Q: What about your non-series novel Blood Work?
A:
Blood Work was inspired by a good friend of mine who had a heart
transplant in 1993. I was aware from spending time with him how much his
life had changed, how much he was relying on the medical machinery, and
how he had to take fifty-two pills a day. The main thing, however, that
inspired it was that after he got the new heart he started exhibiting
many of the emotions that I saw years earlier when I was working on that
plane-crash story and talking to the survivors. The thing that
touched me so much about those survivors was their survivor guilt--their
emotional upset at surviving a crash where many other people didn't and
the happenstance of it. You know, like one person walks away without a
scratch where the person in the seat next to them is killed. Though it's
no fault of their own, it delivers a burden to them. My friend,
Terry, who had the heart transplant, had the same thing happen to him.
It took him a long time to work it out and to reach a point of
acceptance. Of all the things that he was going through, that touched me
the most and inspired me to write a story that had someone in his
situation where he felt beholden to the person who provided his heart.
Source: http://www.mysterynet.com/books/testimony/angelsflight/
Q: What is your relationship to Los Angeles -- are you still discovering it?
A: It pretty much heated up by my being a reporter. My job took to
me many corners of the city. LA is many distinct communities, and
there's not a lot of movement between them. In the 12 years I've lived
here, I've had the opportunity to see a lot more of these communities
than most people who've lived here a longer time.
It's a hard city to get a handle on. I have a good feel for the
physical geography, but I'm not sure I have a good feel for the social
geography.
Q: Do you feel you have a responsibility to Los Angeles, or at least
its image? A lot of people are getting a feeling for contemporary Los
Angeles from reading your books, the way they got a feeling for it in
the 1940s from reading Chandler.
A: I had that feeling when I wrote The Last Coyote, which
was post-earthquake. Two things have really shaped the city: one was the
earthquake and the other was the Rodney King incident and the riots in
1992. I felt a responsibility to write about what it's been like to live
here after the place has been shaken -- by an earthquake or by a riot.
I didn't write about the racial tensions too much until Angels Flight, and that had sort of bothered me, because I wanted my writing to reflect contemporary Los Angeles.
Source: http://januarymagazine.com/profiles/connelly.html
Q: You have within the last few years introduced another
character, Terry McCaleb (Blood Work, Darkness Greater Than Night)
and also written The Poet.
A: A lot of that is in deference to Bosch. The more I write
about Harry Bosch, the more I need to take a break from him. The character
can not remain static. From book to book he has to evolve and change and
you have to peel of the layer of onion. That’s getting hard because I
have written about him eight times. So invariably when I am done writing
about him I want to forget about him for a little bit. So I have dropped
into this cycle of alternating between him and other books. I have one
done now; it doesn’t have him in it. It’s a "one-off" thriller.
Since we are talking about classifying I’m thinking it will be classified
as a "techno-thriller" because of some of the subject matter.
Q: Is Blood Work the first of your novels to be made into a movie?
A: Yes. As they came out, I did sell the first four Harry Bosch books
in order to the same studio, the same producer. It’s all very legal but
I could technically sell a Bosch book now because they have had Harry
Bosch, the character, for over 10 years. And they were 10-year deals.
So in a way he’s reverted back to me. They are still working very hard
to make a movie out of Harry Bosch so I wouldn’t pull the rug out from
underneath them and sell him to a competing studio. I’m still happy with
their efforts. There has been no movie but it’s not for lack of trying.
There have been seven different scripts written on four books. They just
have not captured the character. They are about to start an eighth so
we’ll see what happens.
[...] I don’t want
to act like I write everything with Hollywood in mind. When I don’t write
about Harry Bosch or when I am writing a "one off" there is
the aspect that there could be a pot of gold at the end of this book if
Hollywood comes calling.
Q: Did Clint Eastwood come to you on Blood Work?
A: I believe he was leaked an unfinished manuscript [...]. He made a preemptive strike on it before I was
done with the book. And we met and even talked about things he thought
I might want to consider changing before I finished it because they would
not be the way I had them in the book in the movie. It was an interesting
conversation.
Q: I’m sure. You write the book and then somebody else writes the screenplay.
You didn’t write it did you?
A: No. So Eastwood and I had this meeting almost five years ago. And
he told me in that all-morning-long meeting that I wouldn’t hear from
him again until he made the movie. That’s the kind of filmmaker he is.
He has his own team and so forth, and he was true to his word. Four years
went by and I never heard anything and then the script was delivered to
my house. I read it and it was quite good. I got excited about it after
four or five years of anxiety about what would happen. Eastwood is 25
years older than the guy in the book is and that was a big thing about
how that would be dealt with. The script catered to his age now as opposed
to him trying to pass for a much younger man. That was a relief, but I
did have some very minor thoughts and notes. But I didn’t think I would
have the opportunity to voice them. Then he [Eastwood] just called me
out of the blue and asked me what I thought of the script. I ended up
by sending him four pages of notes and he responded saying he agreed and
liked the notes and as he said, "I’m going to use them all."
So after not being in the loop it felt like, maybe out of courtesy, I
was at least somewhat involved.
Source: http://www.identitytheory.com/michael-connelly/
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