The future of book adaptations is looking brightand, well, a little terrifying.
Hollywood is hungry for speculative epics imagining alternate realities grim enough to shake your faith in humanity.
How do we know?
Credit: Tibrina Hobson/FilmMagic
The man behind this season’s splashiest screen-bound novel is experienced in this arena.
Blake Crouch’s books were the inspiration for TNT’s Michelle Dockery vehicleGood Behaviorand the M. Night Shyamalan-producedWayward Pines.
There’s lots to chew on here, of course.
The book is now available for purchase.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: The buzz on this book is crazy.
Does it feel bigger to you than anything you’ve experienced?
BLAKE CROUCH:We really took a big swing three years ago withDark Matterand garnered some good buzz.
But I haven’t seen anything on par with the way people are responding toRecursion.
Talk a little bit more about the idea behind the book.
What do you say that you haven’t already said before?"
I kept thinking about, what is the thing that’s fundamental to the human experience?
It sounds very obvious to say that our memories make us who we are.
It’s even more than that.
It’s fundamental to the way that we experience reality.
So how did you want to play with that?
The upshot of this is it’s about a half-second delaywhich means that we are living in memory.
We never experience what we think of as the present moment.
Even the present moment is just this tape-delay, half-second reconstruction of what the present was a half-second ago.
We live in memory.
We live in our working memory.
You mentioned this was project was really close to your heart.
Why was it so personal?
Did you find it challenging to execute?
Was there any significant inspiration?
This was a really, really hard book.
This is definitely the hardest book I’ve ever done.
I wanted to dramatize what that looks like.
Michael Crichton [is an influence] for sure.
I feel like he’s always looking over my shoulder and I’m looking over his.
I feel a lot of inspiration from his body of work.
Walk me through how you sketched out Barry.
Given the personal nature ofRecursionfor you, is he close to you as a character?
He’s a cop and honestly, his profession was far less important to me than his emotional journey.
We come into the book and Barry is very much this broken human being.
It’s a reflection of where I was emotionally as I started writing the book.
Which I guess means it’s some form of therapy for me.
What was your process withRecursion?
How long did it take you to write?
It took 18 months from first idea to turning it in.
For me, that’s a long time.
It wasn’t doing all the things I wanted it to do.
I threw out 40,000 words, which is a little less than half the book, and tried again.
What does that do to the present moment?
Is that something you’re thinking of as you’re writing your books?
I really try not to.
I wasn’t thinking about it forDark MatterorWayward Pines.
I naturally tend towards a more cinematic style.
Of course it’s there.
It’s an opportunityor a problemto be addressed down the road.
And of course, this is on the way to Netflix.
What does that look like to you?
What can you share about the development process so far?
This is definitely not a two-hour movie, but it feels bigger than the small-screen, too."
