Stewart O'Nan meets his director

Hollywood’s crazy ways: Stewart O’Nan, who has written 11 novels, including the much praised 2007 Night at the Lobster, has finally seen one of his books brought to the screen.  Snow Angels, a dark drama starring Kate Beckinsale and Sam Rockwell, opens in March.  (Click here to see our previous post about the film and watch its trailer.) Curiously, O'Nan first met the film’s director, David Gordon Green, at yesterday’s press junket in Los Angeles and our Nancy Mills says he didn’t seem at all bothered that he had no input on the film. “It’s about 75-80% faithful to the book,” O’Nan says, “although the film is a little lighter.”  He describes the theme of both book and movie as “How people come to do these terrible things to people they love.”  O’Nan is continuing with dark themes for his next book, which he says will be about “two women in their late seventies. They’re sisters-in-law who don’t like each other but come to realize they’re responsible for each other.”  Watch below to see O'Nan doing a reading from Snow Angels.

Green also has Pineapple Express in the works and says Huey Lewis & the News just finished the theme song for it.  Green says he told Lewis, "‘We don’t want it too far from your 80s work that we love so much.  We want you to say a lot of the plot in it and the title as many times as you can and a lot of alto sax.’”  The film, another comedy produced by Judd Apatow, stars Seth Rogen and James Franco as a pothead and his drug dealer, respectively, who get mixed up with crooked cops.  It is scheduled for release in August. Green says he welcomed a chance to do comedy: “I needed to be able to incorporate fart jokes.  When they sent me the script, I visited the set of Knocked Up and realized they used a process similar to mine.  They were making commercial comedies with a loyal crew base, lots of improvisation and the insistence on natural moments.  On Snow Angels, I was more respectful of the actors.  On Pineapple Express, I constantly talked during takes.  We were all yelling at each other all day.  If you’re going for the gag, it’s not like you’re interrupting a dramatic moment.  You’ve got to shout out a funny idea before you forget it.”