Author Craig Davidson on the film adaptation of Rust and Bone
Seeing it on the screenSource: http://arts.nationalpost.com/2012/05/18/seeing-it-on-the-screen/
An excerpt from author Craig Davidson’s article Seeing it on the screen about Jacques Audiard’s transformative take on his short-story collection:
It all started when I knocked a glass of water on to a film director’s hat.
A lovely chapeau. Brushed felt. The director was French; his name was Jacques Audiard. The hat was kind of his trademark. I’d been sitting in La Rotonde, a swanky Parisian café; in attendance were Audiard, my French editor Francis Geffard, and me, the clumsy foreign clown — or as the French might say, le bozo.
Audiard had read my story collection, Rust and Bone. He wanted to option it and I wanted to let him. He was especially taken with two stories: “27 Bones,” concerning a once-promising amateur boxer whose life devolves into a series of underground bare-knuckle fights; and “Rocket Ride,” a story about a killer whale trainer who gets his leg torn off by an aggrieved orca.
Jacques’ notion was to braid these stories together, align the main characters by connecting their physical weaknesses — the boxer has brittle hands that keep breaking; the trainer has no leg — to the way their lives unfold afterwards. It was a connection that, to be honest, I’d not seen while writing it. I found it thrilling that he’d found an inroad I’d never glimpsed.
But our discussion of such complex emotional terrain was made difficult by the fact my French stinks and Audiard’s English was marginally better. Mostly, Francis and Jacques spoke. I drank beer too fast and tried to look suave and then I knocked Jacques’ eau de gaz on to his exquisite hat and the meeting ended, as meetings tend to when one party makes a roaring buffoon of himself.
He did option the book, however. The option money spent well, as money tends to. I never expected much else. Oh, I’d heard the stats: less than 5% of literary properties make it to the screen, et cetera et cetera. But the production company renewed the option. Next: rumours a script had been written. Stars had been attached. Marion Cotillard — really?
Still, I never quite believed. I figured it’d fall apart somehow. But one thing flowed into the next and then one day I was watching the trailer and thinking: Huh, I guess they really made it.
Some people will want to know: How does it feel to have a film made out of something you wrote? The answer is: pretty darn good! I’ve been fantastically fortunate. I’m not worried it’ll be as good as my book — I know for a fact it’ll be better. I wrote it when I was in my 20s. I was a ballsy writer. That’s what drew Jacques to it: the action, the frenetic-ness of it, the fact that I write in fully-formed scenes that unravel like a movie — a tribute to how much films have shaped my writing style. But the book also reflects a youthful viewpoint that misses much of the variance and beauty of life that are so clear to me now.
People have asked how it feels to have my book reworked and fitted to the screen — did it bother me that someone was monkeying around with my stories? They wondered if I considered flying to France, stalking around the set shaking my fist screaming: “This isn’t my VISION! You’re perverting it all!”
The thought never crossed my mind. My investment in the film has been minimal: I simply provided the seed. Yes, there have been plot and character changes: the male protagonist of “Rocket Ride” becomes Marion Cotillard, for example (and I’m weirdly OK with that!). I know some authors go so far as to divorce themselves from the film version, but my ouylook is similar to that of James Ellroy, who has said: "I'm happy for the money. I'm happy for the exposure. Every once in a while there's lightning in a bottle... even bad movies create substantial readership for your books."
Not to be crass, but I am happy for those things. Me girlfriend and I recently moved into a little house in west-end Toronto; we fondly think of it as "the house Audiard biult." (Thanks, Jacques!) I like that something I wrote helped provide a roof over the heads of the people I love. And yeah, if the movie brings more attention to the book and the ones I write going forward, that'll be gravy.
But as I said, the film will outshine the book. Having read the script, I can tell you Audiard has elevated it to something I simply wasn’t capable of expressing back when I wrote it. The man is at the height of his powers. Me? Hopefully I’m just warming up. Jacques found such wonderful connections, sharpened the characters and gave the film something I struggle with: a deep romantic context. It’s a love story, albeit a tortured one. He’s taken what the book gave him and shaped it into a deeper resonance.
I’ll get a DVD screener and sit down with my folks, my girlfriend and my brother and a few close friends. We’ll order a pizza, crack a case of beer and watch that sucker. And it’ll matter deeply to me that I watch it with just those people, as they’re the ones who were with me before it was even a possibility — supporting my foolish endeavour to be a writer without any inkling that something this cool might ever come of it.
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