Ted Thompson’s one of the very first people I met in Iowa City in the fall of 2009 when my wife and I moved there so that she could attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Knowing Ted has given me a close view of watching someone move from drafting a book to editing it, then to selling it to a publishing house and editing it some more. On Thursday, an adaptation of that book—The Land of Steady Habits—will premiere on Netflix. Adapted and directed by acclaimed filmmaker Nicole Holofcener, the movie stars Ben Mendelsohn, Edie Flaco, Connie Britton, Thomas Mann, and Charlie Tahan. It also includes Thompson and his wife Carrie as background actors during an early (and pivotal) holiday party scene. I recently emailed with Thompson to ask about the adaptation, the making of the film, and about the strangeness of watching a world you’d imagined years earlier come to life on the screen.
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Nate Brown: To start, can you walk me through the experience of having the book published and then having someone interested in adapting it? Generally speaking, what were those interactions like, and how long did it take for the novel to become a film?
Ted Thompson: I honestly don’t know exactly how it all happened. Part of publishing a book is letting go of almost all control over what happens with it. It goes out in the world and has a life of its own. Even before the book was published, I was vaguely aware of behind-the-scenes conversations that were happening, but most of them I was totally blind to. One of those was between my agent (who, as far as I can tell, is a genius at these quiet conversations) and an agent at UTA in L.A. who does book-to-film. That agent liked the book and saw a movie in it. We talked on the phone a few months before the novel was published, and he mentioned a short list of directors he wanted to approach with the novel. I think the first one was Nicole Holofcener. The night the book was released, I heard Nicole wanted to make it. She took it to the studio that made her last movie and they optioned it, but would only make it with a huge movie star attached. None of the narrow list of approved stars would bite, so we figured the project was dead. Then, at the last minute, Netflix said they wanted to make it and that Nicole could cast whoever she wanted. They were this movie’s fairy godparent.
NB: Nicole Holofcener brings a wealth of writing, production, and directorial experience to the table here, having written for many major shows and, of course, her own films. What made you want to work with her, and her with you?
TT: I love Nicole’s films. They’re funny and quiet and humane. She has a rare light touch and a wonderful sense of scene and her own vision. Even if I know nothing about the world, her movies feel like real life. I could go on, but when I heard she wanted to adapt it I was freaking out, and honestly pretty skeptical that it would ever happen. Hollywood isn’t often kind to novelists who get their hopes up. So I was preparing myself for disappointment from the beginning. Even after the film had been shot, I would have dreams that they decided not to release it. Nicole had never directed a film that wasn’t her own original script, so I was honored she wanted to adapt this, and I still don’t totally know what drew her to it. She told me she liked the awkwardness. She’s known for her female characters, so it was interesting that she wanted to make a film about a messy guy.
I told her to take whatever she responded to in the book and make that movie, make it her own. There’s nothing worse than a film that’s too reverent to the novel. After seeing it, my guess is she was mostly interested in the relationship between parents and their adolescent/grown children. Reading the first draft of the script was one of the great pleasures of the whole process. To have someone funnier than you reimagine your characters and story, but also make it her own—I don’t know, I can’t really describe it.
NB: I know you and your wife Carrie have a little cameo in the movie. What was it like being on set? How’d it feel?
TT: Oh my god, it was surreal. Part of the strangeness was just learning how movies get made. The scene happens at night but we were shooting at like 9 in the morning at a beautiful giant house in Westchester. We were dressed and fed with the other extras, and handed glasses of half-full fake wine that looked appropriately used, and stationed in a place that turned out to be the center of the shot.
Suddenly Edie Falco and Bill Camp were there and we were chit-chatting about Brooklyn neighborhoods and lamenting the cost of childcare and someone said “Action.” We did this about ten times from different angles and it took all day. But about halfway through I was able to step out of my self-consciousness and remember that this was a scene I had written, years before, while sitting alone in the apartment I shared with my brother. The re-creation was different from what I had imagined, of course, but here it was around me, being made real. It was wild. You make this stuff up alone and then one day there are PA’s with walkie talkies and busloads of extras and canapés on silver trays. Some random detail you don’t remember writing is suddenly some poor prop person’s job to figure out. A turtle walks into the scene in your head and twelve years later a camera crew is standing around an actual turtle, waiting for the sweet thing to poke its head out of its shell.
NB: Having taught the book in a number of times, I feel like I know the novel backwards and forwards (as do a lot of students in the greater Baltimore region!). What will someone who knows the book be surprised at in the film? What were the biggest surprises for you?
TT: Well, Nicole made it her own, which I’m very happy about. She dropped characters (sorry Tommy) and added others (Connie Britton plays a character that’s not in the book). She also decided not to do any flashbacks, which I think was the right choice. Certain scenes that take ten or twenty pages of prose ended up being a single shot and two lines of dialogue. A lot of the ending is different, though to me the characters end up in the same place emotionally and tonally. Oh, and Anders has a lot of sex. A lot of bad sex. Which I guess is Nicole’s version of making it Hollywood.
NB: I know from having talked to you about this in the past, but writing and publishing a book can be majorly anxiety provoking. Do you have any similar anxieties about the adaption? What’s it feel like being just a few days out from Netflix releasing the film?
TT: Not nearly as much! Even though in a lot of ways it’s more public than publishing a novel (I just saw there are billboards up in L.A.), I’m not as worried about it. Part of it is that I’m less involved—Nicole was kind enough to share drafts of the script as she went along, and I gave her my thoughts, but otherwise it was out of my hands. But honestly: one of my favorite directors made a movie of my book with some of the best actors out there.
It’s incredible luck. It paid for my daughter’s preschool. Seems to me the only thing to do now is be grateful and enjoy it.
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The Land of Steady Habits premiers on Netflix this Thursday, September 14 | Watch the trailer here:
Ted Thompson’s novel, The Land of Steady Habits, was published by Little, Brown in March 2014. His stories have appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, Best New American Voices, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he now lives in Brooklyn, NY with his family.