Laeta Kalogridis

After executive producing the enormous two billion dollar success of ”Avatar”, ”Shutter Island” could be back-to-back box office hits for Laeta Kalogridis, who joins Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio as screenwriter for the film adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s bestselling novel.

Laeta caught up with Moviehole’s Tim Johnson in New York, and revealed the surprising feedback from the novel’s author, the joy of working outside of the studio system, and a little too much information on lobotomies!

Tim: How did you first come to this book? Were you just passing through a bookstore, or was it a project presented to you?

Laeta: Was I in Book Soup and I… no. Brad Fischer, who is Mike Medavoy’s producing partner, who is a friend of mine, we had worked together on Pathfinder (2007), and he called me one day and said, ‘Have you ever read this book Shutter Island?’ and I hadn’t. He sent it to me, and I read it, and it was just phenomenal. It’s such a good book. And I called him and I said, ‘Ok, so… why did you send me the book?’ and he said, ‘Well, it’s about to fall out of option at Sony’, as opposed to going to turnaround, which is a different thing. In turnaround, all the costs that were associated with the previous scripts you would have to pick them up. If it falls out of option, all you have to do is be able to option the book. So, it did indeed fall out of option and Brad suggested that we might want to try and do it ourselves, outside of the system. So, we went to Dennis Lehane’s agent, Amy Schiffman and I pitched her what I would want to do with the book. What we ended up doing was Brad and I made an agreement, that I would write it essentially on spec in exchange for having pretty much complete creative freedom, the opposite of the normal studio development process, where you’re answering to a lot of different voices and there’s many cooks in the soup. In this case there was just me and Brad, and to some degree, Mike. And what ended up happening was that I finished the script and we were happy with it, and we sent it to Marty (Martin Scorsese, director) and he liked it.

Tim: So, how do you go about writing a screenplay for a novel?

Laeta: For me, it’s what is the emotional response that you had to the text? How can you recreate that emotional response? Because what you can pretty much never do with a novel, is film it! It’s going to be too long; it’s going to be too interior. Shutter Island is incredibly interior. I’m not a big fan of voice over most of the time, even though it’s kind of traditional and noir, I think it can distract in some cases, the immediacy of the moment and it was a question of trying to recreate in a script form the intensity of the response I had of the book. Because the book is pretty f****** intense.

Tim: Well, actually Brad said you did an amazing job and that this was not an easy screenplay to write.

Latea: That was very nice of him to say that, I think that actually the hardest part about writing a screenplay like that is finding the space to do it. And if it hadn’t been for Brad and Mike, it wouldn’t have been possible for me to do that. There wouldn’t have been any space because any time you try to do something like that within the system, it’s like you have ten people sitting on your shoulders pulling you different directions and something as unique as that narrative doesn’t survive, unfortunately.

Tim: I heard that Marty wanted to change bits and pieces of the scripts, so did you find yourself collaborating much with him? Is it a constant process right until the end?

Laeta: Yes. It’s a constant process all the way through editing. I mean, you continue to both adapt to the situation on the ground, but also to nudge the story a little bit. You know what you’re after; so it’s all about how do we keep rearranging the pieces of the puzzle to get the final thing that we want. So, yeah all the way up to the end of it.

Tim: Did you have to do much research yourself? Did you go to a mental asylum from the fifties, or any of that kind of thing?

Laeta: Actually, we all looked at Titicut Follies, which is a very famous, banned, it’s very difficult to get, documentary from the 1960’s of a mental hospital for the criminally insane. It’s quite horrifying actually. And we had a on site expert who was the man who reformed that institution that’s in Titicut Follies. Most of the research I did actually was a combination of learning a little more about Danvers (State Hospital, Massachusetts), which I didn’t know that much about at the time, and learning more about that nexus between psychosurgery and psychopharmacology. I learned a lot about lobotomies. About the whole evolution of the transorbital lobotomy, where there was a whole apparatus used to hold the head in place, and the ice pick thing was a refinement of the original process.

Tim: I don’t think I’ll ask any more about that!

Laeta: Sorry! I really, actually had no idea how lobotomies worked really.

Tim: I don’t think most of us do. Which is probably a good thing. When you write something like this, and you collaborate with Martin Scorsese, do you see Oscar down the track, is that something that you ponder? Can you tell early on that it’s a possibility?

Laeta: You can’t tell. I chose to adapt the novel originally because I just wanted to do something, as weird as that sounds, very intensely personal. That story is really personal to me. It sounds bizarre, but it is. I didn’t really think beyond that, I was frankly flabbergasted when Marty decided he wanted to do it. I remain somewhat flabbergasted as this continues. I don’t have any idea what’s going to happen. I also don’t think if you’re making things with an eye towards that, you’re never really going to enjoy the experience in the same way, because you’re kind of three steps ahead of yourself, second-guessing something that can’t be second-guessed. For me, the experience has been it’s own reward. And that includes just the writing, just being alone in a room without as I said, all those voices, just writing what I wanted to write. So, seriously haven’t thought about it… That’s a Brad thing.

Tim: When you were in that process, at what point did you collaborate with Dennis (Lehane, author) Did you contact him a lot?

Laeta: I told his agent, what I wanted to do before we ever started, in great detail and she relayed it to Dennis and he said, go with gut. So, it wasn’t until I was finished, he read it, his first response was there were places where I had used too much of his dialogue, and he was right, we did end up changing it. There were some prose areas where I just loved the prose so much that I put it in dialogue, and you just couldn’t do that. The book is a beautiful book, it’s a beautiful book, and I’m a whore for good prose, and that was actually his single biggest note was, ‘You’re too in love with some of this stuff, you’ve got to take it out’. And he was absolutely right.

Tim: That’s funny, from an outsider; I would never think that would be one of the criticisms.

Laeta: You wouldn’t would you? I’m like, ‘Dude, are you kidding me with this?’ and he’s like, ‘No, really you can’t, it’s just not going to work’. And it was true, some of the lines, when you put them in an actors mouth, because they had been written not as dialogue, it just felt too heavy, it didn’t have the grace that it did when you were just reading it yourself.

Tim: And what’s next for Laeta? Do you take your time finding the next one?

Laeta: Well I’m writing Ghost In The Shell, I don’t know if you know the anime or not. You should know the anime! It was originally a manga from the early 1990’s, a lot of which found it’s way into Matrix. A lot of Matrix imagery is taken from; it’s kind of a seminal cyberpunk kind of text. So, I’m doing that for Dreamworks.

Tim: Slightly different!

Laeta: Slightly different. But doing the same thing twice is boring. And then I more of a PG-13 movie at Fox called Demon Keepers, which is alread finished and has a director and they’ll either go forward or they won’t. And after that we’ll see!

Tim: Well good luck with this one.

Laeta: Thank you very much.