By Jason Nawara.

Christopher Kyle

The question of what someone would do for love is not a new concept in storytelling, but Serena, the slow-burn period drama set in a 1920’s North Carolina lumber mill starring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper is the darkest of love stories.

In Serena, screenwriter Christopher Kyle adapted Ron Rash’s novel of the same name. A New York Times bestseller and Faulkner Award Finalist, Serena addresses the the contradictions of a destructive type of love harbored between two people that cannot possibly fathom the havoc they wreak on the lives and world outside of their reality. Or maybe they do?

We had the pleasure of discussing Serena and the adaptation process with Christopher Kyle.

Serena, by Ron Rash

Serena started as a short story then became a book, when did you learn about Serena?

I became aware of it after it became a novel. After the first time I read it I wasn’t even aware it had been a short story first. I saw in the trades that a company I had previously worked for (2929) bought the rights to Serena and it sounded interesting from the description so I asked my agent to get me in the mix. I’m pretty sure that was before the book came out, before it was published. That’s usually how it happens.

What was it about Serena that sunk its hooks into you? 

There’s two irresistible things about the story for me: the scale of it, and the backdrop of the beautiful mountains of North Carolina. Man versus nature. The contradiction of this main character, Pemberton, he really loves this world. He loves to hike and hunt in the mountains and at the same time he’s trying to make himself rich by destroying it and cutting down all of the trees. I think that spoke to something that’s deep in the American character. The contradiction of loving the natural world and wanting to profit from it.

I thought that was interesting but then you have this dark, female character, this Lady Macbeth, this force that was irresistible.

How much did you delve into the short story?

I looked at it to just in case there was something that wasn’t in the novel or vice versa. To my recollection it’s confined to the railway platform where the local girl is there who has the knife and all that. It’s my understanding that the short story is the first chapter or two from the book.

Jennifer Lawrence as the eponymous Serena

So when you sat down with the document in hand, and you were ready to start the distillation of the characters from Ron Rash’s book to your screenplay, what was it about these characters that called out to you?

Pemberton is more the protagonist than Serena. He’s the one who got seduced and then wants to turn back from the edge of the cliff, but Serena is more consistent through the novel in terms of her darkness. Some of these things start to evolve as you get through the screenplay as you are cutting it down as you shape it into a dramatic story instead of a narrative one. You need it to make sense in the new form. Some of the things I really loved in the book, there wasn’t room for them in the screenplay. There’s a scene in the book where a traveling circus comes to town and a Kimodo Dragon is ready to take on all challengers and Serena sets up a battle to the death between the dragon and the eagle. It’s a great scene but it would be off in the movie so it had to go. That’s the tragedy of adapting a good book.

You’ve adapted more than one book at this point, can you share with us your process?

Well, I spend a lot of time with the book, a yellow pad and a pen. I read through the book several times and make notes about what I think would work in the screenplay, scenes. There are some things in the book that took place in the past or are suggested and you realize you need to show that in the screenplay. It’s a process of taking notes that could add up to a hundred or two hundred pages before I really start to break down what the structure is. I go through that, my various ideas. Then I lay out: what’s the story of the book and what’s the story of the film, because they can seldom be the same. Once I have that, and only then do I start to sit down and writing scenes.

So from there what’s next? A treatment?

Yeah I’ll usually do a treatment, maybe twenty pages or so. I’ll outline the story. If there are excerpts from the book I want to use I’ll stuff those in there or put a reference to something I want to use and look at while writing. When you first set out to adapt it and you’ve read it a couple times, you have to develop a frame to make the book work as a film. Basically, I structure a familiar film. There are many structures of a novel and not many of them work for the screen. So I think about what kind of film it is, and if the novel’s story suggests a film in that vein that you can tease out of it. To me, Serena suggests an old-fashioned noir. A woman who seduces a man who is not an evil man, but he’s a man who is morally weak and is willing to go into a life of crime and sometimes murder that will then lead him down a path the ultimately leads to his own destruction. Now you can think of Double Indemnity as an example of that. So it seemed to me that the story of the novel in terms of how to find a film structure, that was a basic framework I could build on. In the end I think the final film is not so much of a noir as I thought it would be, but that is a very useful thing when you start to adapt it: I know what type of film this is going to be in the end. That process I need to do pretty early after I read the book a couple of times.

Barbara Stanwyck as Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity

How long does that usually take you?

You know, this one took a little bit longer because there was research involved. The novelist helped me get into the period and to learn about logging. He provided a box of research when he was writing the novel and he generously mailed that to me. Just files and files of research. One thing you have to do in a film is tell the audience what it’s going to look like in more detail than a novel. So to answer your question, I think I spent three months on the first draft, got notes then the second draft was 4-6 weeks. Then it went through years of attaching different people and new rewrites and once you get a go date and a cast there are many more layers of rewrites. I did many, many drafts. The original draft was three months then second about six weeks or so.

