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Interview with Elmore Leonard By Black Dog Bone January, 1998 Quentin Tarrantino has picked up four of your books to make into movies. How did that come about? Quentin Tarrantino liked my books. It's funny because right after Reservoir Dogs came out my book Rum Punch came out. When he read Rum Punch he recognized three of the characters from one of my previous books, The Switch, 12 or 13 years earlier, and it was a book that he had stolen from a store and got caught. His mother and dad grounded him, wouldn't let him outa the house for I don't know how long. Rum Punch came out and it was the same bad guy character, and he wanted to buy it. He went to my agent and they discussed it, and he didn't have the backing to do it then, that was back then. So a couple years later he had Pulp Fiction in the works and everybody knew it was gonna be good and now he's gonna be a star, he was able to make a deal with Miramax and my agent got him to take not just one, but four of them. The first one he started workin on was Rum Punch, which is being called Jackie Brown. It's his first project since Pulp Fiction. Do you think Quentin Tarrantino will do a good job making your books into films? I think he will do a very good job. You know he's only made two movies and he's had a lot of fun with his success, with his popularity, with his notoriety. He's helped out some of his friends, helpin them write their movies, and has appeared in movies like Dawn Till Dusk, The Four Rooms, which was a failure. The four guys that directed four different segments of that movie--Tim Roth was the only person who held it together, he was the bellboy. Now it's time for Tarrantino to do something, to do his next project. Let's see. Did you like his first two movies, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction? Oh yeah, I liked them a lot. If a filmmaker like Jim Jarmusch would do one of your films it would be interesting. Yes. I think it would be terrific. Jim Jarmusch can really create a feeling in his films. Like you say, style. I think he would do good with one of your books. I think so, and my agent likes the idea too. And you know who else? The Cohen Brothers. Fargo is their most recent movie. If you haven't seen it, you gotta go see it. It is funny. And you gotta understand the way they talk in that movie is the way they talk in Minnesota. They also did Miller's Crossing, Raising Arizona, Blood Simple. The guy who did Get Shorty was cinematographer for the Cohen Brothers on 3 or 4 of their movies. So when I hear he was gonna do Get Shorty I thought it was great because he would've been influenced by them. I've heard that Quentin Tarrantino was influenced by your work. Yes, and he has admitted it. The strange thing is that some critics, at least a couple, said that Get Shorty was influenced by Pulp Fiction. One critic said that it seemed obvious to him that Get Shorty was influenced by Pulp Fiction or that it was riding on the coattails of Pulp Fiction. Even the reference in Get Shorty to Rio Lobo, the Western movie, that's near the end of the picture--Travolta hears it playing on TV and he says it's Rio Lobo. Rio Lobo is one of Tarrantino's favorite pictures, and you would think that I was acknowledging Tarrantino by having Travolta say "It's Rio Lobo," but it's in the book and I wrote the book in 1989. Tarrantino was probably still in school. He has told me and he has even said in interviews that I influenced him. In fact on the Charley Rose Show he said about me, "He's the first writer I've seen where the bad guys can be talkin about just everyday things." Like how in Pulp Fiction they're talkin about McDonald's, the Quarter Pounder, the Royale, what it's called over in Amsterdam or wherever. Then they get out of the car, go to the trunk and take the guns out. Then they're upstairs in the hall talkin about foot rubs. They're not talking the way bad guys ordinarily talk in movies. This quality he says he got from me. That's something I always liked about your work too. The character who are supposed to be "bad guys" are just regular people doing a regular thing, trying to do to survive. In most stories the "bad guys" are portrayed as people who are just born evil, but in your stories they're no different from the cops. No different. They just happen to be into crime. They wanna make money, quick money. Who were you influenced by as a writer? I was influenced by Earnest Hemingway more than anybody else in learning how to write. I started writing Westerns because of the market. There was a wonderful market for Westerns in the 50's. All the better magazines, movies, books, and pulp magazines were still being published. Dime Westerns--it cost a quarter but they called it Dime Westerns--was the most popular magazine. They were paying 2¢ a word, hundred dollars for a short story. In the early 50's that wasn't bad, hundred bucks. Which other writers did you really like? I liked John O'Hara and when I was little of course I read boy's books. There was a continuing character named Don Sturdy. Don Sturdy was a kid who was always having adventures. Like Hardy Boys. I used to go to movies with my friends when we were in grade school, then we'd come back from the movie and we'd sit down and very often I would tell them the movie again. Just tell 'em the movie, kinda act it out a little, not much. So I started out as a storyteller. Your writing is very American, it's probably the most accurate picture of America being portrayed by any writer today. I think that's also why I'm so popular in Europe. They want the real American stuff. Why did
