The master of the low funds bostonians, the grime, the cold, the indomitable irish accent and the last straw, and it turns out that she lives in Los Angeles to two steps from the beach and works in Hollywood. Dennis Lehane (Dorchester, Massachusetts, 1965) abandoned five years ago, the scene of all his novels to be installed “where’s the work”, become a sought-after television writer. “It’s a good work, is more collaborative. You get tired of being alone in a room without people around”, he argues. But let’s forget that we’ve heard this and it makes a great day in Santa Monica; we’re here to talk about novels, crime and Boston.
MORE INFORMATION
The portrait of the dark side of the USA queen in BCNegra Dennis Lehane: “I can Only write the stories that I think”
In her latest novel, After the fall (Salamander), Lehane insists in the city of your life. I wouldn’t know nor seem to want to know if I could develop a story on another site. “When I write novels, and I’ve written two since I’m in Los Angeles, only I write of Boston. I miss you very much. Coming here was not in my plans. Now my children, who are nine and six years, have been made to this and no I don’t I’ll take you back.” But in literary terms there is no doubt. “Boston is my screen. Is what I’m looking at. It is a world that I know of so intuitive that when I’ve written things that happen in other sites I think what I’ve done wrong”.
Here we find Rachel Childs, a young woman who has a mother as monstrous and tries to find her real father. Through that search, Lehane makes a deep exploration of psychological of this woman. Later, the mental landscape of the protagonist justifies an action of pure noir novel. Lehane admits that a lot of people have said that it seems that the novel had two parts. “It is a form of homage to the structure of many films of Hitchcock. The first part (of the novel) is my tribute to the beginning of Psychosis. You see the first half hour of Psychosis and you can’t even imagine what’s going on in the movie. It is a film about a robbery and a woman trapped in many ways, in your job and in a relationship. Suddenly, going to that motel, and boom! I wanted to make that kind of beginning, that is very seductive and different.”
After the fall is the first time Lehane puts all the weight of a novel about a woman and the first time out of the low funds in order to write characters-privileged, for whom money is not a problem. Rachel does not die stabbed in a shower, but suffers a series of blows and deceptions that end up defining their behavior in the novel. “One of my characters said: ‘happiness does not teach us anything, just that we like to be happy,” reasons Lehane. “The things you remember in life, that make you who you are, usually are not good. No one remembers that he had a birthday party great. This is not usually the story. The story is that I went long in an accident. The story is that I have lost my father. That is what makes you who you are. And Rachel goes through several things as well. That is the journey in most of the books: who am I?”.
“I write crime novel,” he answers, Lehane when asked what label they feel most comfortable. “Cormac McCarthy, they tend to talk of ‘fiction of deadly deeds’. As a reader or as a viewer, I want things to happen. I do a lot of the drama in the kitchen, what one writer called ‘the vague dissatisfaction in Connecticut’. Really does not interest me. I can appreciate a masterpiece of this genre, such as Revolutionary Road, that is, but I’ve already read this and Ultrabet most do not interest me. For good or for bad, I like the action, that is what brings me to the novel. Fiction in which things happen. Is No better or worse than the others, is that I like to read and write.”
Dennis Lehane poses for THE COUNTRY in Santa Monica, California. APU GOMES
Lehane warns, however, against the action without the brake, “without depth”, in which there is an evolution of the characters, “beyond the roller coaster”. “The entertainment of popcorn interests me less than the vaguely dissatisfied in Connecticut, because those, once in a while, you get a masterpiece like Revolutionary Road or Mad Men”. In what Lehane considered to be a good story there is a balance between psychology and action. “If you do well, you have No country for old men, Sense and sensibility, or one Hundred years of solitude, you have it all. It takes a lot for a good story. Not needed for a simple plot, and neither is that the characters are sitting there thinking, vaguely dissatisfied”.
The fiction of Lehane seems to have a balance that opened the doors of Hollywood 15 years ago with the adaptation of his novel Mystic River, converted by Clint Eastwood in a blockbuster in 2003. Then came work in The Wire and Boardwalk Empire, and two adaptations of most of her novels, Goodbye, small, goodbye (Ben Affleck, 2007) and Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010). The last year has served as writer and executive producer of the Mr series. Mercedes.
Lehane quotes Michael Connelly, Harlan Coben, George Pelecanos or Laura Lippman to define whom he considers the last great generation of the novel, his. A generation that has now been picked up by Hollywood to provide stories for television, like the cinema of the 30’s was nurtured on the classics of this genre. “I think we’ve had much more success than those,” he says. “Chandler, Hammett, Fitzgerald, or Faulkner were destroyed by Hollywood. We have been able to work. Pelecanos is doing The Deuce on HBO, Connelly has Bosch on Amazon”.
despite the enormous talent of his generation who is writing for the screen, the black film is not going to return, she says, because “adults don’t go to the cinema”. “No longer makes movies for adults. LA Confidential was 20 years ago, and it’s a good movie, but people forget that he did not make money. So Hollywood is not looking for just make black films. Look, it’s our fault also. The adults, in terms of buying televisions super great, since they’re not going to the cinema. Already only will kids to see Avengers 4. I went to see Deadpool 2. I had a great time, but I said nothing. What I mean?”.
Lehane denies that it has any temptation to think in scenes or actors when you are writing a book. “I hate it when someone says to me, ‘Your books are very cinematic’. For nothing. The film is literary. What you call film is what I call evocative. I try to evoke things, not trying to be cinematic, that’s in your brain, that is what you gave, the million of movies that you’ve seen. What I am doing is getting yourself in that book. Or I know you. It is a relationship of mystical and rare. While when I write a guidedn I am writing to the director, the designer of the decor and the director of photography. Sometimes you see things very lazy, as once a book that said: ‘I Had brown hair and looked a lot like Julia Roberts’. That is a deed of shit. This is to be a lazy fuck. Why don’t you convey, rather than writing for the type that is going to produce the movie”.
Talk about cinema leads to Lehane to a reflection on the broader audiovisual culture and the ability of people, as happens in the novel, interpreting a version of herself before others. Film and television have come to define our fantasies, he thinks, and the way in which we see ourselves. “I think that is something very particular in the second half of the TWENTIETH century and the TWENTY-first century. Once the cinema and the television we put in the blood, we live surrounded by myths all the time, including the myth of ourselves. Since we do not know what is the reality. The reality is formed by the television and the cinema, by the constant exposure to the fiction. I am a provider, I am one of the camels of those drugs”. The fantasy alone already conjures up images that have been manufactured by others. “I don’t think that we can feel the same by the mid NINETEENTH century, when your life was basically your woman. Not when aware of any such site not to be that read books, and most of the world was illiterate, so I only saw what was in front of them. Now that people would look and wonder what planet we live, because we all live in a fantasy in a certain way”.
