Two Genuinely Independent Movies.

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: NOVEMBER 12, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 111201np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: "Billy Straight": An Interview With Jonathan Kellerman
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:06

KEN TUCKER, GUEST HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Ken Tucker, critic at large for "Entertainment Weekly," sitting in for Terry Gross.

Jonathan Kellerman is a best-selling mystery writer and an accomplished child psychologist. Kellerman was the founding director of the psychosocial program at Children's Hospital of Los Angeles. He cared for sick children and researched how they dealt with chronic illness, hospitalization, pain, and anxiety.

His first novel, "When the Bough Breaks," was a best-seller, making it possible for him to write full time, although he still teaches at the University of Southern California School of Medicine.

"New York Times" crime book columnist Marilyn Stazio (ph) wrote that "Kellerman's singular touch with wounded children" paid off royally in "Billy Straight," "a brisk suspense thriller." It's now in paperback. The story is about a street kid who witnesses a murder and finds himself in jeopardy.

Here's a reading from the opening page. Billy has been sleeping in the park and awakes to witness a horrifying scene.

(BEGIN AUDIOTAPE)

JONATHAN KELLERMAN, CHILD PSYCHOLOGIST; AUTHOR, "BILLY STRAIGHT": "First the car drove up to the edge of a parking lot. They got out and talked and he grabbed her like in a hug. I thought maybe they were going to kiss, and I'd watch that.

"But all of a sudden she made a weird sound. Surprised, squeaky, like a cat or a dog that gets stepped on. He let go of her, and she fell. Then he bent down next to her, and his arms started moving up and down really fast.

"I thought he was punching her, and that was bad enough. And I kept thinking, Should I do something? But then I heard another sound -- fast, wet, like the butcher at Stater Brothers (ph) back in Watson chopping meat, `Chuk. Chuk. Chuk.'

"He kept doing it, moving his arm up and down. I wasn't breathing. My heart was on fire. My legs were cold. Then they turned hot wet, pissing my pants like a stupid baby. The `Chuk chuk' stopped. He stood up, big and wide, wiped his hands on his pants.

"Something was in his hand, and he held it far from his body. He looked all around, then in my direction. Could he see me? Hear me? Smell me? He kept looking. I wanted to run but knew he'd hear me. But staying here could trap me. How could he see anything behind the rocks?"

TERRY GROSS, HOST: That's Jonathan Kellerman reading from his new novel, "Billy Straight." Tell us what Billy has actually seen.

KELLERMAN: Billy has seen a vicious murder of a woman in a park, in Griffith Park, where he's been living. He's a runaway, and he's been surviving in the urban jungle of Los Angeles, living in a park. And he's witnessed a terrible, terrible crime.

GROSS: He keeps hearing that "Chuk chuk" sound of the stabbing. Do you think it's particularly true for kids that the bad things they've witnessed get replayed and replayed in their minds in a terrifying way?

KELLERMAN: Absolutely. I think repetition is a very important form of childhood, not just in the sense of trauma but also in the sense of therapy. When I worked as a psychologist I became aware of the curative value of repetition, in the sense that children will just -- for example, if they're frightened by a movie will see it over and over and over again until it's desensitized.

GROSS: Wow, I'm glad you mentioned that. I did that when I was a kid.

KELLERMAN: We all did. That's why kids...

GROSS: That's how I learned to love horror movies.

KELLERMAN: Exactly. And parents make this mistake. They say, "Well, you were scared by it the first time, so you can't see it again." It's really the worst thing they can do, because the child will often engage in self-therapy and really systematically desensitize him- or herself to the frightening stimulus.

GROSS: You worked as a child psychologist before you became a novelist.

KELLERMAN: Right.

GROSS: Or before you became published as a novelist.

KELLERMAN: Published novelist, right. (laughs)

GROSS: When you worked as a psychologist full time, did you know you also wanted to write?

