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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Oscar watch: The author of "The Cider House Rules" talks about his Academy Award nomination, abortion and his strange fixation on oral sex.
Mar 8, 2000 | John Irving's new book, "My Movie Business," explains how he wrote, rewrote and re-rewrote the script to the film version of his novel "The Cider House Rules" -- all over a period of a dozen years and with the involvement of no fewer than four directors. His book finally landed in the hands of Lasse Halstrvm, the Swedish filmmaker best known for "My Life as a Dog" and "What's Eating Gilbert Grape." The movie that resulted ended up as one of the year's sleeper hits and earned a surprising seven Academy Award nominations, including one for best picture and another, for Irving, for best adapted screenplay.
The book is an unlikely epic, following the father-son relationship of Dr. Wilbur Larch, the head of a Maine orphanage and an accomplished abortionist, and a seemingly unadoptable orphan, Homer Wells. (Larch is played by Michael Caine, nominated for best supporting actor; Homer is Tobey Maguire.) After Homer returns from his fourth foster family, Larch trains him to become a doctor, to make himself useful. But Homer eventually evinces a deep philosophical opposition to abortion; this leads to his setting off on a 15-year journey, during which he works at a New England apple orchard and falls in love with his best friend's girlfriend.
The film version is much smaller. The action occurs over two years; major characters are struck, minor characters are written in. Yet, in the end, the movie is as strong as the 1985 novel, less complex and rich in detail, but more precise and centered. "My Movie Business" details behind-the-scenes Hollywood machinations, but Irving's main concern is detailing how a book he was proud of became a film he was proud of. His unstated, but plain, point: Good stories are elastic.
The following interview took place on a Saturday morning in the restaurant of the Royalton Hotel in New York. Irving had just finished diverting his 8-year-old from Saturday morning cartoons with a story. From the start, chomping triangles of buttered toast and forking through a bowl of fresh berries, he was chatty and comfortable, so much so that the interview began without a question.
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[Irving began:] I don't know anything about the Internet because I don't myself have a computer.
Really?
I still write longhand. In my house I have four IBM Selectric typewriters that I usually get from hospitals or offices that are discarding them. And I have four so that if one breaks I can use the other three for replacement parts. And in my apartment in Toronto I have two others. Altogether, I have six old IBMs, which I cherish the way that some people might collect Volkswagen Beetles.
Do you write longhand and type it in?
I write first drafts longhand. Once I have a first draft of something and it begins to move with a little more pace, then I go to the typewriter. There's a kind of comfort to starting something with a pen. I like pens, I like pencils, I like the crossing out of things, the changing of pen colors. I like leaving those traces on a page.
One of the aspects of working on "Cider House" that felt the most familiar was not the pre-production, or the stuff on set. It was as soon as the film was shot and Lasse Hallstrvm began to edit it, I felt that I was now in a realm that was closer to my day job.
You said in "My Movie Business" that you had very little to say about editing the first cut of his film, whereas there were so many revisions done on the screenplay.
I did have very little to say when the film was two hours and 17 minutes long. But most of the fine-tuning on the film happened after I wrote "My Movie Business." And I felt that the last four minutes and 20 seconds that we edited from that film was really crucial.
What happened?
We just shaved it: We lost a line of dialogue, we took out a music cue. It was all losing something. And from the time we screened the film at the Toronto Film Festival at the end of September to when the film opened, I just felt we made a quantum leap with it, in the way that only a last draft, last bits of fine-tuning that can do. It really meant a lot to me.
"Cider House" is being called the surprise candidate for best picture. Did that offend you?
No, I can't say that I was offended by it, but I was amused by it, because I have always had mixed reviews. I would say that by and large, the movie of "The Cider House Rules" had better reviews than the book did. But the percentage was right. I usually get about 80 percent positive reviews and 20 percent bad ones. But the 20 percent of bad ones can be counted on to come from an area of criticism which is opposed to the whole premise of what I do.
