In his early, formative years in Hollywood, Larry Gross adapted a pair of Andre Dubus novellas into the screenplay for We Don't Live Here Anymore, only to see the project shelved as studios became more conservative and high-concept driven. While editing and contributing interviews, film criticism and analyses to Millimeter, Sight and Sound, and Film Comment, Larry made a name for himself with screenplays for director Walter Hill (48 Hours, Streets of Fire, Geronimo: An American Legend) and adaptations of such works as diverse as the teleplay for David and Jim Thompson's This World, then the Fireworks.

Recent years included the screenplays for Prozac Nation and Crime and Punishment in Suburbia. After the success of In the Bedroom, based on another of Andre Dubus' stories, We Don't Live Here Anymore was put into production under the direction of John (Praise) Curran and netted Gross the Waldo Salt screenwriting award at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. Jack and Terry (Mark Ruffalo, Laura Dern) and Hank and Edith (Naomi Watts, Peter Krause) are couples and best friends whose emotional limits are tested through their infidelities, though there is no way to "soundbite" the complexity and maturity of Dubus' story or Gross' screenplay.

Adam Barnick: What sparked your interest in bringing these stories of Andre's to the screen in the first place? Were you a fan of his work before?

Larry Gross: I was handed these stories by the son of the man who was, at the time, Andre Dubus' editor. This is when Andre Dubus was alive- he gave me the stories to read, with the suggestion that they might make a film. This conversation took place in 1979. And that guy, Jonas Goodman, he's the producer on the film today.

I was completely fascinated by the stories that I was shown, albeit I had no life experience at that time that was directly related to it. I'd never been married, never had kids... But there was something about my own experiences in life, unrequited love, obsession, anger at people, people being angry at me when things didn't work out in a relationship. Something about the way Andre depicted that, that I found incredibly powerful and incredibly believable; and he captured some truth about the way in which in extreme emotional situations, the situation between two people sort of has a logic of its own. And they start doing things to one another; hurting each other, forgiving each other, accepting each other, rejecting each other, that almost is more than the sum of their characters. It's like some necessity inside the relationship takes over.

That's what I found being depicted in the stories that I found so fascinating. And it seemed true to me, whether I'd been in those kinds of relationships or not. I said to myself I'm not married, I don't have kids, and yet I believe totally in the reality of the way this is depicted. Because I'd had enough life experience to just know what it feels like- your emotions are taking you into places that you can't control. And you're doing things you never thought you'd do. You're accepting things you never thought you'd accept. You're rejecting things you never thought you'd reject!

AB: You're put on another level entirely by your emotions.

Larry Gross: Yeah! By your emotions. And that ability to depict the chain of events that creates that circumstance, I just found (Andre's) skill at that to be amazing. I mean you see it, in a way, in great novels where they have hundreds of pages to convey the passage of time..but to do it within the framework of a shorter piece.. The conciseness and economy with how he did that, I thought was amazing and made me want to make a film from them.

The other thing is that this type of material wasn't so far from movies that were being made at the time. People like Paul Mazursky and Mike Nichols were making movies that were more focused on relationships…John Cassavetes was still alive, Bergman was still (making films), and still having an influence. And so to me, the movie that I saw in my head, was not such a marginal, out-of-the-mainstream movie. I was wrong in terms of where the studios were going in the early 80's, my head was still in those early 70's movies that I had grown up on..and I falsely imagined there would be much more sympathy from financiers than there turned out to be.

AB: If I had to boil it down to a sentence in what I liked about We Don't Live Here Anymore, probably it's so uncomfortable in its honesty. I'm the same now, not married, no kids, but the resonance stuck.

Larry Gross: To me the movie's honest about something that's even more hard to dramatize than simply "people behaving badly"..which is painful, and requires honesty to depict that, except what's even more painful in a way and more difficult to dramatize, is the way people's behavior eludes their own control. That if "bad things are done," it's not done simply because people are bad. It's not even done with the intention to be bad, is what it boils down to. People are driven by love. And by the demands they make on themselves for what love has to accomplish in their life-and accommodate. And love is very much stronger and powerful than we are as individuals.

