Interview [Written]: Scott Frank (“A Walk Among the Tombstones”)

An Indiewire interview with Scott Frank whose writing credits include Malice, Get Shorty, and Minority Report. His latest movie is A Walk Among the Tombstones, which he directed and adapted from a Lawrence Block novel.

You’ve done a few of these high-profile mystery novel adaptations. What are the challenges of something like that?

Just to try and not to panic. They’re all different because you wrestle with all of these because they all have a very specific voice, a very strong authorial voice that is part of what makes them read so well, particularly in the case of Elmore Leonard. The challenge is to translate the feel of those novels into something visual, and then from a story standpoint, the moves in these stories are very small. They’re pulp stories, they’re not giant dramatic moves, they’re very small pulp moves. And the challenge is to make those little moves feel big enough that they warrant a movie. Once upon a time you could. In the sixties and seventies and even going back to film noir, the private eye story was very common. But now movies are about spectacle and television is more about telling the pulpier stories, like “True Detective” and so on. So you’re always trying to want it to be a movie.

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Ruth Wilson was originally announced as being a part of the ‘Tombstones’ cast but isn’t in the final movie. What happened to that part?

She was my favorite part of the script and my favorite part of the movie when I shot the movie. She was great and her scenes with Liam were fantastic. But I realized that he needed to be a character in isolation. I also cut out his son. He had a son in the movie and there were several scenes with him. Whereas the read was greatly helped with those characters being there, once you see and hear things coming together, it takes on its own life and the scenes with Ruth tended to soften the movie. Not because she was a soft character; she was a tough character. And one of the reasons is because I wrote her into the movie, since in the book that part is a man. I made it a woman so that not every woman in the movie was getting cut up or kidnapped. I wanted a really strong female character and she was great — she rocked it. But I just realized, at a certain point, he was a much stronger character being on his own.

Here is a trailer for the movie:

For the rest of the interview, go here.

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