you make the transition from writing Westerns to Crime novels? It sounds very different from Get Shorty or Rum Punch. It's not anything like that. It won't have that kinda humor. There will be a little humor, but it'll be different. Get Shorty is today and the humor is today. Where do you get the ideas for the stories you write? In research often. My researcher loves his jobs. He's investigating all kinds of things. How do you get horses to Cuba? What do you think it costs? What was the monetary exchange then? What were some of the cigarette brands. What was a sugar mill like? Cuba is a fascinating country. And they had slaves in Cuba until 1886! That recent. And there were a lotta bandits. I'm gonna get involved in all that. You have a person to research whatever subject you want to include in your writing? One person. He's been researching for me for about 12-13 years. Anything that I wanna know he finds it out. For example, I'm writing a book and I call him up and say, "What's a prison in Havana?" He calls me back and says, "You want the new prison or the old prison?" How do you pay your researcher to gather all that information? I pay him like 40 dollars and hour. He does well. He gets me good stuff and quick. You live in Michigan, but a lot of your stories take place in Florida--hot places, palm trees, alligators. Where does that come from? I been goin down to Florida since 1950. For a while I had a motel, I bought a motel in Pompano Beach for my mother. My mother ran this motel until she got too old. And there was a lot goin on. My friend was a private investigator in Miami. I went to school with him, I went to University of Detroit with him, we got out in 1950. In 1979, almost 30 years later, I had some questions I thought he might be able to help me with about dope in South Florida, so I called him up. When we were goin to school together we were in a Sociology class together and once a week we had to hand in a one page book report, and he never read a book. I used to dictate, I'd read 'em all, so I'd dictate a book report to him on the way to class. So 30 years later I called him up and said, "You owe me one." I forgot what it was I asked him at that time, but we became very good friends again. Then when I'd go down there, and I go down every year, I'd see him and we'd talk and I would get some stories from him--not plots for the book but little bits. A guy who worked for him was named Chili Palmer, who was originally from Brooklyn and went down to Florida with some money to put on the street, lone shark money. After he finished with that, cause the guy he was workin with got shot, killed, so he went to work for my friend Bill Marshall. Chili Palmer was workin for him when I met him. Then when they started to make the movie, Get Shorty, I used his name. I used his name and his background--the fact that he was from Brooklyn and the fact that he was a shilock. I sent a picture of him to Danny DeVito whose company was producing the movie and Danny liked his looks and says, "Let's invite him out." He invited him out and then put him in the movie. He's in the opening scene when Dennis Farina walks over to Travolta's table in that little restaurant and says something to him. There are two guys there with him and one of them is the real Chili Palmer. Were you happy with the way Get Shorty came out? Very, I thought it was funny. I said to the director, Barry Sonnenselb, I said "This movie is a comedy. It's a comedy and you're advertising it as a comedy, but I don't write comedy." He said, "No, but it's a funny book." Your books have a sort of humor. Throughout the crime and everything it's a little funny. Yeah, but the characters don't think they're funny. I said to Barry, "I hope when you make this movie when somebody says something funny you don't cut and wait to get a reaction from somebody else, I hope you don't do that. I hope you just let the audience react how they feel--if they think it's funny, fine. Don't try to get the other actors to try to tip the audience off like a TV sitcom or something." A lot of your books have been made into films. The films I saw couldn't compare to your books, the books were far better. They didn't sound like my books at all. Get Shorty was the first one I really liked. 