All In His Imagination - Part Two - Page 3
© Paula E. Kirman
David: Absolutely, because they're not autobiographical. There are things in those books that have happened, significant events in my life, but they are by no means a chronological recitation of what has gone on before. I also write my books, you probably know this, I write my books six, seven, eight times with the exception of this last one, and I write them and I write and I write them so that they seem absolutely effortless. When you read How Boys See Girls, when you read Lost Between Houses -- I mean, to me, when I read those books, it looks like some guy sat down and blasted that book off in about two hours on a computer. But I wrote the shit out of those books so that they would feel absolutely effortless, so that How Boys See Girls would just feel like a guy sat down in a bar, ordered a beer, and said, "Listen, I've got a story for you, here it is." Out it comes, he pays for his beer, and he leaves the bar. When people talk about my books being autobiographical they dismiss the entire degree of artistic achievements - you try telling a story, even one about your life, for 200 pages and try holding an audience. You can't do it. It has to be an artistic creation, but to make it seem effortless you just have to write thousands of pages. So that's why I have problems with that - it makes it sound like I had a couple of drinks, slept with a few girls, and wrote a diary about my summer vacation. And that wasn't the way it was.
Paula: Besides working on Sparrow Nights, what else have you been doing for the past two years?
David: Alliance Atlantis Pictures hired me to write the screenplay for Larry's Party [by Carol Shields] . So I wrote the screenplay - I did the first draft, the second draft and then the polish, so that one is now done. They liked that screenplay sufficiently so that they hired me to write the screenplay for Lost Between Houses, so I'm writing the screenplay with a really lovely director, a guy named David Wellington, who a few years ago directed I Love A Man In Uniform and then he directed a version of A Long Day's Journey into Night. He's just a little hotshot, wizard guy whose work I noticed years ago and actually talked about on television long before I met him. I mean, this sounds like bullshit but it's actually true -- I think he's one of those little Quentin Tarantinos, who just somehow, in his cells, understands the visual attack a story should have, because most Canadian directors don't; most Canadian film directors just don't understand how to tell a story in pictures, in a compelling way. Americans, they seem to be born with that almost cellular knowledge, the way Russians apparently knew how to write novels in the 19th century, but there's something about young American filmmakers. It's almost as if they just know how to do it; they just understand the medium. Well, he's one of the few Canadian directors I've ever met who actually has that strange visual attack; you know, they throw a few images up on the screen and you really want to see where its going to go.
