Willy Vlautin on the art of work­ing class storytelling

Willy Vlautin has writ­ten five nov­els, two of which, ​‘The Motel Life’ and ​‘Lean on Pete’, have been adapt­ed for the screen. The author and musi­cian has cit­ed John Stein­beck, Ray­mond Carv­er and William Kennedy as influ­ences, and his ten­der but har­row­ing sto­ries of work­ing class life have received wide­spread acclaim. Here Vlautin speaks about the lat­est adap­ta­tion of his work, Lean on Pete, by the British film­mak­er Andrew Haigh.

LWLies: Do you think film­mak­ers should stick to the text when adapt­ing a nov­el, or should they have com­plete free­dom to cre­ate a ver­sion of the sto­ry that makes allowances for the medium’s tools and language?

Vlautin: With film you only get a cou­ple of hours, so I think that film­mak­ers should take it and morph it and do what they want to do. You hope you get a film­mak­er that takes your sto­ry, and maybe keeps the heart if it, the soul of it. But you have to trust them that they’re going to pull out and change the right stuff, and leave the right stuff in. Hope­ful­ly they’re smarter than I am, and they’ll make it bet­ter. If they leave out a large amount of the sto­ry it wouldn’t both­er me if it works as a film.

You didn’t have a hand in writ­ing the scripts for the adap­ta­tions of The Motel Life and Lean on Pete. Was this a delib­er­ate choice on your part?

I’ve nev­er real­ly had an inter­est in screen­plays, main­ly because of time. I’ve nev­er been able to shake being in a band [Rich­mond Fontaine released 11 albums before call­ing it a day in 2016], and it takes a lot of time to write a nov­el, of course. I’ve nev­er real­ly want­ed to rehash sto­ry ideas I’ve already writ­ten for a screen­play, it isn’t where I’ve want­ed to go. I read the screen­plays and make notes – I have that in my con­tracts – and I hope to God that they lis­ten to some things, but then I put my head in the sand.

Have you declined any approach­es to option your books because of trep­i­da­tion about how the work would translate?

You want to make the best deci­sions you can for your work. I love my books, they’re friends of mine and I want to look after them. I’ve turned down some stuff here and there that just didn’t feel right, and then oth­er stuff has got me quite excit­ed. Guiller­mo Arria­ga, who wrote 21 Grams and Babel owned ​‘The Motel Life’ for four or five years. That’s when I realised that these things can kind of drift away. I had a lit­tle bit of inter­est in ​‘The Free’ but I didn’t real­ly feel com­fort­able with who the guys were. ​‘North­line’ almost got made a few times, but it fell apart after they got the mon­ey and every­thing was lined up.

The only thing I’ve ever learned about the movie busi­ness is that they’re world-class bull­shit­ters. I almost think you have to be because there are so many peo­ple involved and so many mov­ing parts. They have to believe that every project they get involved with is going to hap­pen, and they have to get every­one else involved believ­ing that it’s going to hap­pen too. I enjoy any­one who’s a great bull­shit­ter, but I nev­er take any of it too seri­ous­ly. I just hope whether they change your sto­ry or not that if they do make it that it’s got soul and heart.

Your writ­ing style is often described as ​‘sparse’, focus­ing the read­er on the inter­nal states of your char­ac­ters, what they’re think­ing and feel­ing. How do you feel about writer/​director Andrew Haigh’s trans­la­tion of Lean on Pete to the screen?

There’s often prob­lems with the trans­la­tion of nov­els to film. Por­tray­ing work­ing class sto­ries is always real­ly tough in film and is usu­al­ly hit and miss – it’s a lot more dan­ger­ous to do than peo­ple think. Lean on Pete could be done almost as a Dis­ney film or in a more doc­u­men­tary style. Andrew is one of the coolest guys I’ve ever met – and prob­a­bly one of the coolest guys I’ve met under pres­sure. The few days I was on set watch­ing him, and he was always so nice to every­body and always knew what he want­ed, which got me wish­ing I was a lit­tle bit like that. With my lim­it­ed knowl­edge of film it kind of reminds me of Ken Loach’s Kes, a movie that made me want to break the kid out of the screen and save him. I don’t think he went for the eas­i­est style that he could have used, so I was hap­py with how he han­dled that aspect of it

Were you at all involved in the cast­ing of Lean on Pete’s teenage hero, Charley?