52 Pick-Up, there were some parts of that that I thought were very good--the bad guys especially. Clarence Williams III, the Black guy in it, he was really good. He used to be in a TV series 20 years ago or so, The Mod Squad. I wrote movies. I've been lucky because I was able to either sell my stuff to Hollywood or get it optioned in Hollywood and that supported my book writing for at least 15 years, up until the early 80's when I started to make enough money with books so I didn't have to write movies anymore. I don't really plan to write movies anymore because it's work, you're workin for somebody. You write a book, you're workin for yourself--that's all. Probably now you're very comfortable writing, but in the beginning was it hard for you to just start writing a novel? I'll tell you, it keeps gettin harder. For a while it's easy and then it gets hard, cause you don't wanna keep doin the same thing, you don't wanna repeat yourself. You're writing a scene that's familiar to you, it's kinda like something you did in another book, you wanna do it differently. You don't wanna keep doin the same things. That's one of the reasons I don't have a continuing character, I think I'd get too tired of it. I think the most successful Crime and Mystery writers do have a continuing character, but I don't want to do that. I have a lotta fun writing a book, and I get a lotta satisfaction off it. People have told me, "You have the best job in the world. You can write about anything you want." Because I'm not doing it on assignment. Do you read a lot of other writers? Which other mystery writers do you like to read? In my reading I'm more interested in style and the way it's written. It's gotta be a good writer. I think Ed McBain is a good writer, for example. I think James Lee Burke is a good writer. Walter Mosley is a good writer. But so many of the books that are sent to me, like that one there is a review copy which is sent to magazines and so on. I picked it up and read a few pages and I liked it so I brought it along to read it. So far it's a good book. You don't care too much about the story, you're looking for style? I think that my books are about the way they're written and about the characters. They're about the people, they're not about the plot. The plot just comes along, I make it up as I go along. I never know how it's gonna end, never, and I don't wanna know until I get there. My manuscripts are usually 300-350 pages. By the time I get to 300 then I have a pretty good idea how it's gonna end and I start thinking about the ending as I go along. I may have to go back and add something to make it work. But for the most part my books are about people reacting to one another. How they talk, what they think and how they move. I try to make them human, I try to make them real. Your characters have a working class feel to them. They're ordinary people Definitely, that's right. And I always write from their point of view. You never hear me writing. I never use words that my characters wouldn't use. It's always on their level. And I don't see people as evil. What the man does might be evil, might be bad, but you could be sittin next to one of my characters at a ball game or at a bar and you wouldn't know that he robs banks or what he does. People don't wear signs. Sometimes you use the same character in more than one book? A few times, not too often, but not a continuing character. I've never done a continuing character and the main reason is because when you sell the movie rights that company owns that character. When they buy the book they own the rights to that character. You can't use that character again? I can use him in a book, but I can't sell that next book to a different studio or a different producer because somebody else owns him. You don't consider yourself to be a Mystery writer? In my books there's never a mystery. The reader knows what's goin on. Where did the term "pulp fiction" come from and what does it mean? The pulp magazines that I described to you that I got 2¢ a word for, the paper was pulp--it's cheap paper. And they were kinda cheap stories too. For the most part they were not very well written,. The emphasis was on the action than anything else. The guns goin off in the Westerns. That's where I learned how to write, doin pulp fiction. It doesn't mean that you had to write like that, you write as well as you can from the beginning. I was always encouraged that I could be a good writer, the editors told me that. I had a job at an ad agency writing ads for Chevrolet and they said, "Don't quit your job cause then you'll have to write, you'll have to sell and you'll just crank 'em out fast. Take your time and learn how to write." I did that for 10 years before I quit my job. I always have liked reading Mystery stories and books like yours, Charles Willeford, popular fiction. But when I was in school my teachers would call those books "dime novels" and consider the writing of people like Faulkner and Hemingway somehow higher. What do you think? Do you think about that? I do. They call it genre writing, what I write--the Mystery genre, the Romance, the Science Fiction--and the literary critics and academics say that that's a lower class of writing. But it could be better writing than many of the so-called literary writers. I think most of the literary writers are boring. I think the academics learn to read them and sort of accept the fact that they're kinda boring. It's almost like it's gotta be boring if it's gonna be literature, which is ridiculous. There are a lot of