'The Buccaneers' was an Edith Wharton novel, and she never finished it, and a screenwriter adapted it for television.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When I first started writing the books in the 1980s, all of the female detectives were flawed in some way because they were based on noir characters.
And I didn't grow up wanting to be a director. I grew up wanting to be a writer, so for me, that was always the goal - to be a novelist, not a screenwriter. And I think, again, if I didn't have the novels, maybe I'd be much more frustrated by not having directed yet.
Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen.
The savagery and power of Edith Wharton's ghost stories surprised me.
I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.
I felt like I haven't had the typical experience of a novelist whose book becomes a movie.
There are very few films that work like a novel.
I took two years away from making films to write a novel.
I've never abandoned the novel.
I didn't hang around films. I don't know if I'd ever seen Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes.