“If you can’t pitch an idea — if you’ve got an idea for a story, whether it’s a book, a TV show or a movie, if you can’t pitch it in like 30 seconds and hook somebody and make them believe in it, you’re probably in trouble…Many, many years ago, I had just finished A Time to Kill, and [my wife] Renee was in the kitchen cooking. And I said, hey, I’ve got an idea for you. Listen to me. Give me your attention. I said, okay, here’s the deal. A young associate finishes law school. He goes to work or a law firm set in Memphis, of all places, not one of your big, powerful Washington or New York firms. And he joins a firm that’s secretly owned by the Mafia. And once you join the firm, you can never leave. That was my spiel, just like that. I made that pitch. And Renee just stopped and she said, wait a minute. Do that again. And I did it again. And she said, that’s a big book. And that was The Firm. So that’s the way I get the ideas going.”
John Grisham
Interview on The Diane Rehm Show
The Firm became a best-selling book and then a film starring Tom Cruise based on a script by David Rabe, Robert Towne & David Rayfiel.
This is what Grisham told Rehm about having your novel turned into a movie by others:
“When you deal with Hollywood, you have to be realistic. It’s going to be something different. It is very difficult to adapt a 400 or 500-page novel into a screenplay that’s 120 pages and a two-hour film. And it can be done, it’s done all the time, but it’s not always that easy. Something is always going to be left out, something’s going to be changed, and you have to know that up front. It’s going to be something different. I don’t get too close to it. I keep my distance. I don’t go to the set and hang out. I go and meet everybody one time and then go home and wait for the movie to come out.”
Related post:
Where Do Ideas Come From? (A+B=C)
John Grisham’s Writing Routine
John Grisham’s Outlining Process
Bad Ideas & Writing Poorly
Is It a Movie?
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