Having done all three, I think for me the hardest is adapting your own novel. What’s the hardest: adapting your own novel, adapting a novel by someone else, or creating something from scratch?
I never worked in television prior to that. The next job I got was writing This Is Where I Leave You. Through that, I started to be able to get work as a screenwriter. I wrote that for 20th Century Fox, and there was a period where Steven Spielberg was interested and wanted to direct it, so I worked with him for a while. Nobody bought that, but on the strength of that script I got the job of writing a remake of Harvey, the Mary Chase play that was also a movie in 1950 with Jimmy Stewart. I adapted one of my earlier novels, The Book of Joe. Once they optioned it, I just insisted on being attached as a screenwriter.īut This Is Where I Leave You isn’t the first script you’ve written, right?Īfter some of my books got optioned and the screenwriters failed to write scripts that got them made, I decided I wanted to get in there myself and see what was going on. I really thought the format and the subject matter of This Is Where I Leave You would preclude any Hollywood interest.
When you wrote This Is Where I Leave You, was there a glimmer of a movie in your mind, or does that not really enter into your head until after the book is finished?īecause my last few novels were optioned, I actually set out with the intention of writing a novel that could not be optioned. We caught up with the New Rochelle writer prior to the movie hitting theaters on September 12. Tropper’s This Is Where I Leave You, about a family brought together to sit shiva for their departed patriarch-and, yes, it’s a comedy-is directed by Shawn Levy ( Cheaper By the Dozen, A Night at the Museum ) and features a stacked cast that includes Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Jane Fonda, Rose Byrne, and Adam Driver. T hough most of author Jonathan Tropper’s novels have been optioned for movies, the first one to actually make it to the big screen is the one he adapted himself.
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