I Am Pilgrim author, Terry Hayes, discusses the challenges of adapting his successful novel into a film. Despite a film deal with MGM, the project has yet to materialise, with the author attributing delays to the complex nature of Hollywood. He reflects on the evolving landscape of streaming and the difficulty of capturing and maintaining audience attention. Hayes highlights the importance of the ending in movies and contrasts the streaming format's need for a quick grab with the theatrical release's luxury of time. He also shares insights into the potential movie adaptation.
I Am Pilgrim has been a huge success all around the world and there was a much-heralded film deal with MGM at the time, so there were great expectations of it. So why did it never happen?
Never say never. The rights are still with MGM. But it's like everything in Hollywood. It has to find its time, its place, and its right people. It's a difficult story to tell.
Writing novels may be a difficult job, but it's very easy in one regard. It's just you and a screen and a keyboard, and that's it. With movies, there are so many moving parts which you have to get in sync. There are endless examples of movies that have taken five, 10, 15, 20 years to come into existence. Take one of my favourite books of all time, The Lord of the Rings, which was originally made as a movie many years ago by a director called Ralph Bakshi, and it was animated, because that was all the technology could handle at the time. A few years later, Peter Jackson and New Line saw where the technology had gone and realised that you could do it for real. The rest is history. So, you've got to find the right time, and the right coincidence of people. There'd been lots of good movies made that the public just are not interested in because the zeitgeist has changed so much.
Mission Impossible started out as a TV series which took many, many, many years before it was turned into a series of blockbuster films. So I'm not worried about it. I’m patient. It’ll happen when it happens.
Bearing in mind that took Peter Jackson effectively the best part of nine hours to tell the story of The Lord of the Rings, do you think it's possible for a movie of I Am Pilgrim to encompass the sort of depth and breadth that you were able to put into its 225,000 words? And when it happens, how do you think it will play out?
That's a really tough question. One of the problems is streaming. There's so much of it available, that it's hard to stand out from, or even rise above, all of that noise.
The difference between that and theatrically released movies is you get to know about them, and you get to form an opinion about them before they come out, because they spend 80 to 100 million dollars making sure that you do so. I'm not convinced that I'm that interested in watching Barbie, but boy, do I know that Barbie's coming down the pike. Similarly, do I want to watch Oppenheimer? Well, I might. I certainly know what it’s going to be like. Because I know who directed it. I know who's playing Oppenheimer. I've seen the trailers. I've seen the one sheets. It's out there and so I form an opinion of it. I’m not sure that that is possible to do in the quite same way with streaming.
“No matter how good the adaptation is, what the real question is, is anybody going to watch it?”
No matter how good the adaptation is, what the real question is, is anybody going to watch it? Amazon spent a fortune on making The Rings of Power but only something like 34 percent of people kept watching the series. That's not what I want for I Am Pilgrim. It's a very hard thing to do, to find the audience initially and then hold them. Everybody in movies will tell you that the first 15 minutes of a film is absolutely crucial. So that's why so many movies you see start all the time with huge action sequences.
In reality, this is one of the most stupid things I have ever heard. Have you ever seen anybody walk out of a movie in the first 10 minutes? They just paid their money, they've got the popcorn they haven't eaten, the four gallons of Coca-Cola they haven’t drunk, they're sitting there and they say, "Oh, I don't like this. I'll leave." I've seen people walk out of movies after 40 or 50 minutes, after, say, a particularly violent scene. But generally, you sit there, and you think, "Oh, well this is 142 minutes long and it really is a raft of rubbish, but I paid for the parking, I’ve got my popcorn, the babysitter is with the kids …" and so you stick it out.
The 15 minutes that really count are whether you can land the ending – that is what's really important. Take A Man for All Seasons, an incredible piece of work, which didn't start with a big action sequence. It didn't have Henry VIII running around beheading his various wives. The Godfather, which is one of the best movies of the 20th century, starts with a wedding. Nobody is turning up with a submachine gun. There are no explosions or superheroes jumping out of alien spacecraft. You can take as long as you like at the beginning, but you can't take your time at the end – you got to wrap it up, and it really has to work.
Streaming is different. If you don't grab them in the first 15 minutes, then you run the risk of the audience thinking, hmmm I think I'll go and make a cup of coffee, or I think I'll go and talk to the kids about their homework, or I think I'll change channels, or I think I will go walk the dog. How you grab them is quite different to how movies work. And then you've got to hold them, and you've got to hold them for hour after hour after hour. That is very hard to do, and I take my hat off to the people that can do it.
