Interview: David Hare

A playwright, screenwriter, and director, David Hare has a long and storied career in storytelling. His film writing credits include Wetherby (1985), Plenty (1985), Strapless (1989), Damage (1992), The Hours (2002), and The Reader released this year, a movie that has surprised many people by receiving 5 Academy Award nominations including Best Adapted Screenplay for Mr. Hare.

This print interview with Hare appears surprisingly enough in the movie website Ain't It Cool News. In it, Hare describes the very first problem he had in adapting the book into a screenplay:

Mr. Beaks: In the press notes, you say you've an aversion to "those dreary old voiceovers" when adapting a novel. You need to find a way to get rid of a lot of exposition without resorting to something so artless. It seems like non-linear storytelling is a good way to avoid this.

David Hare: This is pretty linear. I do flashback, it's true. I do whilst in the context of the moment. You know, the book exists as an interior monologue. In the book, a man has held a secret for the whole of his life. And how does he finally reveal the secret? By writing the book. So the first problem I was faced with is that there is no film equivalent for that. You don't believe that Michael Berg made a film in order to tell the secret of his life. That doesn't make sense. So there was the whole question of why does the book exist at all. It's clear why the book exists: it's for him to finally reveal his secret. So that's why I had to create the framework for the film, where he's going to tell his daughter and she's going to be the first person he tells. And so from that flowed the whole way of telling the story. The story is pretty linear by contemporary standards. It's pretty classical.

Beaks: Well, by MEMENTO standards.

Hare: Or by the standards of THE HOURS. And having done THE HOURS, I basically didn't want once again to throw bits of mosaic up in the air. I felt we'd done that.

Here is the trailer for The Reader: