a separate entity, not a perfect recapitulation of my novel”. (Ignatius’s latest CIA novel, The Director, is currently being adapted by filmmaker Paul Greengrass.)Ī still from the film adaptation of We Need to Talk About Kevin, regarded by Lionel Shriver, the book’s author as “. But in Body of Lies, the director captured the basic points I wanted to make about America’s miscomprehension of the Arab world in the years after 9/11.” In the process it becomes something different – loses some dimensions and gains others. Still, for her part, Lowry pronounced herself well pleased with The Giver, saying she thought director Phillip Noyce brought the book “to a new level”.Īs an author who is actually happy with how her work has been brought to the screen, Lowry is that rara avis of the book world, joining a lucky band of writers who have maintained a parental interest in their literary babies while mastering the Buddhist art of letting go.Īs the Washington Post’s associate editor David Ignatius – whose spy thriller Body of Lies was adapted by Ridley Scott in 2008 – told me, “You have to accept that your book is going to be reimagined for the screen.

But The Giver, which stars Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep, underperformed at the box office, with some observers suggesting that what doomed it was a too-long gap between book and movie (in which time, similar-themed adaptations such as The Hunger Games and Divergent took the lead), as well as fans’ disappointment in the liberties the film took with the protagonist’s age and in the emphasis on a merely hinted-at love story. Also in the US this summer, The Giver opened to heightened expectations that fans of Lois Lowry’s 1993 novel – a dystopian allegory about a futuristic society devoid of individuality – would reward the 20-year attempt to bring the book to the screen.

Body of lies movie fact of fiction