>> funding for "overheard" with evan smith is provided in part by mfi foundation. improving the quality of life within our community. and from the texas board of legal specialization, board certified attorneys in your community, experienced, respected, and tested. also, by hillco partners, a texas government affairs consultancy, and by the alice kleberg reynolds foundation, and viewers like you. thank you. >> i'm evan smith, he's an award winning writer of book, stories and screenplays whose four decades of credits include the cement garden, imitation game, enduring love, atonement and sweet tooth. he's ian mcewan, this is overheard. >> actually, there are not two

sides to every issue. >> i guess we can't fire him now. >> i guess we can't fire him now. [ laughter ] >> the night that i win the emmy. >> being on the supreme court was an improbable dream. >> it's hard work and it's controversial. >> without information there is no freedom and it's journalists who provide that information. >> window rolls down and this guy says, hey, it goes to 11. [ laughter ] [music]. ian mcewan welcome. >> thank you. >> very nice to meet you, congratulation on the new book, the children act, i'd say i love it, but to say one loves your books would be also mass -- masochist. i enjoyed reading this book very much. >> it's a story of love that's hardly expressed, and, yes, there's a sadness, a melancholy. >> that's exactly the right word. >> but it contains along the way the expressions of powerful

conflicts between a young boy who's on his death bed needing a blood transfusion and a high court judge who has to make a decision. >> and who is thrust in the middle of this at a moment perfect from a narrative standpoint when her own life has its challenges. >> so who judges the judges. >> right. the big theme is themes we've seen in books of yours, family, religion, bureaucracy, institutions versus individuals, and really the role of many of these institutions particularly in the modern world, you have a kid, 16 years old, the child of jehovah's witnesses, there's an attempt to keep this kid by the family from being treated. >> in american law as in english law, it's a matter -- serious matter of criminal assault to treat someone against their wishes. >> right. >> it's a fundamental right to refuse treatment. >> i heard you tell a reporter

some weeks ago that you did research into the american legal system, and instances like this in the united states. and that except for one court in the south, i think you said -- >> the court always allows the hospital to -- >> to intervene. >> to treat the child. yes. the court will always say the nicest things possible about the legs, and then press ahead -- rational concerns. but there was a case of a judge who himself was a jehovah's witness and he allowed the child to continue to refuse treatment, and the child died, but that is a really exceptional case. >> in most instances the courts weigh in favor of medical treatment. >> yes, and this is something that happens, recent cases in australia, new zealand, and it seemed to me that it exposes a fundamental rift in our daily politics or daily lives. it certainly comes up a great deal in the family division. >> right. >> you know, when you get

profound religious sincerely-held belief running up against a rational, secular state of mind, which is who represents the state. >> right. >> it's also very important. i know here, more than any other country in the world, what are the limits once you put on the power of the state. >> well, this seems like a case for ted cruz and for a number of other american politicians who have been carrying the flag of liberty. liberty for the individuals against government, against institutions. people should be allowed to do what they want and it has the additional benefit of being a fight over religion and religious relief. very much an american problem now. >> it is very much so. and it's what i would call an honorable problem. >> explain. >> some problems that you can just solve. you cannot actually solve this problem. all you can go on doing is giving it your full attention and trying to accommodate, you don't want to give the powder too much state, but you can't ignore the fact a 18-year-old or

17-year-old raised within a tight community, not much exposed to other philosophical ideas, would make a choice that we could only regret. >> and you point out actually in the context of this book and in discussions about this book that at 16 you are really just a couple on exits on the highway from being of an age when the courts have no role in resolving this. at 18 you get to trip the switch yourself or elect not to. >> sadly, the courts have kept alive young men and women, they get ill again in their early 20s, they come back to court, they come back to hospital and they refuse the treatment and they die. >> and that's what happens. >> yeah. and the courts can only throw up their hands, it's in the nature of courts to draw line, 18 is when you're an adult, the minute you're 18, you're an adult, the court cannot protect you. so it's again what a judge friend of mine called an anxious question. >> it is, indeed. >> the courts don't take this on very lightly. >> right. >> they don't like doing it. but they cannot let an

