NAME: Audrey Niffenegger AGE: 44HOMETOWN: Chicago ACHIEVEMENT: Author of The Time Traveler’s Wife, a bestselling novel published in 2003 that has been adapted into a feature film (being shot in Evanston), starring Rachel McAdams and slated for release in Fall 2008CURRENT JOB: Faculty member at Columbia College’s Center for Book and Paper Arts, where she teaches book arts.
“In the screenwriting process, I was involved to the extent that they let me read the various drafts of the screenplay and I would recoil in horror and I would write them these lengthy notes which they would then ignore.
And then they started shooting it, and I had no involvement whatsoever. I didn’t even visit the set. Before it happened, I thought, “Oh, you know, it would be good to have professionals who know what they are doing do it, rather than me who has never written a screenplay.”
I kind of freaked out. It’s like being rewritten, it’s like people coming in and just tromping all over your thing and putting their ideas in and you’re sitting there and thinking, “This is all wrong,” but you can’t do anything.
No, I don’t have any fabulous stories about Rachel McAdams. Not a one. I’m very disappointing when it comes to the movie because I have virtually no contact with the making of it.
When the movie comes out, I’ll be very curious to see what people think. I’ve not seen any of it, and I don’t think I am going to, so I’m going to rely on other people to tell me.
The new (novel) I’m working on is set in London, and it’s based in and around a real place, which is Highgate Cemetery. To work on that one I ended up becoming a tour guide at Highgate Cemetery and hanging around there a lot.
The other thing with the new one is that most of the characters are Brits, so I needed to listen very carefully to the speech and the slang. It’s been really kind of trippy to do it.
Most of the time, I’m just being chased by giant deadlines. At the moment I’m working on the graphic novel because, once it starts running, it’s a weekly thing so it will be kind of like that scene in Indiana Jones, being chased by the big rock.
It’s a comic for the London Guardian based on a short story I wrote called “The Night of Mobile,” about a young woman who’s wandering around in Ravenswood very late at night and stumbles across this Winnebago camper which turns out to be a bookmobile that contains everything she’s ever read.
The bookmobiles all emanate from the library, which is basically heaven or the afterlife or whatever you want to call it, and so everybody who is living has a bookmobile. This young woman, whose name is Alexandra, becomes kind of addicted to hers and starts trying to find it.
But bookmobiles are very elusive, and you can’t always find them when you want them.”