AB: Bigger than all of us.

Larry Gross: Bigger than all of us, and that's what the material's honest about. Not only honest about it, it has the intricacy to be accurate about it. Saying it is one thing, showing it…Andre Dubus shows it to you. He doesn't really propound it as a doctrine, it's not a theory, it's just the way-it's the thing you infer from your experience of the text, and hopefully from your experience of the film. What I hope people come out of the film feeling is "I can't decide how I feel about these people! I can't decide whether they're bad or good."

What I do feel about it is the characters each do what is real for them to do in that particular situation at the end, but I have no particular conviction that that will make them happy, know what I mean?

To me the characters in this piece sort of get where they're supposed to go. Sadly or happily, it's where they are supposed to be, but that doesn't necessarily come with any sort of-

AB: Wrapup, or closure.

Larry Gross: Wrapup, yeah, and again that's part of honesty. It's one thing to cop attitudes about these things, the art is to render those complexities in each role with enough skill so that the audience experiences what you want them to experience. Sometimes people see what you do and they come up with a more simplified version of what it means. What I'm searching for, I did what you're doing-I was the associate editor of a magazine called Millimeter, and the first gig I got I interviewed Robert Altman on the set of Nashville.

To describe this thing, Altman said, "I want people to come out of the movie that I make and not be able to say that it was "bad." I want them to be inhabited by it, so they're not sure or they can't say.. It's too dense to be reduced to "It means this." Or "It says this."

That always struck me as a tremendously vivid description of what really good art does, and I think that Andre Dubus' stories do that, and that's what we were trying to do in this film.

AB: Did you meet or collaborate with Andre at all when he was alive?

Larry Gross: No I did not..here's the thing. I knew a lot about him, since my producing partner's Dad knew him, but the material felt autobiographical to a degree, and the fact that he wrote more two more stories after the first one I read (about these characters) made the autobiographical element more obvious..though interestingly, it turned out, that the character most literally like him was the character Peter Krause plays (Hank, in the film.) Leaving aside the literal truth of the story in his life, I felt he had put so much of himself emotionally in the material that it terrified me to..it would be like probing a scar when you had a chest operation- "oh does that rib hurt?"

What would have happened is, if the movie had gone into production at the time, I would have shown him the finished script, and said 'please comment on it.' Shortly after I finished the script, there was a fight between the different partners who had optioned the material-the material was sold out from under me . I didn't have control of the underlying rights- somebody in our group finagled the rights to sell the material to somebody else. Long story.

I did do other rewrites of the script for myself since I wanted to improve it just from a writing standpoint, I wanted to make it better, in case I got the rights back, the script would be in the best shape it could possibly be. Then what happened, Todd Field's movie (In the Bedroom) hit, and that opened the possibility of people looking at it differently. It was amazing that this object suddenly looked great to everyone.

AB: Were you then approached, or did you set the wheels in motion then to get it back?

Larry Gross: I was approached; that was mostly Jonas Goodman's doing, we worked out some type of arrangement with the folks at Columbia- paid them back the money that they had put into it back then. And then we sold it to Warner Independent.

AB: There's several adaptations in your recent produced works; before We Don't Live Here Anymore, Crime in Punishment in Suburbia was released; the book of David was made into a miniseries..how did that come about?

Larry Gross: I got more oriented towards adaptations around ten years ago. It had to do with the fact that I had one experience of doing one that I enjoyed, particularly(David); certain aspects of working on that that were extremely exciting for me to sort of see the arc of the material, put a structure on it that makes sense…I sort of decided I was good at it. It's also easier, by and large, for me to create a good screenplay from a piece of pre-existing material that I understand, then it is for me to do an original. I can do a bunch of adaptations faster. Then there's also the question of 'do I have an original idea at the moment that's better than the material that's available for me to adapt?' I try to adapt material I hold in really in high esteem.