18-year-old, 17, 15-year-old become march tars to -- martyrs to their religion. >> well, this particular judge, high court judge, fiona maye, the protagonist of your book wrestles with it especially, circumstances in her own life, the dissolution of her marriage, the fact that she is childless and forms an attachment emotionally to this kid, sort of everything about her life sets her up as a really interesting person to be put in the position of deciding the outcome of this case. >> she's a compassionate but rather self contained person. she's very rational. but like all rational people, when it comes to affairs in their own life. >> yeah. >> she's somewhat unhinged. [ laughter ] she's been a judge and before that a barrister, she would have been telling people, it's the great caliche of divorcing couples, do not change the locks

on your house, you're on the wrong side of the law immediately if you exclude someone else's rightful entry to their property. >> but of course that's what she does. >> that's what she does, she's down there swimming with the desolate tide, but more importantly once she's in court, hearing the arguments from both sides, she makes a decision which probably comes out of her own emotional turmoil, she suspends the proceedings, gets in a taxi and goes to the boy's bedside, and really that for me was the core challenge of writing the book. what would happen between this childless woman, and that's another important thing about her, the deep regret that she's always just been too busy, too frantic, too much a bride as it were of the law to take time off for children. and she begins to see in this boy the child she never had. even though she won't acknowledge it to herself, and he sees in her a kind of

intellectual lit raytor, and because she does again another third extraordinaire thing he's learning the violin, very hard to imagine someone who is dying -- >> learning the violin. >> would teach himself an instrument, it's such an act of hope. nevertheless he's got a tune a day book, he's a few weeks in, he plays rather badly an irish traditional tune, and she knows straight away that tune she recognizes, down by the sally gardens, and she also knows the yates poem, and because she herself is a pianist, she can't help but say let's do it again and i'll sing it with you. and the singing of this lovely, sad, melancholy song, down by the sally gardens my love and i did meet, that also starts a bond between them. >> right. >> and then she leaves him in the hospital bed, returns to court, and as you would expect, delivers the judgment that will keep him alive. >> yeah. >> but she has triggered a

switch in him. >> it's amazing. it's a very -- i think a very resonant plot, it feels very familiar, so much of what we read in the paper are cases that have echos of this case that you fixalalize, and what i thought reading it was, and i put it down was, when is the movie, because it had -- it had the narrative of the very best literary movies that we have come to look forward to. >> funny you should say that. >> have you sold the rights to -- >> well, there have been many, many inquiries, i've turned them all down. there's only one person i want to direct. >> tell, tell, who. >> his name is richard air, within britain almost revered theater director. in fact at this very minute he's directing figueroa at the met. >> is he aware of your interest. >> of course, he's an old friend. >> has he said yes. >> yes, he's said yes.

>> and now we must find the actress who will play the judge and there's only one, and i can't name her. >> really? does it rhyme with udy ench. >> it doesn't rhyme with udy ench, but i know that udy would love to do it. >> i bet. she would. >> all i can say is that she's american. >> she is? okay, well, we'll go off in our ways and -- well, you've confound -- >> revered in our country. >> have you had the experience, many of your books have made their way into films, now, you've had different degrees of involvement with that. i remember the garden, the country of strangers, tasha richardson, rupert everett, i go back to, well, of course atonement, james mca voy and

kyra nightly. a film i'm remembering with anthony hopkins -- >> the innocent. >> these are all films, and you've had varying degrees of involvement. >> well, some of them i wrote. >> right. >> but you have not been literally involved with every one of them. >> no sometimes i back off, by the time it's happening i'm writing a novel, but i don't want to get back in it. i wrote the innocent, john schlesinger directed. campbell scott played the young englishman. we have isabella rossalini who is swedish italian playing a german and we had anthony hopkins, a welshman, playing an american. >> hollywood, right? >> you couldn't move on the set for dialogue coaches. [ laughter ] >> i wonder if it's been a positive experience for you to watch with your participation and not these books that you

pour so much of yourself into, become these films, i'm curious with directors when i get to visit, probably with authors whose films are made by other people, do you feel like it's to be yours at that point? it was mine and now it's theres? >> yep. i think what you've given them is the skeleton of something, some ready made characters in a ready made story. >> right. >> but it moves away from you so quickly. in the early stages, script stage, development stage, lots of intense discussions of how to do it, but once the button is pressed on the first day of principle photography, you're in a state of controlled panic. every day costs $200,000. >> sure. >> what it doesn't need is for the novelist to bustle on the to the set and say, no, i didn't mean that. >> he would never do that. >> right. at some point you have to step back. you cannot be the bad conscious of the set. >> right. >> so it's a ceerious process, because it also comes on so slowly. >> right. >> months, years of negotiation.