KELLERMAN: Yes, I'd been writing compulsively since the age of 9, and I actually wrote before I became a psychologist. I really never saw writing as a job, it was just a passion, and it was just a love. I won a literary prize in college and got an agent at the age of 21, and proceeded to write a lot of books that never got published. So I was really a failed writer with a good day job.

I just always had dual interests in art and science. I'm a painter, and I play music, and I just love to write. But I also loved science, so I gravitated toward psychology. And I guess the unifying thread in writing fiction and practicing psychology is a curiosity about people.

GROSS: Does that curiosity play out differently as a writer than it does as a child psychologist?

KELLERMAN: Yes, I think the two fields play out in a diametrically opposite manner. I like to think of psychology as dealing with the rules of human behavior. As psychologists, we're always trying to predict human behavior.

And to me, writing fiction is dealing with the exceptions to the rules. That's what interests me. In fact, "Billy Straight" came out of that because it was an attempt to write about a very special type of street kid who didn't go the way of other street kids. And it was, in some sense, a super coper, and very, very fascinated with people who manage to rise above the bad luck that fate has given them.

GROSS: Now, you say as a child psychologist you're more interested in the rules of human behavior. I guess I don't think of there being real rules.

KELLERMAN: Well, you know, science is all about rules, and psychology would like to be a science. And when you talk about rules, you're basically -- all science strives to predict. That's its goal. Psychology is a soft science which to some extent is what I love about it, because it's ambiguous. I would never want to be a surgeon, it's too concrete.

But we are striving to learn about ways in which people behave and to predict. So there is irregularity. Now, the rules are not as ironclad, but there are certain ways of predicting, I think. But fiction is just the opposite. Who wants to write about the same old stuff? You really want to write about what's different and what's novel.

GROSS: Did you come across stories as a child psychologist that would have made good cases for your detective?

KELLERMAN: Every day. Every day. I think what finally helped me get published as a novelist was my -- were my experiences as a psychologist. But all that said, I could never, ever write about a patient or even come close to it, because of confidentiality. I took it very, very -- very seriously, and I bent over backwards never to write about real people.

That's not a problem, because the fun of fiction is making it up. But I think what psychology did was, it gave me just an experiential base. So hopefully if I want to write about a kid in a situation -- and I've seen a thousand kids in that situation -- hopefully it lends an air of verisimilitude and authenticity to what I'm doing.

GROSS: Well, let's look at your new novel, "Billy Straight." You know, Billy is a kid from a neglectful and abusive home who is now living on the streets of Los Angeles. And as you say, he's a real coper. He's very smart, not in a school-educated kind of way, but he is very smart. Have you met kids like that?

KELLERMAN: Absolutely. Well, you know, the book came out of so many different places, but one of them was my experiences dealing with children in a variety of traumatic situations. I dealt with street kids. I dealt with seriously ill kids. And there are always a few children who survived in a super way -- super survivors -- and they always managed to rise above things and to do much better than anyone expected.

Robert Coles (ph), a psychiatrist, has written books about that. I had the chance to review some of those books for the "Los Angeles Times" many years ago, and I was struck with the similar stories of children growing up in the slums of Rio managing to maintain not only a survival, but to rise above it, to transcend it, to maintain a moral vision.

So what I tried to do with "Billy Straight" is create a character in which, even though fate casts him in a situation where he's forced to do things that he doesn't like -- amoral and immoral things -- he's always struggling to maintain a moral vision and a constancy.

GROSS: You are the founding director of the psychosocial program at Children's Hospital of Los Angeles.

KELLERMAN: Right.

GROSS: And one of the things you specialized in there was the care of seriously ill children and their families. And I'm wondering if you could talk little bit about children's conceptions of disease and death.

KELLERMAN: My first job, actually, was working with children who were put in these plastic bubbles, these isolation rooms, for intensive chemotherapy. And people wanted to explore the psychological ramifications, and asked me to do it, as well as to care for these children and their families.

