New Yorker Festival: Fiction Into Film October 7, 2006

Fiction Into Film
Theories of adaptation.
With Michael Cunningham, Jhumpa Lahiri, Mira Nair, Edward Norton, Sarah Polley, and Liev Schreiber.
Deborah Treisman, moderator.

Michael Cunningham won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel “The Hours,” which was made into a film that received nine Academy Award nominations. Part of the book first appeared in The New Yorker. His adaptation of Susan Minot’s novel “Evening,” with Claire Danes and Vanessa Redgrave, starts filming this fall. He is currently finishing an adaptation of part of his novel “Specimen Days.”

Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London to Bengali parents and emigrated to the United States as a child. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her début story collection, “Interpreter of Maladies,” some of which originally appeared in The New Yorker. Her first novel, “The Namesake,” part of which also first appeared in the magazine, has been made into a feature film by the director Mira Nair. It premières next spring.

Mira Nair has written the screenplays for a number of films, including “Salaam Bombay!,” which won the Camera D’Or at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival. She is the director of “Monsoon Wedding,” which won a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, and “Vanity Fair,” an adaptation of the William Makepeace Thackeray novel.

Edward Norton is currently writing an adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s novel “Motherless Brooklyn,” which he plans to direct and star in. He has acted in a wide range of films, including “Primal Fear” and “American History X,” each of which earned him an Academy Award nomination. This fall, he will appear in “The Painted Veil,” based on the W. Somerset Maugham novel.

Sarah Polley has acted in numerous films, including “The Sweet Hereafter,” an adaptation of the novel by Russell Banks. Her début feature as a director, “Away from Her,” premières this fall at the Toronto International Film Festival, and is based on the story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” by Alice Munro, which was first published in The New Yorker.

Liev Schreiber made his screenwriting and directing début with an adaptation of the novel “Everything Is Illuminated,” by Jonathan Safran Foer. His many acting credits include the Broadway revival of “Glengarry Glen Ross,” for which he won a Tony Award, and the films “The Manchurian Candidate” and, out this fall, “The Painted Veil.”

Deborah Treisman is the fiction editor of The New Yorker.

10 a.m. Directors Guild of America
110 West 57th Street

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