disappointments along the way. >> well atonement was written in -- published in '01 and the film was out in '07, maybe, so about six years. >> that's quite speedy for these things. >> relatively speaks. >> i don't know if it's fair to say, i think the comfort of strangers is fairly widely distributed and acclaimed film. it was the most recent. james mcavoy is a wonderful young actor. kyra nightly is a star. positive experience. >> that was the first really large scale commercial film where budget was 48, 50 million, whereas all the others were -- >> modest right. >> so i was somewhat dreading the process, because commercial pressures are just different, but in fact joe wright did this brilliant thing right at the start, and i think everything else then followed, by casting

this wonderful girl, sasha ronan as the 12, 13-year-old heroine. she was such a marvelous spirit on the set, a lovely girl. very loving parents who were on the set themselves who carried on her school work with her while using the studio's teacher. >> great. >> and who clearly were dead set on making sure that movies were not going to ruin her education or her life. she's now in her early 20s, extremely highly balanced, lovely, young woman. >> but a very positive experience in all ways. i'm thinking back to your very earliest books, i put your first publicked work that we might know about '75, or so. >> exactly. >> we're looking back not quite 40 years but almost 40 years, think back to then, and then kind of come for forward.

obviously the publishing business has changed and changed and changed again. you self aware as a writer has changed, you think things and know things and do things today that maybe not 20 or 30, certainly 40 years ago. >> absolutely. >> help us understand your evolution and your thinking about the process that you go through. >> well, i was 21 when i was writing my first stories that were being published. i don't know to this day where those stories came from. i mean they were so dark. they were so frightening. they were full of psychopaths and unbelievable mayhem. >> right, these are relatively cheerful and positive stories. [ laughter ] >> just as a corrective to your first remark. >> right. >> yeah, if you think that was dark -- >> wait. >> yeah, unwait. go back here. what happened? slowly, slowly, slowly i was a slow developer, i learned to begin to include all the other things that fascinated me into

my fiction. it warmed up. i was still interested in the dark aspects of human behavior, but things like history, the spirit of the place. using real situations, real historical characters, or living people to bring the fictional reality into some brighter color. that all interested me. i reckon i became maybe the birth of children had something to do with this -- more forgiving, tolerant of everybody who was in my novels. perhaps the strain of optimism, which has always been rather slender -- [ laughter ] >> we shouldn't overstate it. >> let's not get wild with it. [ laughter ] >> yeah. >> but that grew. i think, again, i think once you have children, you become very

aware of a strong wish that the human project will succeed. you might not be around for it, but you want the project to go on, whereas back in the 20s, where it's a dark time of the cold war, i used to find myself thinking, full all out nuclear exchange might be rather interesting. >> interesting. yeah. shake things up a bit. >> have a back pack and a pair of boots and i'll hit the road and leave town. >> this is the happy, peppy ian mcewan i'm talking to. >> well, thank god i didn't have my finger on the button. >> yes, indeed. going to try to come back to what i asked a bit of initial ly, and that is publishing, and how that has changed. obviously for the sort of person who writes the kinds of books that you write, the process, not just the writing part, but then the publishing and the promoting and the touring, and all that, that has also changed. it's a much more fraught moment today. >> yeah. >> and it has been more some time. >> one thing vanishes in the

writing time, what has evaporated not just from writer's lives but from everyone's lives is solitude, real privacy. >> there's no escaping. >> there's no escape. we've made machines that we adore, let's not forget they're very attractive, they're addictive. in the '70s, you could sit all day every day for a week at your desk working away at something, maybe you would hear a soft thud in the hall and it would be a letter. a letter. >> remember those? >> it might even be for you. [ laughter ] now, the world presses in not only the lives of your family and your friends, but the extraordinary political turmoil that we're living through now. i mean what a dark summer it has been for the news cycle. >> it has. >> so that becomes -- i'm a news junky. i can't really -- i want to know what's happening in eastern

ukraine, and western in africa and ebola, the gaza strip. it's unusual we have so many stories running simultaneous. >> so much access, the other thing to the technology point, so much access to information, hours can pass and you you've done nothing productive but ekept up. >> with what. >> nothing germaine to my life, of course, but -- >> for all you know this can be staged for your benefit by -- >> right. [ laughter ] >> it hadn't occurred to me, but now i won't sleep. >> it could be the truman show. >> it could be. well, is this a good time, forget about what came before, i think about the community of writers, geographically, similar to yours. seems like a great time. there seem to be a number of wonderful, british novellest, this is a great moment, the fraternity and sorority of people in your peer group, seems

like a great moment. >> i think it has been a fairly productive, whether it's a bronze, silver or gold age, the future can decide on that, but it's been lively, and more to the point diverse. >> yeah. >> and there are people still writing as if the 19th century ended and there with people pushing the boundaries of language and form right to the edge. >> yeah. >> so it's been a lively time. >> right. >> the american century of the novel was the second half of the 20th, i think, when we thought no one else was coming anywhere near that way of being in touch with modernity,. >> purchase, boundaries, reinventing the form. >> you don't think the last fifteen years have been particularly -- >> i think it continues to be very lively. i particularly admire richard ford for example, who is like a generation before him can really give you the taste of, you know, how to struggle now. >> yeah.