And I said, Sure, but what's the previous research? And they said, Well, there is none, we're inventing the wheel. So I was really privileged to do it and I learned a lot about how children responded. One of the things that we started doing in the mid-'70s was to talk very openly to children about the disease and the diagnosis. And that met a lot of resistance, but that is essentially the state of the art today.

One thing I'm very proud of is my team really basically helped to pioneer the model of psychosocial care that is still used. And once again, children react to it very, very differently depending upon developmental stage. I think, once again, with a 6-year-old child or younger, they tended to react in terms of missing their parents, separation, the isolation.

So when you deal in a therapeutic sense with a child of that age, you want to minimize the separation. You want to get the parent in the hospital as much as possible. So we instituted boarding-in and sleeping-in programs.

Latency age children -- 7 to 11, 12 -- were very concerned about pain and suffering. And of course all kids are, but especially it was magnified at those stages. And so we emphasized a lot of pain control programs.

And the adolescents were more involved in philosophical issues, and a more adult conception. We dealt with death and dying, but one of the rewarding aspects of the work was, we dealt a lot with psychosocial rehab because kids were living longer. And today it's even better.

You know, leukemia is basically curable. At this point most children survive many, many years, if not outright cure. So in that sense, we were dealing with helping them adapt, things like getting them back in school. How does a kid who's lost his hair go back to school dealing with peers, dealing with siblings? It was wonderful, wonderful work.

GROSS: You must have talked to the children a lot about what their ideas of death were.

KELLERMAN: Right.

GROSS: And I'm wondering if you could share with us some of the more interesting ideas to you, interesting because they were especially poetic or horrifying.

KELLERMAN: Well, you know, the fascinating thing is, children, as their thoughts develop, progress from concrete to abstract. I'll give you a good example. We had a little boy who came in, and he was about 3 or 4 years old, and his mother came to us in a consultation because he was having horrible nightmares. And he'd just wake up screaming about bugs and insects and spiders. And she couldn't understand where this was coming from.

And we did some therapy, some play therapy, and we found out that what had happened is, he had asked someone, What's the matter with me? And they said, Oh, you have a bug -- using the colloquial expression, You have a bug.

And once we were able to correct that and give him accurate information at his age level to explain to him what was going on -- at his age level -- and that meant actually showing his blood under a microscope, showing the blood cells -- you know, not doing it in a scary way -- the nightmares stopped.

And so one thing that I learned back in the '70s was, the mind abhors a vacuum. If you don't percent accurate information to children, they will supply their own, and usually their fantasies are much worse than reality. So we were encouraged, and we found that parents who dealt in an open but age-appropriate manner with their children tended to have fewer adjustment problems. Which is not to say we'd ever tell a child, You're going to die, or, Deal with it, because we didn't know, and that wasn't always true, and many kids didn't.

But we like to teach them about the concrete details of their disease so they can assume more control and more understanding. And I think it involves a lot of sensitivity. It involves pacing. The science of psychotherapy is knowing what to say. The art of psychotherapy is, A, knowing when not to say it, and B, timing it.

So it's not an easy thing you can cookbook. It takes training. But once you focus on the humanity within the child, you're able to figure out how to communicate. But the goal was clearly communication and to prevent these kinds of fantasies.

(END AUDIOTAPE)

TUCKER: Jonathan Kellerman. His latest book is "Savage Spawn: Reflections on Violent Children." We'll continue in a moment.

This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

TUCKER: We're listening to an interview with author Jonathan Kellerman by Terry Gross. They spoke earlier this year, several months after five people were killed in a shooting spree by two young boys outside a middle school in Jonesboro, Arkansas.

(BEGIN AUDIOTAPE)

GROSS: Now, you've not only studied and worked with children who were very vulnerable -- vulnerable because they're sick or because they're abused -- you've also written about, and I imagine have worked with, children who are very violent.

KELLERMAN: Right. I have a book coming out in October called "Savage Spawn: Reflections on Violent Children." I worked with psychopathic children -- sociopathic kids -- not that many, thank God, but I've had enough experience to know what they are like.

