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From pages of a book to Hollywood
April 4, 2008
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In Limelight this week, with me Shereena Sajeed, find out how an author’s dream of having his book made into a movie came true for him.
Christopher Moore is a Canadian best-selling author and he is famous for his engaging novels. He has written a total of nine books to date.
His Vincent Calvino Private Eye series of books is being adapted into a movie.
My colleague, Loretta Foo, recently spoke to Christopher Moore and he shared with her how he felt about his book making it to Hollywood.
CM: The way it happened and in a sense, this is every writer’s dream. You know, you sit there in solitude, in a room, alone, and you are writing and you have a dream that one day, someone will buy your book and actually read the book and perhaps, just perhaps, someone may decide that there’s a movie in that book. And, all that happened to me last year. I have a very good agent in Washington D.C and this agent has a co-agent in Los Angeles, CAA. CAA is the Microsoft of Hollywood film agencies, so what they do is they package things together, they find the literary property, they have the screenwriter, they have the producers, the directors and the stars and so in January this year, I had a phonecall from my agent in Washington, saying, “Great! Keanu Reeves Production wants to do the Calvino series!” I thought, fantastic but I didn’t really believe it would happen. I thought that this is something that is just off the wall but indeed it did happen. So it’s been structured where Keanu Reeves Production and a film financer named Steve Samuels who financed Michael Clayton, which just came out and won some Oscars this year. So they are putting together a movie, based on the Calvino series. They auctioned all the books and assuming it gets made, Keanu Reeves will star as Vincent Calvino. Now, they sent out the screenwriter to Bangkok, to follow me around the city for one week, as an immersion course, into Thai culture.
Ok, and tell us about that experience. I mean, what did you show these two Americans, presumably who have never been to Bangkok and Thailand, might not know very much other than the typical stereotypes of Thailand that they have, what did you show them that would help to increase the depth of their writing, so that it would translate onto screen well?
CM: It was a challenge, no question. You have a week to prepare someone for a moon shot, basically. NASA would never do that, but Hollywood would do this with screenwriting. So they sent someone out for a week and I put together an agenda to cover basic locations where Calvino’s world would intersect. I took him to the area where Calvino’s office was located and walked him up and down the street, showed him the spirit house, where Calvino’s secretary would make the daily offerings. I took him out a vast swamp on the edge of Bangkok, near the port and I know Father Joe Myer who runs the Mercy Centre there, took him through slums, took him through the AIDS hospice, where all the children are, that Father Joe looks after. So that was something that gave him an insight that most foreigners would never get a chance to see. In other words, Bangkok is not one place, it is a broad concept. There are many Bangkok’s, just like there are many Singapore’s. You can go to many places in Singapore and feel that this is Singapore and yes, it is part of Singapore but it’s not Singapore. The same is true with Bangkok, so I try to introduce him to the kind of neighbourhoods, the kind of expat people, who populate my novels, as well as to Thai people, who he could meet and understand are real people, so that he doesn’t come away with a Asian caricature, to me that’s the greatest fear. You want fully-rounded characters, both expats and Thais, in order to make it viable and authentic.
What do you hope as the author and the creators of these books, what do you hope will remain true when you see it on the large silver screen?
CM: What I hope that they are able to capture is the true underlying spirit of Asia, of Thailand is this sense that there is a different culture with different kinds of values and that they shouldn’t be “americanised”, that there should be an attempt to make assertion that the values of that place, the way that people perceive in that place are preserved to the extent that they can be and so the role of Colonel Prat will be pivotal. Whoever they get to play that role has a lot of burden because that’s the person who has to be able to carry the weight of the culture on his shoulders.
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