FJ-HRN-1562

A02. HRN-1562 Sound Bite: Mike Newell – collaboration with novel writer
We talked with the writer at the very beginning and Scott Steindorff the Producer uhm talked with him of course when he was acquiring the rights which was a long and difficult process but he then uh he read the first draft and the first draft was written in fact before I came on the film uhm and uh he was the the notes were really good, he gave us about 6 or 8 notes. And the greatest of all of them he said its all very good and well done but where is my stitch work and by stitch work what he meant was the way that he had created a very complicated uh and highly embroidered quilting of surfaces on surfaces on surfaces meaning on top meaning on top of meaning, character on character uhm and that is indeed how the book works, its its extraordinarily dense and rich uhm and so again we had to find out how to uh how to do that and frankly if i had done nothing other than simply try to satisfy that request I would have done enough. Uhm I talked to him a couple of times when I had uhm specific points of detail that I I needed uhm but I didn’t talk to him a lot and in a way quite deliberately certainly I was relieved not to at least I didn’t have the old man on my shoulder I had the book that was enough. But I didn’t have uh Marquez with whatever attitude and I felt freer for for not having him and wonderfully enough when he saw the movie bout 4 or 5 weeks ago he simply turned to the producer at the end of the screening and went, like that and uh so we got him and that’s great. Uh but I think that if I had been, if I’d felt that I was sort of working for Marquez I wouldn’t have had the freedom to do anything with it, I would have felt constricted all the time.