As far as Charley goes, he’s in almost every sin­gle scene, so I wouldn’t want to be in charge of that deci­sion. You might see a kid actor a year before and he’s real­ly good in some­thing, but a year lat­er he might look total­ly dif­fer­ent and his voice might have changed. Every­body loved Char­lie Plum­mer because he’s a real­ly good actor. If it was my Charley he’d be a lit­tle more beat up – that’s my view of him – but I thought Char­lie did a great job with a lot of pres­sure on him to car­ry the whole thing.

If you get ful­ly involved and say that a movie can’t be made unless you’re a part of it, you might spend three nov­els’ worth of time try­ing to get that movie made. I could still be work­ing on a draft of ​‘The Motel Life’ right now. My love is the nov­el, and if I felt real­ly weird about them I just wouldn’t sell them. Again, I feel like I only have so much time and I want to write my ​‘Fat City’ before I die, or my ​‘Iron Weed’. I want to write a nov­el like those two before I die and I don’t think I’m smart enough to jug­gle any­thing more.

Are you a fan of John Huston’s adap­ta­tion of ​‘Fat City’?

Of course, I’m a huge fan! I watch the movie a few times a year. John Hus­ton under­stood work­ing class peo­ple. I watched Wise Blood just the oth­er night because I’d been think­ing about Flan­nery O’Connor. I saw Fat City when I was a lit­tle kid and I didn’t get it all. The novel’s become one of those that I read all the time, maybe once a year, because Gard­ner doesn’t fetishise the work­ing class or guys on the skids, he just tells their sto­ries. Guys who don’t under­stand that way of liv­ing try to make it some­thing it’s not, but in that book and movie Gard­ner under­stands it and Hus­ton under­stands it.

Crimes com­mit­ted acci­den­tal­ly, out of des­per­a­tion and even with good inten­tions, fea­ture fre­quent­ly in your nov­els, but you’re not a crime writer. Who are the crime writ­ers that you admire?

Some of the most inter­est­ing writ­ing now about work­ing class issues is crime writ­ing. George Pele­canos is a great exam­ple of this, and one of the things I like about him is that he often picks a social prob­lem or issue and then writes a nov­el around it. I grew up on Jim Thomp­son, Charles Wille­ford and David Good­is – the three great por­tray­ers of mani­acs and the psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly dam­aged. I was obsessed with them in my ear­ly twen­ties and they were one of the rea­sons I want­ed to write short books that would hope­ful­ly keep you up at night. Crime’s in the water in their writ­ing, but their nov­els are real­ly about dam­aged people.

When I start­ed writ­ing nov­els I tried to write sim­ple sto­ries that packed a punch and were the kind of books a guy could read after work. I worked in a ware­house and places like that and I was a house painter for 15 years, and I was always try­ing to get the guys I worked with to read, so I tried to write books that they would like. I’ve always been kind of a spare writer because it’s the kind of writ­ing I like and I thought that it was the kind of writ­ing that I could get the guys I knew to read.

Which films are par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant to you?

Obvi­ous­ly there’s seri­ous, work­ing-class-life films. But the two movies that kind of got me through high school were Slap Shot and Repo Man, two worlds that I des­per­ate­ly want­ed to live inside. I spent four or five years try­ing to fig­ure out how I could break into and live inside those movies. As a kid I was real­ly about, ​‘How do I get out of being me?’ And I was a movieholic because I could day­dream my way into a movie. I loved the cama­raderie in Slap Shot; the team is a dys­func­tion­al, psy­chot­ic, crazed fam­i­ly, but they’re a fam­i­ly. Repo Man is the same thing; you get to steal cars with your ​‘father’, who’s Har­ry Dean Stan­ton! Speak­ing of Har­ry Dean, I’ve always been a huge Paris, Texas fan. When peo­ple asked me who my dad was when I was younger, I’d tell them Har­ry Dean Stan­ton because of Repo Man.

Lean on Pete is released 4 May. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.