The Sweet Hereafter at BAM

The marquee events at the massive Brooklyn Book Festival happen tomorrow, but last night the BBF joined with the Brooklyn Academy of Music in hosting a special screening of Atom Egoyan's 1997 elegiac, lyrical adaptation of Russell Banks's novel The Sweet Hereafter, followed by a Q&A with Banks moderated by Courtney Hunt, director of Frozen River.

Initially, Banks explained, his attitude about movie adaptations came from Hemingway, who advised that writers drive to the Nevada border, toss their books across the state line to California, wait for a bag of money to be tossed back, and then drive home to write something else. But Banks enjoyed working with Egoyan, who skillfully adapted his story of how a school bus accident rips apart a rural community, and he's gone on to help adapt several other novels, including On the Road for Francis Ford Coppola. Interestingly, Egoyan and Banks found that the most cinematic scene in the novel --- a climactic demolition derby --- wouldn't really work with the modest, mournful staging of the film, and Egoyan introduced a literary device --- a reading of the Pied Piper story --- that Banks loved in the movie but thought would have been impossible to pull off in the book.

In all, it takes about five years for Banks to get the critical distance from his original work in order to see it transformed into a movie. He touched too on the ways movies corrupt the imagination; unlike reading, which requires the active participation of the reader in the work's creation, movies let their viewers be passive. Despite having thought up the characters, even Banks feels movies' impact: the faces of the actors overwhelm the people he imagined --- he can't see Wade Whitehouse, of Affliction, as anyone but Nick Nolte, and the tall, curly-haired lawyer he imagined in The Sweet Hereafter is now, and forever, Ian Holm.

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