And this book really grew out of my horror at that Arkansas shooting -- the Jonesboro shooting -- where the two little boys ambushed their classmates. It wasn't just the violence, but it was the premeditation, the coldness of it, that I found very, very shocking and very, very chilling.

And I just decided to sit down and explore the origins of this kind of violence in kids to see if I could learn from existing literature, as well as draw upon my own clinical experiences and to posit some possible answers to the question.

And what I learned was eye-opening. I mean, I learned a variety of things. But for example, one thing I learned is, I don't believe media violence is a big or a very significant ingredient in the equation. The most common knee-jerk reaction when there's an outbreak of child violence is to blame the media and talk about how violent the media image is. And when you look at it closely, that doesn't pan out as a significant predictor.

GROSS: What makes you say that?

KELLERMAN: Well, there are a thousand correlative studies, and not one caused a link. And one thing people not trained in science often don't understand is that correlation is not causation.

If I could just get into it briefly, correlation is a statistical association between two events, meaning that if A occurs, B is more likely to occur. That's a positive correlation. And if A occurs, B is less likely to occur, is a negative correlation. So some correlations are causative. For example, smoking. Smoking is correlated with cancer and it causes cancer. But blue eyes and blond hair are correlated, and they don't cause each other.

And the fact is that 99.9 percent of children watch television and watch movies, but very, very few of them become criminals. And so it's really hard to tie in. And most of the studies do things like, show kids some movies and give them a questionnaire about violence. But that doesn't relate to actual serious murderous violence.

And when you look at those kids, sure, they watch stuff, and there is some evidence that the more disturbed kids are more likely to watch violence on television. But what's really at play are things that correlate that are much more important, namely, some biological factors as well as chaotic families.

It's a classic case of nature-nurture. If you look at kids who actually murder and kill, you find a high rate of brain damage indicators. You find attention deficit, learning disabilities, median IQ of 90, documented head trauma, just a lot of neurological signs. And you find chaotic families and parents, particularly fathers, with a history of violence.

And then you combine that with access to weapons, and that's generally what seems to bring about this type of violence. For example, the Jonesboro shootings, if these kids hadn't had access to automatic weapons, to speed loaders, and known how to use them at a very young age, would not have been a massacre, it would have been a -- possibly been a stabbing of one child, which is terrible, or pushing and shoving.

But when you throw in the access to weaponry with a kid with a nature-nurture tendency to violence, you get a really bad, bad situation.

GROSS: Jonathan Kellerman is my guest, and his new novel is called, "Billy Straight." Kellerman is both a child psychologist and a best-selling detective writer.

Now, your wife, Faye Kellerman, is also a best-selling writer. And I understand that you both initially kept it a secret from each other, the writing?

KELLERMAN: Well, mine was not a secret. She knew me -- Faye and I were married very, very young, and she knew me as a failed writer with a good day job for many, many years. Faye kept her writing secret. I mean, she watched me struggle, basically.

Faye -- I like to say she trained perfectly for a career as a novelist. She has a bachelor's degree in theoretical math, and she has a doctorate in dentistry. So, I mean, I never imagined she had any sort of literary talent. And I saw her as the chemistry, math, physics, hard-science person. She's a very, very brilliant mathematician.

And I saw myself as the artsy guy. And so it just -- it was a fascinating thing, because we'd married for 13 years when I sold my first novel, and I was still in practice as a psychologist for the first three novels. I was gone, and when I'd leave she'd sneak off and work on this book. And I had no idea.

And I would come home and see her working, and she'd hide it. And I figured maybe she was working on a diary of some kind. And then one day she just thrust a manuscript at me and said, "Read it, you won't like it." And I said to myself, She's absolutely right, because how could she possibly have any talent? Because I had seen her as this math-science person. So it was a real lesson to me on the need to be open minded. You think you know someone, and you really don't.

GROSS: Boy, what went through your mind when you said, Read it -- when she said, Read it, you won't like it? Were you worried that you wouldn't like it and would have no idea what to say?

