"If anyone was going to adapt Audrey Niffenegger's bestselling 2003 novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, it makes sense it would be Steven Moffat--the man who, alongside Russell T. Davies, helped reinvigorate the Doctor Who franchise and get a new generation obsessed with time travel," Entertainment Weekly reported in a q&a with Moffat.
Although the novel has been adapted to the screen before, as a 2009 film starring Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana, in the new series for HBO, Moffat "is trying to honor the book he fell in love with so much that he even loosely based a Doctor Who episode, 'The Girl in the Fireplace,' on it," EW noted.
"I read the book and loved it," Moffat recalled. "It wasn't long after it came out. I remember saying to Russell who was running Doctor Who at the time, 'We should do a Doctor Who story like that.' And so, I did, which was 'The Girl in the Fireplace.' But all I'd done in Doctor Who was use the wonderful, fantastical element of an out-of-sequence relationship. That's not really doing The Time Traveler's Wife; that's running with one of the ideas from it. In terms of the film, by the time I had read the book, the film rights were gone. At that stage, I wasn't in the position to be the person who wrote it. Although, I remember thinking about it back then, and my immediate instinct was a TV show. A film is too short. If you know the book, it rambles a bit because it's not a jeopardy-driven, plot-driven piece. It's a prose poem about love, longing, and loss. It doesn't shrink well into the three-act structure of a conventional movie. If you reduce it to what happens, you've boiled away everything that's interesting about it.
"We did chase it. When I was coming off Doctor Who back in the day, three or four years ago, my co-exec on that said, 'I've been looking into the rights for The Time Traveler's Wife, and I know where they are and I think we could get them.' And I was very interested."