Adapting a Literary Masterwork for the Screen: John Krasinski on His “Hideous Men”

How or what prompted the idea for your film and how did it evolve?

I have wanted to adapt this book into a film ever since I first heard it out loud.  In college, I was asked to be a part of a staged reading of the interviews.  I can honestly say that, until that moment, I hadn’t really even thought about being an actor outside of school.  It was in that one night’s performance where my personal definition of acting went from just “an opportunity to make my friends laugh” to this incredible sense of “being a part of something.”  As cliché as that sounds, I had never been so moved in watching a theater performance, seeing how all the interviews worked as a group.  David Foster Wallace, in my opinion, is one of the greatest writers we’ve ever had, certainly in the last twenty years.  His obvious dominance of the English language is partnered with honest moments and the most beautifully dark sensibility.  The result is an astounding book, and the most awesome material for an actor!

Please elaborate a bit on your approach to making the film…

As far as the process of making the movie goes, I felt like I won the lottery, starting with financing for the movie. In any other situation, financing would have been next to impossible, but the film first saw light when a college roommate of mine read the script and agreed to finance the movie himself.  And the winning lotto numbers just continued from there, including the day we got John Bailey, our cinematographer, on board.  The man has shot some of my favorite movies, from “Days of Heaven” to “Ordinary People” and then that little indie movie, “As Good As it Gets.”  Probably the biggest challenge for me as a director was to not show how scared I was. I was surrounded by some of the most talented people in the industry, and I had to pretend I knew what I was doing.  It all worked out, and the vision I had had of the movie since the day we performed it at Brown was first realized, and then completely surpassed.

What are some of your favorite films, and what are your other creative influences?

Because I didn’t have one movie in mind to emulate, my drive and reason for wanting to see this movie through is 100% based on my favorite films that I watch over and over.  Quite honestly, my definition of film is nothing more than “an amalgam of moments.”  Whether it’s the final courtroom scene in “The Verdict,” any one of bowling scenes in “The Big Lebowski,” or the breakup scene in “All the Real Girls,” every moment in my movie was me trying to achieve only a FRACTION of feeling I get from film moments like those.  I wanted to project the same feeling I got when I read the book.  It was such an honor to get a chance to play with such terrific material.  This movie can never achieve the wave of unbridled imagination one gets the first time one reads any of Foster Wallace’s work.  But with any luck, it will at least do the book justice.

What are your future projects?

I’m not sure when I’ll direct next- I sure took long enough to finish this movie! But this is an extremely high bar set, as far as experience goes.  I don’t know if I’ll ever have a chance to direct something like this, with such amazing people around me, again!  I’m always thrilled to head back to “The Office,” and in the spring I’ll be in a new movie called “Away We Go.”  The film was directed by Sam Mendes, and written by Dave Eggars and his wife, Vendela Vida.