KELLERMAN: Oh, yes. I said, This is going to be horrible. She obviously can't possess talent. She's never even written a laundry list. What the hell has she done here? I'm going to have to let her down. We're going to have a big fight.

As a matter of fact, I -- in fact, I was sitting there with our third child, who was born then, and the baby was sleeping on my shoulder, and I'm reading the script, and I get into it. And I'm realizing this is coherent, and I was just shocked. So I started to read it, and I'm caught up, and I'm reading and I'm reading. I'm turning pages.

And I called her in and said, "Honey." And she sheepishly comes in looking really upset. I say, "This is really good." And she says, "No, it's not." And I say, "Yes, it is." -- "No, it's not." And we had a big fight about that. She thought I was patronizing her.

So I backed it up and I said, "I'm going to call my agent." Now, you need to understand, I was not a household word, certainly, in publishing if I am indeed now. I had just sold my first novel. It hadn't come out.

I called my agent. I said, "I know what it sounds like, but my wife wrote a book." And he told me his eyes rolled all the way back in his head, but he said, "Sure, send it." And he sold it. He sold her first novel, "The Ritual Bath," in three weeks. So it was an amazing story.

GROSS: Now, does she read your novels before they are published? And if so, do you prefer an honest critical appraisal or the more supportive, You're the greatest, dear?

KELLERMAN: Well, honesty is kind of a malleable term here. You know, I'm Jewish, and in Judaism we have a concept of peace, that true honesty is peace. But it's interesting, because neither Faye nor I came out of the English department. And here we are, both novelists.

So we started to read each other's stuff on a weekly basis. And as Faye says, there are often some very cold nights. We didn't know how to do this, this was a skill we were ill prepared for. And when you criticize someone's creative work, it's akin, almost, to criticizing your child.

The fortunate thing is that we both really love each other's work. I mean, I could love Faye and despise her writing. I happen to really love her writing. So we're approaching it from the aspect of a fan.

All that said, we do tell the other if we feel something needs to be changed. And it goes well. Generally, it's, Oh, this is great, but you might think about this, this, this.

And this has been expanded because my son is working on his first novel -- our son -- and especially (inaudible)...

GROSS: Have you called your agent yet? (laughs)

KELLERMAN: I haven't called, but I honestly think -- it's Boshell (ph) -- he's a brilliant writer. He's actually sold a short story. He's quite good. And he e-mails me the chapters from college, and I read them. And once again, I like them very, very much but if there is something he wants me to point out, I try to do it in a really diplomatic way.

And I think if you're approaching it from a perspective of positivity and support -- some of these writing -- you know, the writers' groups get very nasty, because there really is a -- there's this agenda. Faye and I don't have that, because we're very supportive. Even so, it can get tough. It's a tough situation. But we work hard at doing it well.

GROSS: Well, Jonathan Kellerman, I want to thank you very much for talking with us.

KELLERMAN: It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

(END AUDIOTAPE)

TUCKER: Jonathan Kellerman, speaking earlier this year with Terry Gross. His novel "Billy Straight" is now in paperback.

This is FRESH AIR.

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Philadelphia, PA
Guest: Jonathan Kellerman
High: Jonathan Kellerman is a child psychologist and best-selling writer. In "Billy Straight," his star is a 12-year-old runaway who witnesses a murder. The book has just come out in paperback and is currently number 6 on the best seller paperback list. He also recently published the non-fiction "Savage Spawn," inspired by the schoolyard shootings that took place in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and Springfield, Oregon, in 1998, examining the question of how children can become cold-blooded killers. (Rebroadcast from 1/26/99)
Spec: Entertainment; "Billy Straight"; Violence; Youth; "Savage Spawn"

Please note, this is not the final feed of record

Copy: Content and programming copyright 1999 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1999 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: "Billy Straight": An Interview With Jonathan Kellerman
Show: FRESH AIR
Date: NOVEMBER 12, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 111202NP.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Interview With William Trevor
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:30

KEN TUCKER, FRESH AIR: A novel by Irish writer William Trevor, "Felicia's Journey: A Tale of Self-Delusion and Murder," has been turned into a movie. Coming up, we hear from William Trevor.

