TS Spivet, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and me: Reif Larsen on seeing his book filmed

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jun/10/ts-spivet-jean-pierre-jeunet-reif-larsen

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After I sold my first book, The Selected Works of TS Spivet, Hollywood agents quickly came knocking. As they put it, they were "way into" the novel's "imaginative" use of drawings in the margins. The story of a 12-year-old boy on a cross-country adventure was sure to be a blockbuster, they said. "A four-quadrant film!" they pronounced. I had no idea what a "four-quadrant film" was, but I didn't care. This was Hollywood, baby!

I soon learned that while Hollywood enjoys being near projects with "imaginative" drawings in the margins, it almost never makes said projects. I naively handed my agents a list of six directors who I thought would be perfect for the movie version of my book: Alfonso Cuarón, Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry, Guillermo del Toro, Tim Burton and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Unfortunately, I was told all of my directorial choices were either not wise or simply not possible.

A year later, I was still waiting for a movie deal, though I had taken several independent meetings with enthusiastic screenwriters who wanted to adapt the book. Seeing the story through their eyes was a fascinating exercise in housekeeping. Screenwriters tend to speak in acts and climaxes; theirs is a swift medium, like coitus performed in a semi-public place.

"Act two is going to be a real problem," one screenwriter said. "Boy alone on train reading his mother's diary? Uh-oh." He tapped his pen against his cheek. "Maybe we can go all Sixth Sense and make the dead brother a character. You don't realise he's dead until the end and then you're like … Woah."

I had reached the point where I was ready to swallow my pride and accept whatever borderline movie option came down the pike, when something extraordinary happened. Out of the blue, I received an email headed "Some little considerations about our friend TS Spivet".

"Over the past year and a half," it began, "I have read more than 100 books without finding the right story, until … TS Spivet. Shucking sweetcorn into big tin buckets, and metal-eating dogs … I am smitten … It is safe to say that I share Mr Reif Larsen's great love of details, of those tiny elements that are the spice of life. My film Amélie was full of these details, and it is clearly that which first tweaked my interest in Spivet. Of course this is a book that won't be easy to adapt for the cinema … but it is exactly this challenge which I find exciting."

It was signed "JP Jeunet". My first thought, of course, was that this was a prank. This could not possibly be the actual Jean-Pierre Jeunet writing to me.

Ever since I was a teenager, he has been an artistic hero for me. I remember seeing Amélie in the theatres and having the distinct sensation that somehow this director had crawled inside my head. I had an old VHS copy of Delicatessen that I watched and rewatched until the tape began to squeal like a pig being butchered. His imagery, his camera movement, his wide angles, his narrative rhythm and his delight in the absurd minutiae of human civilisation all shaped my own development as a thinker/artist/dilettante writer. Jeunet's way of seeing was thus embedded into the DNA of Spivet, as well as that of every book I will ever write.

As it turned out, the email was bona fide. A week later, we were sharing a table at a steakhouse in Williamsburg, surrounded by sleazy Wall Street bankers scarfing down rib-eyes. This was at Jean-Pierre's request – he said he was craving the kind of "American hormone-filled steak" not available in Europe. Over exceedingly bloody (and hormone-filled) pieces of meat, we talked about the book, about metal-eating dogs and other oddities that had struck him from the narrative. He had written down a list of little moments on his iPhone, which he kept producing from his pocket like a snuff box.

Although a generation and an ocean separated us, we would both later admit to feeling as if the other was a long-lost brother, bound not by blood but by aesthetic sensibility. Somehow in this vast, vast world, we had found our way to one another. It sounds cliched, but such is the invisible power of books. Jeunet had read a French translation of Spivet on his porch in Provence overlooking the cypress trees, and somewhere in that intimate process of reading he had decided that he wanted to make my flawed first pancake of a novel into his next film. It was almost too much for me to comprehend.

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David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, a supposedly unfilmable novel that was ultimately filmed, once wrote, "Film adaptations fail not because they are too faithless, but because they are too faithful." So I encouraged Jeunet to look beyond the bounds of the text to get at the "essential spirit" of my book, though in truth, I was not sure what this meant. I need not have bothered. The man lives for this kind of problem-solving.

He first set about rereading the novel several times, coding each page according to an elaborate, colour-based schema. For instance, green meant "important for the mother's character", pink meant "perfect dialogue scene" and red meant "detail able to become a scene". He then literally cut up the book and rearranged these scenes according to a new sequence, leaving the books themselves nothing but empty husks. He would occasionally send me dramatic videos set to music of him slicing up a book or re-enacting a scene from the novel. I, in turn, would send him videos of me writing in the shower wearing a pith helmet. It was a match made in heaven.

The script was written (first in French, then in English). Funding was found, locations scouted, actors hired. During the summer of 2012, I was able to visit the set in Montreal, where they were filming what was now called The Young and Prodigious TS Spivet, an Anglicisation of the French title of the book. Inside a nondescript studio building, I entered an uncanny scene born of my own imagination. Amid a sea of lights and equipment were the orphaned upper-storey rooms of the Spivet family ranch house. When I walked into the fake room that contained Dr Clair's office, my mouth fell open. The walls were covered in thousands of beetles and insect specimens. On the table, there was a carefully curated scattering of instruments, magnifying glasses, encyclopedias, dissecting kits and field journals.

I could not believe the perfection, and the care with which everything had been found, placed, re-placed. And thus was laid bare the great difference between movies and books. I had dreamed this all up in my underwear; with a couple of key strokes, I had conjured a crazy beetle-scientist mother in Montana. But to make that play on the screen, a small army of people had been put to work. In novels, a single pair of hands launches a thousand possibilities; in movies, a thousand hands work to construct just one.

Six months later, on a rainy Monday in March, I found myself hunkered down inside an editing bay in a suburb of Paris. I was nursing a hangover, sucking on a cough drop, and filled with the kind of nervousness one has before going into the operating room. I was about to watch a rough cut of the movie for the first time.

"If you don't like it, I will jump out the window," Jeunet threatened. "Please don't," I said.

The lights dimmed and the picture came up. After a moment, I was again filled with a strange sense of familiarity. I knew these characters; I had made these characters, and yet they were no longer mine. It was like watching someone perform brain surgery on me while I was still awake – a not altogether enjoyable experience. I couldn't separate the story from myself enough to be completely swept up in the magic of the movie.

I came out of the screening dazed, trying my best not to reveal the existential tempest that was raging inside me. This movie looked like something I would make, like something I would love, except I was left feeling empty, as if I had just donated a precious organ to a stranger. Since then, I've come to realise that this feeling is a necessary part of letting go. I can't wait to sit in a darkened theatre, popcorn in hand, and watch the movie again (and again). Each time, I will be less the author of the novel on which the movie was based and more just another viewer caught up in the seduction of moving pictures.

• The Young and Prodigious TS Spivet is released on 13 June.