In the case of Crime and Punishment, that's hardly an adaptation- it's inspired, in a very serious way, by the original… and it's certainly inspired by my interpretation of the original..but I changed almost every detail of the story.

AB: How did bringing We Don't Live Here differ in the way you tackled it? Tell me about your process of adaptation.

Larry Gross: The interesting thing is every adaptation is different. You adapt material for an entirely different reason. When John Huston adapted The Maltese Falcon, he had his assistant take the text, break it up into scene headings, and used every line of dialogue in the book.. It's a literal adaptation..that's one extreme.

There are adaptations (like Crime and Punishment in Suburbia) where the themes, and the philosophical viewpoints, come from the original and almost no details from the original are used.

AB: More thematically inspired.

Larry Gross: There are cases in movies where there's an incredible hook in the book for a situation, and you make the adaptation for that, and you throw out how they dealt with the hook, know what I mean? It's a situation, and you're dealing with that situation. There are cases where there's a particularly interesting element in the novel's style or manner that you want to preserve, but you want to change other things. The difference in what you want to change or use varies.

One of the things that was incredibly interesting to me when I did this adaptation of the Biblical narrative of King David...The more I read the biblical material, the more I understood and realized that scenes like the scene in The Godfather where Michael tells his brothers he's going to murder the guy in the restaurant; that is an almost word-for word transcription from David pledging to kill Goliath. Even down to the brothers laughing at him…then "I'll do it." There's even a line in the Old Testament about David being strong for the tribe, which Puzo had transcribed as being "strong for The Family." Literally out of the King James Bible.

What I decided was that when you're adapting something that has had a profound influence on other material, you essentially have the right to use any other material that's been influenced by it..and for instance, there's a thing in the David story where David's given the opportunity to kill his initial first enemy, which is King Saul… it's very much like the relationship between the Scarface character, both versions, vis-a-vis the boss, whose power he takes away… he doesn't kill him when he could.

I bring it up because I decided I could make the David story as much of a Western or genre as I wanted because all these pieces had been influenced by them.

What I'm saying is, when you interpret something, and when you adapt something, you're adapting its whole range of implications out in the world - in the case of Dubus' stories, I saw - especially in the dialogue- this quality of realism and theatrical intensity that I saw in films that I had admired, and really wanted to do. So I wanted to bring that element of the story into the piece. Sometimes you want the voice of a character, sometimes you want a plot device; many books are bought for their plot, and then (people) throw the characterizations out.

But in almost all cases, what all these things have in common, relatively speaking, was that books have much more freedom about not hammering plot at every moment, and adaptations have to be more plot-oriented on film than texts are. Prose writers have more freedom in terms of digressing. And not being tyrannized by the effect they got in the last scene.

In prose the reader puts the book down, comes back..when you have them, you can let go and bring them back again. Once you have them in a movie, you have to stay on them, and they expect you to stay on them. And there are things that once they happen, you have to commit to.

There's another interesting thing that I was intrigued to try and do in adapting We Don't Live Here Anymore… it was told exclusively from Jack's point of view in the story that I mainly relied on. And I wanted to tell the story from all of the character's point of view. I thought that was more cinematic, cutting back and forth would produce the effect that would enrich the stories, and they did. Produced a different level of suspense.

AB: Something more intrinsic to movie structure.

Larry Gross: Dubus relied exclusively and effectively on the sympathy you felt for the Jack character. That was terrific! But I felt that that wouldn't be enough for a movie. So I wanted the audience to keep going back and forth between the different character's perspectives so they would be playing in their minds with the question "what do the characters know about what's going on" at any given moment. There's a lot of things like that in the movie where things are juxtaposed, and this allows you to make visual statements rather than verbal statements. The script was always going to be very verbal and I didn't want to eliminate that, but I wanted there to be another element that was more visual to equal it.