And John Powers reviews "Dogma" and "Boys Don't Cry," two new films by independent filmmakers.

(BREAK)

TUCKER: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Ken Tucker.

The new film "Felicia's Journey" by director Adam Agoyan (ph) is adapted from the 1994 novel by Irish writer William Trevor. "Felicia's Journey" stars Bob Hoskins as a catering manager who's also a serial killer. He seeks to help the vulnerable young women he befriends, murders them when they try to leave, but then doesn't remember committing the murders.

In this scene, he sings to Felicia, a pregnant 17-year-old Irish girl he takes in. After he's drugged her, he begins this creepy serenade.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, "FELICIA'S JOURNEY")

BOB HOSKINS, ACTOR: Shhhhh, shhhhh.

(singing): You're my special angel, sent from up above.
(inaudible) smiled down on me and sent an angel to love.
You are my special angel, (inaudible).
I know that you're an angel, heaven is in your eyes.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

TUCKER: William Trevor isn't famous in America, but he does have many readers here, and they tend to regard him with near-reverence. In a "New Yorker" profile, Steven Schiff (ph) said Trevor is "probably the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language." Schiff described Trevor as "a mild man, retiring and soft-spoken, famously shy," and he also observed that "almost nothing about Trevor suggests that he could possibly know anything of the throttled romances, blistering humiliations, and free falls into madness that wrack his characters' lives."

Trevor grew up in the south of Ireland, where much of his fiction is set. He moved to England as a young man, where he's lived ever since.

Terry Gross spoke with William Trevor in 1995. He told her that as a child, his family moved around a lot.

(BEGIN AUDIOTAPE)

WILLIAM TREVOR, "FELICIA'S JOURNEY": We moved around simply because my father was a bank official, and every time he got promotion, the practice was to move the man who got promotion from one town to another in other to put him up a step. I don't know why that was the practice, but it was, so that we lived in seven or eight small Irish towns during my childhood, because he was actually quite a clever and able bank official, and he was rising slowly to the top of his profession. And we all went with him, of course.

TERRY GROSS, HOST: Was there anything all the different towns you lived in had in common?

TREVOR: The different towns? Yes, they were all very similar. I think "having in common" is an understatement. They're almost interchangeable, some of them. They're very, very similar places.

As my father advanced, they got slightly bigger and more important, because he was obviously being given a more important job.

But it does mean that I have got no home town, which I rather regret. They're all my home town, and I -- even towns in Ireland where I haven't lived, I feel belongs to me somehow or other, because I feel so very, very strongly a provincial small-town person.

GROSS: What do you think a home town would give you that you don't have?

TREVOR: Well, a home town, I suppose, would give you a kind of coziness, which I don't have. But I'm rather glad in a -- from a writer's point of view. I was speaking personally just then. From a writer's point of view, one doesn't -- one shouldn't really have that cozy feeling. A writer is -- at least this writer is -- an outsider. And I feel outside society. And that coziness of belonging is something I would be very, very suspicious of and wary about and really wouldn't want to have in the end.

It's -- writers are -- fiction writers are much spikier people than that, beady-eyed and watchful, and -- you can't do that from inside, you've got to do it from outside the pale. And I feel that I belong outside the pale. That maybe is why I don't live in Ireland.

GROSS: In a recent memoir, you wrote a little bit about your parents and their unhappy marriage. You describe them as "victims of their innocence." I wanted to know if you could elaborate on what you meant by that.

TREVOR: Well, I think that my parents -- when I said "victims of their innocence," all I meant, really, was that my parents didn't know an awful lot. They were simple people. They didn't know an awful lot, first of all, about each other before they married each other. They didn't know an awful lot about marriage. And I suspect they didn't know an awful lot about love.

