‘Don DeLillo gave me his blessing’: film director Ben Rivers on how letters from Underworld author led to his latest project | Books

NTeenage girls reciting Don DeLillo’s gnomic quotes – it sounds like a very English lock-up, but for filmmakers. Ben Rivers this was the basis of his new movie, and the culmination of an unexpected friendship with a literary titan. DeLillo is almost a modern day literary legend. His writing was precise, his stories were sophisticated and his concerns were unpredictable: conspiracy, terrorism, nuclear power, hypercapitalism – the 89-year-old New Yorker has been at the forefront of the late 20th and early 21st century. Rivers, a 53-year-old freelance filmmaker in London, has been a lifelong fan, he says. So he was surprised to receive a letter from DeLillo himself one day in 2017.

A friend sent DeLillo a DVD of Rivers’ 2015 movie The sky trembles and the earth trembles and two eyes are not relatedan illustration of a knowledge set in semi-abstract Morocco, and the author responded with a handwritten letter. “He thought the movie was very powerful and he was looking forward to seeing it again,” says Rivers. “It was nice to receive it and it meant a lot to me, to be his admirer.” Rivers later sent DeLillo another one of his films: 2019’s Krabi, 2562, directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong, “and he also wrote about it, saying he enjoyed it”.

You can see why Rivers might be a DeLillo filmmaker. His work would be more at home in the art gallery than the multiplex; it prioritizes imagery and mystery over conventional cinematic elements such as story beats or character development, and often uses grainy 16mm film instead of digital.

Their correspondence prompted Rivers to write to DeLillo in 2020 asking if he would adapt his 2007 play The Word for Snow into his latest film, Mare’s Nest. “He said he wouldn’t see it as a film, but he gave me his blessing to use it,” Rivers says. The one-act play is a dialogue between a traveler who visits a professor in the remote mountains in search of answers, during the destruction of the climate and the kind of breakdown of language and meaning. The professor has vague answers: “The idea of ​​the north has been crushed”; “What is the meaning of this language or language?”; “The word snow will be snow.”

“I read during the pandemic, which was appropriate,” says Rivers. “At the same time, I began to fill in a book with pictures and fragments of a children’s film that had recently been set in the absence of adults. Then I thought that this play, although it was written for three grown men, would be more powerful when coming out of the mouths of children.

The Mare’s Nest isn’t a straightforward adaptation: Snow’s voice forms an important scene in the larger story that follows a young girl, Moon, as she navigates a strange, postapocalyptic, adult-less world. (The film was shot on location including Menorca, Snowdonia and a studio in London.) This isn’t Lord of the Flies – the kids seem to do just fine without us. They do not fight or eat each other; instead they are playing, sharing and living in nature but also using the detritus of civilization. “They’re kind of reinventing themselves,” Rivers says. “They are coming with their own traditions, things have lost their old meaning and been given a new meaning.”

As well as DeLillo, Mare’s Nest also includes words borrowed from author Daisy Hildyard, and notes by Portuguese playwright Fernando Pessoa. (The director of Rivers, Moon Guo Barker, is the daughter of Xiaolu Guothe British-Chinese novelist and film-maker, and an old friend.)

We tend to think of books and movies in the straight lines of authors like Jane Austen or Stephen King, but Rivers takes a different approach. Writing has always been a big part of his creativity, he says, but he rarely takes it actually. The Sky Trembles … a film that caught DeLillo’s attention, for example, was an interpretation of a short story by Paul Bowles, but not identified from the source. When I first met him in his 2012 film Two Years at Sea – a non-dialogue study about a Scottish man who lives in the woods – explained how he was inspired by Knut Hamsun’s desert novel Pan and Francis Bacon’s utopian tale The New Atlantis. This is the place where Rivers works like this: a kind of Arcadian, maybe post-apocalyptic world that is neither utopian nor dystopian, but a wonderful and liberating hope.

Rivers’ work is not only informed by literature, but it is very close to it, with its vivid, often ambiguous narratives, told mostly through images rather than dialogue. “When you read a book,” he tells me, “obviously each person has room for their own thoughts. And that’s very difficult with a movie.

Other filmmakers have tried to adapt DeLillo’s work but often fail, or take too many liberties, ending up as something else. Noah Baumbach’s 2022 version of White Noisefor example, he turned DeLillo’s best-selling novel (about a bickering family fleeing a “terrible space event”) into a comedy, starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig, but the novel’s cerebral ideas and simple dialogue were lost in the need to make it more powerful. Even worse was the French film Never Ever, which turned DeLillo’s 2001 novel The Body Artist into a boring thriller. The rights have also been sold to Underworld, DeLillo’s 1997 magnum opus, but it’s hard to imagine how one could faithfully adapt it.

Rivers’ only cost is David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, based on DeLillo’s 2003 novel and set in the streets of a billionaire finance bro (played by Robert Pattinson) as he walks through Manhattan. Critics didn’t like it, but for Rivers it’s good to stick to DeLillo’s cool, tone and keep his language correct.

This is what Rivers wanted with Mare’s Nest, with scenes where child actors repeat DeLillo’s dialogue – in a dark room, around a fire, in black and white, they shoot. “They do it with straight faces, which you look at with a voice,” he says. Getting his son’s actors to remember those words took work (and Autocue), admittedly, but he’s very proud. “He is 9 years old. I didn’t expect him to understand anything. Me they don’t understand anything. I read it over and over again and it still doesn’t make sense and sometimes doesn’t make sense. “

And has DeLillo seen the Mare’s Nest? They are, says Mitsinje. “He said he was impressed with what I did – it was a huge relief.”