Director Scott Hicks on Adapting “The Boys Are Back”

Last night GalleyCat prowled the aisles of the New York City premiere of “The Boys Are Back,” an adaptation of Simon Carr‘s memoir by the same name. The film polished Carr’s raw and powerful book into a more conventional story, giving the author a flattering career milestone–in the movie, dreamy actor Clive Owen plays a fictionalized version of the British journalist.

After the screening, one GalleyCat editor asked director Scott Hicks about taking Carr’s memoir to the big screen. “The memoir is very anecdotal, a collection of incidents scattered over time,” explained the celebrated director of Shine and the Stephen King adaptation, Hearts in Atlantis.

“What [screenwriter] Allan Cubitt has done is weave all these pieces into a narrative structure,” he continued. “I would keep feeding off the memoir. I’d go to him and say, ‘we’ve got to have that [memoir] scene.’ … And he’d find a way to weave it in. The memoir was a constant reference point. It was very skillfully adapted in the first place.”

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