Normally reclusive novelist Anne Tyler is urging her fans to see a movie of her 1970 novel “A Slipping-Down Life,” a film sidelined for five years in a production dispute but which finally opens Friday in 20 cities.
While reviews of the film starring Lili Taylor as a shy Southern girl named Evie Decker who becomes obsessed with a rock musician played by Guy Pearce have been mixed, Tyler is giving it an enthusiastic thumbs up.
In an interview with Reuters conducted via E-mail, Tyler, the author of “The Accidental Tourist,” said she was speaking out because “I am tickled by the idea that (director) Toni Kalem, like Evie Decker herself, had such a fond dream about something and went to such lengths to follow it.”
The film was a hit when it opened at the Sundance film festival in 1999 but had trouble finding a distributor. One of the producers recut the film to make it more “commercial” but Kalem and the movie’s stars objected and the dispute stopped the film from being released. Finally a bank took possession of the film and sold it to Lions Gate which restored it to its original state.
In the film Tyler’s heroine is transformed from an overweight teenager to a slim woman in her 20s but Tyler said she didn’t mind. “There are some kinds of changes that I mind very much — but not those in ‘A Slipping-Down Life.’ I think this book had a special, private meaning for Toni Kalem and she went to work to show us on the screen what that meaning was. While I was watching, I just enjoyed her vision without worrying about whether it had anything to do with mine.”
Asked if the phrase “Hollywood would like to buy your book” was something she dreaded, the author said, “I long ago stopped imagining that a movie made from a book — mine or anyone else’s — would be the book itself come to life on the screen. It’s going to be something different, always, no matter how faithful. But yes, I think the honesty can be preserved. I’ve even seen movies that were better than the books.”
Asked why her books often feature “losers” who are redeemed, Tyler objected. “I don’t know that I’d call them losers. Maybe outsiders And I have so many of them in my books because there are so many of them in real life. Besides which, they’re more interesting.”
She added, “When I mail off a finished manuscript, I always imagine my characters riding the train to New York. I picture them as excited, but a little scared, and I worry about whether they’re up to this. Once the book is accepted, though, I tend to forget about them. I’m like a mother cat: those kittens are grown and gone.”