But they married, and they seemed a very attractive young couple. My father was a handsome man. My mother was very beautiful. But they were the last two people on this earth who should have married. And we three children grew up with that like a cloud hanging over us almost every day of our childhood, which was a fairly gloomy household at times.

GROSS: What made them so wrong for each other?

TREVOR: Well, I think that one of the things that made them so wrong for each other, and, you know, strange sense was that they were both very humorous people. My mother had a good sense of humor, and so had my father. But their senses of humor didn't meet. They laughed at different things. The world seemed to both of them a rather different place, and what was amusing in the world to my mother was not amusing to my father, and visa-versa.

Now, that may seem a very small thing, but I believe that that's an enormously important thing in marriage and relationships, if you laugh and are amused at and find interesting the same things, you get on. If you don't, somehow or other there is a blankness on the other face when you make a joke or tell a story, and I was always aware of this with my parents. And that was one of the areas of life which I think was very difficult.

There were other reasons why they didn't get on. My father was a jollier person, in a sense, than my mother was. He was a more social person, more gregarious person. And also there was the very difficult problem of moving from the towns we've been talking about, from one town to another, which was hard on my mother, but rather nice for my father, because he was advancing in his career, he was doing well, he was making more money, he was able to exert more influence locally, and all that kind of thing.

Whereas my mother was presented with some really rather nasty house which she had to have repapered and repainted. And each time that happened, there would be maybe six months of upheaval. And this is not easy for a woman.

(END AUDIOTAPE)

TUCKER: Writer William Trevor. His book, "Felicia's Journey," has been made into a film which opens today. We'll continue in a moment. This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

(BEGIN AUDIOTAPE)

GROSS: ... Irish writer William Trevor.

After college, you moved to England. Did you -- did your Irish background feel different to you in England than it had in Ireland?

TREVOR: Oh, yes. I didn't want to leave. The one thing I didn't want to do at that time was -- this was about 1952 -- I didn't -- one thing I really knew was that I did not want ever to leave Ireland. I wanted to be in Ireland all my life, and I hated the idea of exile. But it was necessary, and I had to do it.

Now, of course, I see that I probably would have never written anything if I had stayed in Skiboreen (ph) all my life, or Mitchell Sam (ph), where I was born. You have to travel in order to see Ireland in perspective.

GROSS: I think for about 15 years you worked as a sculptor before you started to write at all. Did you realize you had a gift for writing before you actually started to write?

TREVOR: Well, I was good at English. I was one of those boys, one of those children who was, you know, good at English at school, not good at anything else very much. But I did happen to be good at English. But then I became very interested in sculpture, not painting, but I became interested in sculpture, because the -- it just so happened that the art master was a sculptor. And I -- I should say I was a sculptor for a long time.

I didn't make very much money. I seemed always to fail to make money when I was young. And I had to, in the end, give that up and get a job writing advertising copy, which I did for a couple of years.

GROSS: Could you remember for us any of the ads that you wrote?

TREVOR: I can't remember any slogans or headlines. It's a question I'm always asked. I'm always glad to say I've forgotten them all, because they were no good. I was very bad at it.

GROSS: Gee, so did that hurt any confidence you thought you might have as a writer?

TREVOR: Oh, no, no, not at all. No, you -- it's a different -- it really is a different thing altogether. The good thing about writing advertisements was that when I went to that job, I wasn't given very much work at first, naturally not, because I was a novice, and I had a great deal of time on my hands. And I was given a typewriter and endless cups of tea.

And, you know, in those days, they would say, Write an advertisement for a brand of paint, or something. But you'd take your time over it. You know, you'd take two days to write the advertisement. I'd say, What do you mean, 12 lines, two days? And they'd say, Yes, because it's got to be good, you know, and it's got to be absolutely right.

Well, of course, I would write what I could in a couple of minutes, and then put it aside. And then I began to write short stories, because I had nothing else to do. And that's how, really, I began to write.

