Why this screenwriter prefers writing novels

‘Foe’ is Iain Reid’s latest page-to-screen adaptation

There’s a movie coming out soon, “Foe,” and it’s based on a 2018 book called “FOE.” As we know, the best thing about a film adaptation is not the movie, but the reminder to read that book you’d intended to read when it came out, but then a bunch more books came out and you’re sorry and you won’t let it happen again.

This is how I eventually got around to reading “Emma” and “The Da Vinci Code” and why I still haven’t read “The Corrections” or “Blood Meridian.”

And it’s why I’ve just read this 2018 novel by a writer I’ve been hearing about for years, whose work everyone who’s ever mentioned it to me has liked.

It’s also why I recently spoke with the Kingston novelist, Iain Reid, about his second novel, “FOE,” and not to co-screenwriter Iain Reid, the until recently striking Writers Guild of America member, about “Foe,” the film about to be released by the until recently struck Amazon Studios.

We spoke while the strike was still on (as it remains, at time of writing, for the Screen Actors Guild) and Reid was specific about his solidarity, and concerned that this interview not step over the line that forbade members from promoting struck work.

The distinction between novelist and screenwriter, it turns out, was not difficult to maintain, because they are two very different people, though they sometimes work in close quarters.

As it will please no other novelist reading this to learn, Reid’s first work of fiction, 2016’s “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” was optioned by Charlie Kaufman — the Oscar-and BAFTA-winning screenwriter behind “Being John Malkovich,” “Adaptation” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” — while he was in the middle of writing his second, which was in turn optioned eight months before it was published. And though he says he had some great conversations with Kaufman, he was at pains to ensure that none of it had any influence on his novel in progress.

“I’d be frozen,” he said, if he let any film thoughts into his novel-writing. “I was already finished the first draft of the novel ‘FOE’ when Charlie got in touch about ‘I’m Thinking of Ending Things,’ and was somewhere in the long, long process of revisions and rewrites.”

And reading “FOE,” it’s clear he didn’t let himself get distracted. Though it starts with a visual cue — “Two headlights” is the complete opening sentence — the rest takes place almost entirely in an almost entirely undescribed barn, just as “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” took place almost entirely in an almost entirely undescribed car.

If I’d gotten a call from Charlie Kaufman while he was preparing to adapt my first novel into a movie while I was writing my second — even if I was already, as he described it, “somewhere in the long, long process of revisions and rewrites” — I would have casually assumed Spielberg or Villeneuve would be interested in whatever I did next, and I’d have inserted an appropriate number of challenging action sequences, children in peril, and/or prompts for moody, meditative long shots complete with hard grey or soft umber palettes described in understated yet filmically inspiring detail to tee things up for them.

But Reid’s made of sterner stuff. “For me, novel writing is a bit freer,” he said. “It has fewer restrictions and constraints than are implicit to screenwriting. Novel writing feels less regulated and also more like an end in itself, compared to screenwriting, which feels like a kind of detailed master plan that requires many additions and many future collaborators to complete. The only collaborators a novel needs for completion are an editor and a reader.”

Another reason is that all three of his novels depend heavily on their unreliable first-person narrators, which is a tough thing to pull off onscreen when, barring voiceovers, the narrator is essentially the director. Kaufman, being Kaufman, made some pretty idiosyncratic choices to tell his version of Reid’s story, including destabilizing timeline interventions, radically decontextualized framing, frequent references to the musical “Oklahoma!” and a lovely Oklahoma-unrelated dance sequence, none of which was in the book.

Since Reid wasn’t promoting the film being released by the struck company, we didn’t talk much about the very different choices he and director/co-screenwriter Garth Davis (“Top of the Lake,” “Lion”) made. Like the opening text that sets the stage for us and a final scene that clarifies something the book heavily suggests but does not state. We also didn’t discuss whether the title, rendered in all caps on the cover and title page, was meant to imply it’s an acronym, or whether it’s just a typographical choice. Though awkward and possibly pushing it, the top Google search result for an acronym is Field Operational Evaluation, which is one especially businesslike way of describing the action of the story.

People tend to think of Reid’s haunting books as thrillers (“I’ve never thought of my novels as thrillers,” he said, “though I know some people read them that way and I don’t mind that”), although they might be better described as unsettlers. But the subtle, slow-burn act of unsettlement is something better suited to books than films. So, in addition to the aforementioned bookends, in place of the two protagonists’ jobs that are so vaguely described in the novel as to make the reader question whether they’re actually real, in the film they’re lividly lit facts.

The movie also has spaceships. “A screenplay is inherently limited,” Reid said. “There’s only a certain amount of space you can use, you have to be aware of budget and how we’re going to film this; it’s a lot more restricted and limiting in a way than the novel, where the only limitation is your imagination.”

It’s a testament to just how much of a writer’s writer he is that he considers adding something like spaceships and subtracting something like a cool trick he does in the novel with quotation marks “restricted and limiting,” but he’s also a big movie fan, and the chance to dive further into the biz is hard to resist. So while all this was going on, he wrote another screenplay, inspired by his recent experience of moving his 99-year-old grandmother into a care facility. And then promptly revised it into a novel, published last year as “We Spread.” And if that gets optioned, the film will almost certainly turn out to be not quite like either.

Reid’s ideal in this respect is “Under the Skin,” both Michel Faber’s 2000 novel and Jonathan Glazer’s famously divergent 2013 film adaptation.

“That’s a movie I love,” Reid said. “The book and the film both had various genre elements, lots of room for interpretation, but for me both the book and the movie were stand-alone things.”

So please do see the movie, it’s good, and the result of what Reid describes as a second draft not of his novel, but of what was behind the novel.

But read the book first.

AMAZON STUDIOS WILL RELEASE “FOE” THEATRICALLY ON OCT. 13.