"Fiction into Film" Panel at the New Yorker Festival

A packed theater at 10 am testifies to the power of the panelists: Edward Norton, speaking about acting in a movie based on a W. Somerset Maugham novel and about adapting Jonathan Lethem's "Motherless Brooklyn"; Mira Nair and Jhumpa Lahiri, speaking about adapting Lahiri's "The Namesake"; Sarah Polley, speaking about adapting a short story by Alice Munro; Liev Schreiber, speaking about adapting Jonathan Safran Foer's "Everything Is Illuminated"; and Michael Cunningham, speaking about having "The Hours" adapted. Aside from a weird discourse from Schreiber about Jew-on-Jew prejudice, the panel was really interesting. According to Norton, Lethem had no doubts or concerns with Norton's adapting his novel for the screen, a sentiment echoed by Cunningham when he stated that novels are only rough approximations of what the writer originally had in mind. Both Lethem and Cunningham felt that they had tried to do something in their novels, and now someone else could give the creative process a go. Lahiri evoked the familiar comparison between writing a novel and giving birth to a child. Schreiber, quoting Foer, said that giving up his novel was like watching his daughter head to a prom party with a strange man. Definitely worth heading up to Midtown for.