More and more popular books are getting the big-screen treatment, and the latest to have its name up in lights is SJ Watson’s bestseller Before I Go To Sleep. With an A-list class that includes Nicole Kidman, Colin Firth, and Mark Strong, it’s an engaging thriller that works hard to keep its audience guessing.
When we caught up with the author earlier this week, we quizzed him on what passage from the novel he was most looking forward to seeing on screen, what lessons he’s learned about his writing process, and plenty more.
How much did you know about amnesia and how much research did you do when you started writing the book?
I used to work at a place called the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery which is a hospital for people specifically suffering from a disease of the nervous system and the brain. I met lots of people in the course of my job there who had very odd and interesting medical conditions to do with that psychology and their brain function, though none that had amnesia. I didn’t want anyone to read the book and go “that doesn’t sound right”. I was aware that it might not be 100% medically accurate but it had to be medically plausible. I told myself I didn’t mind if an expert neuropsychologist said “that’s actually not true”. I did a lot of reading around amnesia and around memory function and things like that, but most of my research reading was actually case studies about people who suffered from the condition. What was happening to this person was less important than what was happening inside her. I was more interested in trying to understand how it would feel to have this memory loss and to not know your own story and to have no idea how you got to where you are, even physically. The more I thought about it the more I realised without your own story you’re not really anything. How do you know what kind of person you are if you don’t know what you’ve done and where you’ve been and what you’ve achieved, and what things you’re proud of or less proud of?
Now that you have a Nicole Kidman, Colin Firth and Mark Strong inhabiting these people you’ve created, when you think of your characters is it their face you see when you think of them?
It is. When I wrote the book I wasn’t thinking of anybody in particular. I had a very strong visual image of what the characters looked like, but I’m not the type of author who imagines them as any real person. But now I see the movie and I think Colin, Nicole, Anne-Marie Duff and Mark Strong inhabit those characters so well that I can’t see the characters as anything else. In a way I feel this whole process has been a way of me saying goodbye to the characters. They belong to other people now.
When you were first approached about the possibility of turning this into a film, was there any particular passage or segment that you were most looking forward to seeing on the big screen?
That’s a really interesting question. I think the opening actually. Before I even thought about whether it could be a film or not I read an obituary – which gave me the idea – of a man who had very severe amnesia for his entire life. In my head I saw a woman getting out of bed having woken up next to a strange man and thinking ‘Oh shit I’ve had a one night stand!’ The opening scene of the book came to me fairly quickly, then I wrote it and the book span out from that, so I suppose I was always excited about seeing how that would play out on screen.
Are you able to still get caught up in it all when you watch the film?
Totally. I think it’s a real tribute to Rowan as a filmmaker. The very first time I saw it after about seven or eight minutes I totally forgot that it was anything to do with me and I just strapped myself in for the rollercoaster if you like. There were moments where I thought ‘shit I wrote this!’. There was one moment in the film where I thought Rowan had thrown a curveball in in terms of the plot. And I had my hand in my throat going ‘Oh God, you’re in danger’ and then I thought ‘Of course it’s a red herring, I know the story!’ so I completely forgot.
This was your debut novel. What lessons did you learn about your writing process that you’ve taken into future projects?
I think I learned that first drafts tend to be pretty rubbish actually so there’s not a lot of point in agonizing over every word. The first draft is about getting the story down. If we use the analogy of a painter, it’s really like stretching your canvas and mixing your paints. Books are really written in the editing stage. For this one I lost entire characters in the editing stage. Also I think I learned that the most important thing for me to do is to stay in the world of the book, by which I mean doing some work on it every day, even if it’s only 100 words. Interestingly, writing the second book I’ve also realized that every book requires a different take on it. I wrote Before I Go To Sleep pretty much on the fly. I didn’t really have a big master plan. Whereas with my next book Second Life I’ve had to be a lot more focused on the plot, and I’ve had to keep the story tighter. Every writer is slightly different so my advice wouldn’t necessarily help anyone else.
Obviously it wasn’t possible for you on this one, but for other book-to-film adaptations what is your preference: read the book and then watch the film or watch the film and then read the book?
It’s not really a preference but I’ve pretty much always read the book first. It’s funny because I really love the film Fight Club and I saw the film before I read the book and the book is a little bit of a disappointment. But then I read it again a couple of weeks later, trying to appreciate it as a book and trying to forget about the film I recently watched and it was a much better experience. They’re just two different things; sometimes I feel like sitting in a dark room eating popcorn and sometimes I feel like spending eight hours on a couch reading a book.
Before I Go To Sleep is out in cinemas now.
