Which is?

My novels, and that film, are written deliberately -- negatively, you would say manipulatively -- to move you. It is my intention to emotionally affect a reader or an audience. And I'm unashamed in that intention. In fact, I believe that films and books that don't try to make you love the characters in them or feel pain at what happens are easy ways out of storytelling.

I think it's far easier to tell stories about characters who you have contempt for, who you are looking down upon, because it makes you look very smart to be superior to the characters who you are writing. And it makes audiences feel very smart to be superior to the characters that they're reading about or seeing on a screen. And there's no risk involved. You don't risk the accusation of sentimentality if you don't write about people who you want readers or an audience to love. It's my intention to make you love Dr. Larch, to make you hurt for him.

I said to Lasse Hallstrvm after the wave of reviews came in that he must have done a faithful job of transcribing me, because not only was he getting my good reviews, he was getting my bad reviews.

[But] I was not surprised by those nominations. Our exit polls prior to the Academy Awards were terrific. We were in a limited amount of theaters, but our audiences were getting better and better. In a time when films that had gone to more theaters were starting to lose some of those theaters, we were just holding strong.

And it's done what Oscar nominations can do, which is really extend the life of the picture. [The movie has made $40 million and continues to hover near the weekly top 10 box-office list.]

Absolutely. I didn't buy the predictions that we were a dark horse. I've been to a number of Academy screenings, principally Writers Guild screenings, and saw the response, and I knew that those were the people who were going to nominate me. I was surprised that Lasse Hallstrvm was not nominated by the Directors Guild. And I think that because of that, people were surprised that he got one from the Academy. It was an oversight, I think.

I wanted to talk a little about "My Movie Business." It seems to me a very unusual book, particularly for you ...

It's short.

Yes. It's got big margins, and wide leading.

It's the only book of mine that I've been able to read without my reading glasses.

One of the things that is interesting about "My Movie Business" is that it preempts a lot of the questions that people like me would ask, or answers those questions directly to a reader. Is that one of the reasons that you wrote it? And did you write it partly to expose the process behind making the movie?

It is a story about process. To me, it's a book with very narrow interests. Namely, it is a book about the process of novel-to-film. It is a book about origins of a story, sources of a story. Although the focus is largely on "Cider House" -- both the medical and historical background in my family and the history of trying to get that book into film -- it also goes full spectrum of my collective experience with the movies, which has more typically been not being involved, or involved to a limited degree.

I thought that it covered a fairly broad spectrum of what novelists experience with the film world, from the most commonplace of a first-time author getting an option for a film, being hired to write a screenplay, seeing the film not made and losing the rights to the screenplay and the novel like that. That is what happened with my first novel, "Setting Free the Bears." Hello, goodbye.

And that's the story that we're most familiar with, the movie that got taken away and never made, or taken away and made into a terrible film. But there's a great resolution to your story.

I don't think that there would have been if I hadn't had that experience with "Setting Free the Bears," because it was very educative. It certainly contributed to me not wanting to be involved making "The World According to Garp" or "Hotel New Hampshire."

But when I did agree to do "Cider House," I came to it from that background, realizing that you don't take any money up front, so that nobody ever buys the rights to the novel until the film's going into production. You don't take any screenwriting fee. If you're going to get paid, you get paid on the back end. And you insist on director approval, script approval, cast approval and that the director have final cut of the picture.

Further, the terms I had with the film's producer, Richard Gladstein, were spelled out even more clearly than that. The only people making creative decisions with this film -- and those creative decisions included script, cast and cut -- would be Richard, Lasse and myself. It was a three-man film.

Miramax is not only to be credited for making a film with this subject in the first place, but more important to me, they honored that agreement and had the confidence to leave us alone. They never interfered at the creative level, not once.

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