There's a cliché about screenwriting that you can't have too much dialogue. And I think that's completely false. And what interests me in its being false is that there are a handful of films- sort of obscure art films in a way…but there are a handful of films that have a tremendously dense amount of language in them. But they also at the same time are the most cinematic films. Wings of Desire is like that. There's these incredible voice-over monologues, extravagantly literary, written by a great German prose writer named Peter Handke…it's very verbal! And at the same time, you almost feel like Wenders is under this pressure to create a visual atmosphere that's commensurate with how demanding the verbal side of it is.

That's sort of what I felt when I was perceiving this adaptation; the verbal side of this that I want to preserve is so extravagant and powerful, and I don't want to lose it; but I have to try and devise something so it balances it. You don't want the audience to have an excuse to feel overrun, inundated..

AB: They'd deem it "talky." Which I don't think is the result of a lot of dialogue.

Larry Gross: You're so right, it's what's absent, not what's present that causes it..interesting point you make. It's funny, there's a parallel misnomer when people talk about scripts…they talk about there being too much 'technical jargon' in a script…there's never too much technical jargon in a script, there's too little of what is more important than technical jargon! When the more important stuff is there, than all the technical jargon in the world is great! The Hunt for Red October, or The Hustler, all this pool jargon is there but the more important elements are there, and you love the jargon.

AB: It's like when someone goes 'the movie's too long." The more important stuff is not there, that's the problem.

Larry Gross: The thing with movies being talky, it's what not there cinematically that "makes" them talky.

AB: It's an effective balance in We Don't Live Here Anymore, the film's practically got an action film's running time (99 minutes) but it's all about the people.

Larry Gross: That, I give all the credit to (director) John Curran. He really said all along that 'I don't see this as a talky movie; I see this as a cinematic movie.' It's a visual film even though it relies heavily on talk.

AB: Many reviewers are catching that though, crediting the visuals people notice.. without it being more overt like a video. But they've been more aware of the design. color scheme, the contrasts between the more sterile environment Edith lives in, and the more ragged, fiery place Terry inhabits.

Larry Gross: John and the designer Tony Devenyi, and the cinematographer Maryse Alberti really came up with a visual atmosphere in the film that serves the material, and at the same time, pushes the material further. All screenwriters dream of this type of situation where a director will both respect what you've done and take it further. Usually, it's one or the other. They'll respect what you do and they'll be boring, or have a lot of talent to burn visually and they'll trample over the material and not really understand it. And John avoided both of those pitfalls. I was incredibly lucky. In terms of getting the movie made, my biggest accomplishment and satisfaction was that I picked John Curran.

He was completely unknown in America. I happened to have seen an early film of his that I knew was brilliant.. I didn't know when we started that he was available and an American. I thought he was Australian; he went there to conduct the beginning of his film career.

The fact that he was in America looking for work - we stumbled into that discovery by accident, just as I had stumbled into Praise(Curran's previous film) by accident. A great piece of luck because he's a huge talent, and a huge talent who was specifically right for this material. You'll get it, after about four minutes you'll see what I saw.

Another thing you experience a lot in your career as a writer is you see a piece of material that you like, you've written something you feel is connected to that, you send it to the director thinking "they'll love this," and they don't know what you're talking about! (laughs) Know what I mean? They don't see the resemblance between what they've done and what you've done. For whatever reason.

In this case, it was the reverse. John instantly got it, instantly saw the resemblance, and valued it! It's not literal but (the similarities to Praise were) deeply literal in that it's the underlying thematic thing. It's not the story or character, it's not the details, it's the underlying feeling about life being this thing that drags characters where it's going to go, not where they want to go. The underlying spirit of Andre Dubus. Totally, totally on a deeper level. And the characters are this conduit into a sense of an atmosphere that's all-powerful.

Part two of this interview with Larry Gross can be reached here.

We Don't Live Here Anymore, a Warner Independent release, is currently available on DVD.

Adam Barnick