writers that I don't think are good--they use too many words.....there are some good writers in my field. You mentioned Charles Willeford, he was a good writer. Do you have any secrets or tricks for becoming a good writer? When you go to a writer's conference and I go and talk to a group for an hour or something, they immediately get their pens out cause they wanna know what the secret is. What's the secret? It's reading, studying and doin it yourself. I think you gotta write a million words before you can really have any confidence in what you're doin. You could be selling in all that time, you could sell your first word, but to get the confidence and to develop your own style, your style that is most natural to you. This comes out of your attitude. What is your attitude about life? What kind of a person are you? Do you have a sense of humor? Are you pessimistic? Are you optimistic? Are you happy most of the time? Do you hold grudges or what? That's gonna come out in your writing. I've always wondered what kind of person you were. I've always wanted to meet the person behind the books. I have an affection for my characters. I like my characters, I like all my people, even the bad ones. I can understand them. And a lot of them are really bad. You know how I think of them? I think of them as children. I think of them as either being childish and they want their own way or childlike and open and giving and good. There's a big difference between childish and childlike. When you're writing your books you probably have a picture of how the characters look? Never the important characters, only some minor characters. You don't see their faces? I don't see them clearly. I certainly don't see actors. I might see a face, but it's a real person not an actor. In the films when they cast actors like John Travolta do they fit your characters pretty good? Yeah, that one, the whole cast was perfect for Get Shorty. Did you have anything to do with the casting? No, they did it. Danny Devito, first they had it at Tri Star and Tri Star decided they didn't want to do it. So they put it in turnaround, as they call it, they gave it back to him and he took it to MGM. Originally Danny Devito was gonna play Chili Palmer, because when Barry read the book he was on a cruise on vacation and he bought a Tom Clancey and he bought mine--paperbacks. He read mine first and immediately called up Danny Devito and said, "I got one for you." He said, "You've got to get this." So Danny said, OK. So he optioned it. Then Barry called Danny and said, "What do you think?" And Danny said, "I don't know, I haven't read it." But he had optioned it for Barry because he believed in Barry. Barry said, "I see Danny Devito in the part of Chili because he's the most confident man I've ever met in my life." Chili Palmer is completely confident and that's the reason he gets bought. You can see the confidence in him. He doesn't threaten, he doesn't intimidate, he doesn't use a lot of muscle unless he has to, but he's confident. Do a lot of different people write letters to you? I get letters from guys in prison and they wanna know how I know what I know. They say, "How do you know the convict mentality?" A guy wrote a letter and said, "My partner said you're either Black or you've done time or both." A Black man comes up to me in New York at a reading and says, "How do you know that? How do you know the sound?" I say, "I got ears. I listen." I think you're an amazing poet. I met a poet, he came to Detroit to do a reading and he said, "The first time I heard of you was in New York at a poetry reading. One of the poets was reading something from one of your books out loud." I said, "Come on? I don't use words really, it's language but it's not me using words." And he says, "It's the energy in your writing." When you write about Florida are you in Detroit then? How do you get that hot humid feeling into your story when it's snowing all around you? I write in Detroit always. I may've done a little bit of writing in Florida, but most of it is all done in Detroit where I live. The nice thing about this kind of writing and the fact that I write in longhand with a pen-- You don't write at a computer? I'll never use one. The nice thing is I can write anywhere. I could write here. I do have a typewriter. I'll write in longhand, I compose in longhand, I'll write a page or two, and then I put it on the typewriter to see what it looks like. Then I go on from there. Why do you write in longhand? Because it's easier to cross out, it's quicker to cross out. When you write in long and you cross it out and go on writing, it's still there--what you crossed out is still there. You might have a lot of readers who are in prison. One fellow, a convict, who has written me said, "You are getting more and more popular with the heroin sellers," guys who are in for selling heroin. Then he names some of the new readers, "So and so from the projects in Washington DC," and he named some other guys, and they were all heroin sellers. But he says, "You haven't caught on yet with the cocaine and crack crowd," he says, "because they're younger and wilder and less educated." |