so no, i wouldn't say it just cuts off because the calendar shifts, absolutely not. >> right. i'm thinking about this book which is relatively efficient -- >> that's a nice word for short. >> i'm worried that short is a bit of a cuss word if you talk -- your books is are so short. in fact you've written your share of much longer book, the reality is this is a great read, it's nicely compact, the story is told without much fat. the last book i finished before this book was the goldfinch. i was describe that as not this in terms of this -- its sprawl and efficiency, this is, again, a topic of some discussion for you, many times i've heard you talk about this. do you have a general sense of that question, are we at a good moment in terms of people's use of the space that they're given and how they access our time? >> well, i take a lib tear view and write-- libertarian view for writers as long as they keep typing, but i have a particular fondness for the short novel,

the novella, the book you could sit and read in one sitting, if you can keep all the noise out. >> right. >> maybe two sittings. >> yeah. >> the sort of book whose structure you can still hold in your mind, very hard -- very hard, unless you're rereading, you cannot hold a structure, normal length, normal line, the short novel has always been a fascination for me right from the very beginning. i wrote one called the company of strangers, and on chic -- chesil beach, they're around 40 to 50,000 words, they put some extra demands on the writer, things have got to be established speedily. no hanging about. room for maybe one sub plot. >> with regard to this book and that point, the first point in this book where the main character is introduced to us, it is remarkably packed, not in a bad way, but you learn so much, and the plot really

progresses very quickly, it's no not a leisurely beginning, you're right into it. >> sometimes it's helpful. sometimes just a few def. the strokes, if they are deft, you're relying on the reader to fill in the colors, you can give one or two powerful details and the rest just follows in the contract between the writer and the reader. >> well, it's wonderful. we have a couple of minutes to go. i want to ask you what you mean to do next. now, as we sit here today, you have made the great decision to provide your papers to the harry ransom center at the university of texas at austin, for some people that is a sign that their career has come to an end or has slowed. my sense but is that's not the case. this is simply the right moment for you to have turned that material over. >> it is also dabbling with death when you give your papers to a -- >> the word archive this is sentence. >> today i looked for the first

time at a glass case, in that glass case was a letter i had written to my sons when they were five and three. trying to explain to them why it was midday where i was and midnight where they were, with a little diagram, fortunately i got the earth turning right way, i looked to see -- >> thank god. but this is not a sign that you're done. you intend to continue, you have things you are presumely working on as we speak. >> no, my notebook is full of possible things. i keen to forget into this screenplay with richard on this book. >> on this book. >> and there's a joy in doing a screenplay from a novella, you leave less out, a screenplay is about 20,000 words, 25,000 words. it's very close in form to the novella. and i did the screenplay of on chesil beach. we still haven't shot it yet. that was a real pleasure too, because, again, you could more or less get the whole thing on the screen.

>> right. imagine with some of these longer book, how do you decide what to film and whatnot to film, it disrupts the narrative, right. >> one of my favorite adaptations is james joyce's the dead, that was john houston's last movie, and it was a real act of love. everything in that story you love is in that movie. it's beautiful. it's absolutely beautiful. >> let's hope you and richard and ulia oberts, whoever it ends up being, you'll make a wonderful film we'll be back talking about it again. congratulations on the book. very nice to meet you. ian mcewan, thank you very much. >> thank you. >> we'd love to have you join us in the studio. visit our website at klru.org/overheard to find invitations to interviews, q and as with our audit yearns and guests, and archive of past episodes. >> so i go backwards and forwards, a large writing pad,

black ink, always black ink, and the screen. i love the way the screen can hold things provisionally in memory that have not yet been printed out. it's almost like holding a thought in your head. >> uh-huh. >> and i love the process. >> funding for overheard with evan smith is provided in part by mfi foundation. improving the quality of life within our community. and from the texas board of legal specialization, board certified attorneys in your community. experienced, respected, and tested. also, by hillco partners. texas government affairs consultancy, and its global health care consulting business unit, hillco health, and by the alice kleberg reynolds foundation, and viewers like you. thank you.