I Am Pilgrim as a book works because it's an intellectual game between the hunted and the hunter. Pilgrim's really got to outsmart this guy, who has really covered his tracks. Does that process lend itself to streaming format? Perhaps, perhaps not, but it would certainly lend itself to a theatrical movie. But how do you condense all of this? That's the challenge. And that's why you need a really talented screenwriter working with a highly talented director.
"You start with a kid on a bike making his way through a highway construction zone in Jetta, in Saudi Arabia, and you don't know where he is going.”
Thinking about the book, do you think that that screenwriter and director would make the same choice as you did and start with a murder which didn’t appear initially to have any bearing on the plot?
No, I don’t think so. In my long discussions over many years with an A-list director about a possible adaptation, he said, "There's only one way to start." And I said, "Oh, what's that?" He said, "You start with a kid on a bike making his way through a highway construction zone in Jetta, in Saudi Arabia, and you don't know where he is going. And then you find out that they're bringing a man in to be publicly beheaded, and then you find out it's his father, and then you don't have to worry about establishing for the viewer why he became a terrorist." That establishes a character in a matter of minutes. Now, what he becomes is a different question, but you've started off a pretty high watermark as far as establishing his character. Then you need to establish the character of Pilgrim, because that's what this story really is.
But your next problem, which is not a problem with the book, because it didn't particularly matter in the book, but it would be a problem in the movie, is that you need to get these two characters in a room together before their final confrontation in order to up the emotional ante between them. Pilgrim has to interrogate Saracen.
This is the scene, for those of you who are cinephiles, that exists in Michael Mann’s movie, Heat, where Al Pacino and Robert De Niro meet in some café, and they talk about themselves. Now, that didn’t happen in the book of Pilgrim, but I did work out how you could do that in the movie. After smallpox is trialled up in the Hindu Kush, you would have Pilgrim get right on his trail, and they would grab the Saracen at some airport and bring him in for questioning. But Saracen is several steps ahead of them. Up in the Hindu Kush, he has left a hair, except it’s not his hair. He's gone into a barber shop earlier, had his hair cut and trimmed, and he's picked up some hairs from somebody else, which he then plants up in the Hindu Kush. Pilgrim grabs him at the airport, and he knows it's him. The clock is ticking and they're waiting for the DNA match between the hair from the Hindu Kush and this man that they've just arrested. And while they are waiting, he questions him. So you have this incredible scene between the two of them playing games with each other, circling one another. You need that austere room, the single light and a man sitting at a desk and Pilgrim walking around him and saying, "I know it's you. I know it. I feel it in every bone in my body".
Until Pilgrim gets the results of the DNA analysis and it doesn't match.
Pilgrim has to let him go – he has no choice. And then he realises: I had him, and he outsmarted me. He knew what we would do. He knew we would search that pillow. He knew that we would find that one hair.
So the guy wins. And you need him to win there, so that when they meet at the end and Pilgrim is able to turn the tables on Saracen, they meet with such a degree of mutual respect.
ABOUT TERRY HAYES
Terry Hayes is a former journalist and screenwriter. Born in Sussex, England, he migrated to Australia as a child and trained as a journalist at the country’s leading broadsheet. At twenty-one he was appointed North American correspondent, based in New York, and after two years returned to Sydney to become an investigative reporter, political correspondent and columnist.
He resigned to produce a prominent current affairs radio program and a short time later, with George Miller, wrote the screenplay for Road Warrior/Mad Max 2. He also co-produced and wrote Dead Calm, the film which launched Nicole Kidman’s international movie career, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and a large number of TV movies and mini-series – including Bodyline and Bangkok Hilton – two of which received international Emmy nominations. In all, he has won over twenty film or television awards.
After moving to Los Angeles, he worked as a screenwriter on major studio productions. His credits include Payback with Mel Gibson, From Hell, starring Johnny Depp, and Vertical Limit with Chris O’Donnell. He has also done un-credited writing on a host of other movies including Reign of Fire, Cliffhanger and Flightplan, starring Jodie Foster.
The Year of the Locust is Terry Hayes' second novel. His first, I Am Pilgrim was an international bestseller. He and his American wife – Kristen – have four children and live in Switzerland.
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Extract: The Year of the Locust by Terry Hayes