AMIS: But the
breakthrough was Hombre, was it not?LEONARD:
Yes: the sale to the movies. Because the book itself I wrote in '59, and by then the
market was so weak. I was getting $4,000 for a paperback, for example. And that one sold
for $1,250, and it took two years to sell it. I didn't get that much for the movie rights,
either, four or five years later. That was when I got back into fiction writing.
AMIS: How do you feel when a book of
yours goes through the treadmill of being turned into a movie? It's happened to me once,
in my first novel The Rachel Papers, and I thought,
"Whatever they do to it, the book will still be there."
LEONARD: I believe that. There's no
question about that. I'm not concerned with how closely it's adapted. I just hope it's a
good movie. For example, "Rum Punch" to "Jackie Brown." Quentin
Tarantino, just before he started to shoot, said, "I've been afraid to call you for
the last year." I said, "Why? Because you changed the title of my book? And
you're casting a black woman in the lead? "And he said, "Yeah." And I said,
"You're a filmmaker. You can do whatever you want." I said, "I think Pam
Grier is a terrific idea. Go ahead." I was very pleased with the results, too.
AMIS: And how about "Get Shorty
"? That must have felt like another breakthrough.
LEONARD: It was. It was the first
contemporary story of mine that I really liked on the screen. And I said to Barry
Sonnenfeld, the director, "But you're advertising this as a comedy." And he
said, "Well, it's a funny book." And I think it did have my sound, and it had
Barry's look. Because I could hear my characters on the screen, and I think the reason it
worked was because they all took each other seriously and didn't laugh. There weren't any
nods to the audience, any signals to the audience with grins or winks that that was a
funny line. It was up to the audience to decide. This was the first question I asked
Barry. I said, "When you shoot, I hope you don't cut to reactions to lines." He
understood that, of course.
AMIS: I was on the set of "Get
Shorty." As a journalist, I was writing a profile of John Travolta. And usually when
a journalist goes to the set of a film, he stays for six hours and sees one person cross a
road and then goes home again. But on this occasion, I got to see the fight between Chili
and the Bear at LAX in the car park. And John Travolta, who is sweetness incarnate, gave
me an insight into the star system. We were all going off to lunch, and a limousine
appeared. I was going to have lunch with John in his trailer. I thought there was
obviously some way to John's trailer. In we got and drove a few feet, and John said to the
driver, "Pull over," and then asked the Bear if he wanted a ride. And the Bear
said, no, he was fine, he was going to do it on foot. And then we started off again and
pulled up at the elevator. And that's as far as we went. The Bear joined us in the car and
down we rode. Travolta explained that it was as important to seem like a star as it is to
be a star.
Movies deal with externals, largely, and books with internals. Is that what strikes you
as the main difference between the forms?
LEONARD: I would say definitely that. The
first day I was on the set of "Get Shorty," John Travolta called me "Mr.
Leonard." And I let him. He got over that.
AMIS: Did you call him "Mr.
Travolta"?
LEONARD: No, I didn't. I'm using my age
now.
I don't think there's any question that it's difficult for movies to internalize. The
reason I've been able to sell all my books is because they look like they're easy to
shoot. They're written in scenes, and the stories move through dialogue. I think the
problem has been, in the past, that they've been taken too seriously. They haven't been
looked at as if there is humor in them. And also the fact that when you bring a 350-page
manuscript down to 120 pages, in my books a lot of the good stuff is gone. It disappears.
Because then you're more interested in plot than you are in, say, character development.
AMIS: People say that movies will be the
nemesis of the novel. But I think that's a crisis that's already been survived. I think
the novel is more threatened from the Internet than from movies. I feel the movies are
still an immature form, a young form, that they're still in the adolescent stage. It will
take a while before they can challenge the internal nature of the book. Do you ever worry
about the death of the book?
LEONARD: No, I can't imagine such a
thing. Ed McBain and I were on one of the morning shows, and we were asked, "To what
do you attribute the resurgence in popularity in crime fiction? " And we looked at
each other, and we thought it was always very popular. We didn't know that it had dipped
at all. We have to always have novels. My God, what would you read?
AMIS: Well, they say you won't be
reading; you'll be having some kind of cybernetic experience. I think that the future of
the book perhaps will be that the book will coexist with some kind of cybernetic
experience, where the punter, the depositor (or whatever you want to call him), may read
your book and then take you out to dinner in cyberspace-- looking ahead about a hundred
years.
Now, I'm going to ask you this question because I'm always tortured by it. This is the
sort of invariable question of the tour. Do you set yourself a time to write every day?
How hard do you press on the paper when you write? I'm asked this so unerringly that I
think people suspect that I'm going to reveal that what you do is you go into your study
and you plug your ear into the light socket and then some inner voice tells you what to
write. But what is your routine and how do you go about it?
LEONARD: I write every day when I'm
writing, some Saturdays and Sundays, a few hours each day. Because I want to stay with it.
If a day goes by and you haven't done anything, or a couple of days, it's difficult to get
back into the rhythm of it. I usually start working around 9:30 and I work until 6. I'm
lucky to get what I consider four clean pages. They're clean until the next day, the next
morning. The time flies by. I can't believe it. When I look at the clock and it's 3
o'clock and I think, "Good, I've got three more hours. " And then I think,
"I must have the best job in the world. " I don't look at this as work. I don't
look at it as any kind of test, any kind of proof of what I can do. I have a good time.
AMIS: And it just seems to flow? There
are no days when whole hours are spent gazing out of the window, picking your nose, making
coffee?
LEONARD: Oh yeah, there are whole hours'
work to make one short paragraph work.
