Interview [Written]: Dennis Lehane (“The Drop”)

Interview at WGA.org with writer Dennis Lehane:

Dennis Lehane’s new film The Drop takes the acclaimed author-screenwriter back to the underworld of bleak, blue-collar criminals. Unlike Southy-based Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone, which were adapted from Lehane novels by other scripters, The Drop is set in the neighborhoods of ethnic Brooklyn and was adapted by Lehane himself from his own short story — a first.

He’s written plenty of scripts, having honed his craft in the crucible of HBO’s acclaimed show The Wire, but he’s never liked adapting his own novels. It’s too painful, he says, to retroactively constrain the breadth of a novel into the tight limits of a feature. But a short story fits the form.

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As a novelist, what turns you on or is challenging about such a comparatively confined space of screenplay?

Exactly, that — there’s the challenge. A novelist gets to do the really gradually unraveling, or unwinding of a story. With a script, it’s like writing a short story. That’s where people miss it. [People] make the comparison [of] novel to film. No. It’s novel to television show. A novel is the season of television show, particularly in this new great era for TV, whereas, [a feature script] is a short story. So the challenge of a short story for me was always hitting the ground running. There’s literally no runway. There’s no buildup. You just got to come in and you got to nail it and then get out. That’s really the same as a film.

Novel is to TV as short story is to feature.

Well, particularly with the cable model, [where] you’re thinking 10 to 13 episodes. That really feels so much like a novel. You know, basically 10 60-page chapters. There you got a 600-page novel. It’s just a very different beast to do a script because that’s very much like a short story. You have a limited amount of C storylines in a film. You got to keep those really tight. And it’s really mostly just a storyline.

For the rest of the interview, go here.