Are George and Serena both villains? Their actions are propelled by love? Is the love in this movie/book evil?

What we came to, the director and I, when we were developing the story further was that sometimes there can be a love so possessive, so selfish and such a bubble that it can be destructive to the outside world. They fall into such a deep, obsessive love that any threat to them and their love becomes like a cat being backed into a corner. It’s something they have to defend. What you see in the story is something they’re trying to preserve this idealized view as a couple. This future which they see making their timber camp successful and then moving onto greener pastures in Brazil and having a family. All of the things that they dream of with their life together. Threats start coming in that put these things at risk, and then we see that their moral fiber is such that they’re willing to cross lines and go to dark places to defend it. I don’t think it’s an indictment of love as an emotion, I think it’s more an exploration of how there can be a dark side in certain people, with love.

I looked at it as: they’re destroyers. They are destroying the forest on a macro level, then the lives of the people working the timber camp with various gruesome injuries, then they get on a micro level and actually have a hand in destroying lives directly. It’s a very tragic tale. 

Yes, the environmental aspects of it were always interesting to me. What you see in the character of Pemberton is a man who loves nature and is destroying it. How do you reconcile that? He loves these mountains. He wants to be there. When he’s walking through the woods alone in this unbelievable wilderness hunting the panther, that’s when he’s at his happiest. At least until he meets Serena. And yet, when we first meet him, we see right after he’s hunting the panther, that he lives in a timber camp and he’s trying to destroy the forest as fast as he can to make a profit. That contradiction is inherent in the book.

Bradley Cooper as Pemberton in Serena

Is it difficult to recollect considering Serena‘s been in the can for a few years now? 

I think I remember pretty well. I was involved in the post-production process and seeing different cuts and having many conversations with (director) Susanna along the way. Writing pickup lines here and there. I’ve been involved with the process continually since they locked the movie which was about a year ago.

Do you find it difficult to write for a female lead?

No, I enjoy it. I think it’s a fun challenge. I started as a playwright. One thing you find out as a young playwright in college, is that it’s more popular to girls than boys. So there’s usually a 2-1 or 3-1 ratio, so the talented actors you’re writing for, they’ll probably be 2-1 or 3-1 female. So, writing for female characters was something I always wanted to do just for practical reasons. It was the people I had to write for.

How long has it been since you first broke the page on Serena?

I think I turned in my first draft of the script in 2009. Spring of 2009. It’s been six years. I wish that was unusual, but with a movie like Serena it’s not an obvious commercial film. It’s dark and period. Those are harder to put together so it went through a few different iterations before we found what worked.

Jennifer Lawrence as Serena and Bradley Cooper as Pemberton in Serena

Was a lot of material cut?

We didn’t shoot a tremendous amount of things that were left out of the film. We didn’t have the budget or luxury to shoot more than we would use. There’s always things that don’t end up in the film, but not an unusual amount.

I’d be interested to see the various cuts. You were also a writer of Alexander, which went through many different variations in the editing room. Is that tough to deal with as a writer?

You get used to it, but you have to understand that the story of the film represented on the screenplay is just a blueprint for what the movie is going to become. Another version of the story plays out when the actors are on-set inhabiting their roles, and another version happens in the editing room, then the final film. You can’t anticipate in a screenplay what things will click and work when the actors are on set. Sometimes there’s magic that happens between actors that you didn’t anticipate, so when you’re in the editing room you have to understand that they won’t throw away a great moment because it wasn’t in the screenplay. The story has an evolution through the different stages of production and post-production. The first time I saw something cut in something I wrote was in The Weight of Water, and I was a little startled that things had changed. Ultimately I came to understand how the process works.

Jared Leto as Hephaistion in Alexander

In your opinion, should a new screenwriter try adapting as an exercise?

I think it’s valuable thing if you’re a young screenwriter and you want to work. A lot of the work you’ll be offered is adaptations of novels or comics or other forms of literary material. So, you have to deal with the rights issue. You can’t go out and adapt a Stephen King novel because of the rights. You’re just wasting your time and violating the law. But if you find a book that’s in the public domain, then by all means I think it’s an excellent exercise to see the very different way that a film tells a story than the way that a novel does, and how do you translate the best parts of the novel’s story to a story that works best on film.

What is your writing schedule like day to day?

I get to my office around nine or so and I work with occasional breaks until 6 or 7. I work in the attic of my house so the commute is easy and I can go and make a lunch or mow the lawn if I have to. For the most part I try to work a very regular schedule. I learned long ago that you can’t sit around waiting for the muse to inspire you. You have to sit down and do the work even if you don’t feel particularly inspired that day. If you don’t have that discipline you’re not going to get very far.

The grind.

Yeah, it is a grind. Some days you really don’t want to do it, but I think that’s true of every job.