GROSS: So what were the subjects of the first stories that you wrote?

TREVOR: The subjects of the first stories were -- they were stories -- I think that the only thing they perhaps had in common is, quite a number of them were about elderly people. And I can't really tell you why that was. I wrote a novel called "The Old Boys," which is entirely about elderly men, and one woman.

And I wrote a number of short stories about people who were in their 70s. And I think that the reason I did that was that I was curious to know what it was like to be very old. I was myself in my early 30s. Now that I'm closer to 70 than 30, I write more about children, because I have forgotten in all sorts of ways what it's like to be a child.

But when I stopped writing about the elderly, I wrote a great deal, have since written, an awful lot about women, because I'm not a woman, and I don't -- I want to know more about women. I write all the time out of a sense of curiosity. That's what drives me, as far as I can see, to write.

GROSS: Well, you're how old now?

TREVOR: Sixty-six.

GROSS: Sixty-six. So you're still not at the age that you were describing. But you're closer to it than you were in your 30s.

TREVOR: That's right.

GROSS: Do you think you came close in your descriptions from what you can tell now?

TREVOR: Not bad. I've -- not too bad. All sorts of things I didn't know about, which -- certainly not in those early stories, a kind of -- perhaps not enough emphasis on the loss of memory, which all old people have. But they're not bad.

GROSS: You -- even in your memoir, a lot of the memoir is actually about other people you've known, or about places that you've been. Your memoir is filled with portraits of others. I get the impression you really don't like to write about yourself very much, that there's two things working here. One is your curiosity of others, and another is a reluctance to explore yourself in a public way.

TREVOR: Yes, I have very little interest in myself. I am -- I'm sitting here talking to you, whom I can't see, and I'm more interested in you than I am in what I am saying to you. I am one of those people who, for some reason, is interested in other people than more than in himself, and I don't know why that is. I don't know whether it's part of being a writer, or whether it's just part of being a human being. I have absolutely no idea.

But it's there, and I don't reject it. I use it. I use everything in order to write something.

GROSS: See, that's interesting to me, because I think so many writers are very obsessive people, and usually one of the things they're obsessed with is themselves.

TREVOR: I'm sure that's true. But I'm not obsessed with myself. It's -- I'm not, I'm -- I am really -- I'm obsessed with my friends. I mean, I'm very fond of my friends, and I'm very fond of my family, and they seem to come first. And I trail along someplace behind. I don't know.

On the other hand, of course, talking like this, one has to say that all fiction is autobiographical, in a sense, because -- it's autobiographical in the sense that I can only write about the physical pain that I feel. I can't write about the physical pain that you feel, because I don't quite know what it is like for you. It's like saying, when I see the color blue, I see the color blue, you may see a slightly different color.

So I have to use as a yardstick my own feelings of pain, distress, happiness, everything else. Those are all things which I have experienced, and that experience goes into the characters I write about. So that there's always that autobiographical strand in everything.

But it's almost a technical thing. It's almost using myself as a piece of litmus paper.

GROSS: Do you think of yourself as an interesting person?

TREVOR: Well, not particularly. I would much prefer to hope that people found what I wrote interesting than that they should find I am interesting. I think that what they -- what people get when they meet a fiction writer is the remains of someone, because the bulk of everything in that person has gone into what he has written, or in the case of a painter, gone into what he's painted.

GROSS: What are you working on now?

TREVOR: Well, I always work in the same way. I work on short stories, and usually a novel at the same time, so that when the novel gets into difficulties, or when I become tired of this particular part of it, or, you know, whatever reason, I can just drop it and begin a new short story. And it's a luxury for a fiction writer to be a short story writer and also to be a novelist. I think of myself as a short story writer in the first place.

But to be a novelist as well is a luxury, because I can turn to another craft, because they're quite different, the two crafts are quite, quite different.

GROSS: How are they different?

TREVOR: Well, you can -- with a short story, you can see around it. It's like when -- having something in your mind that you can sort of see almost in the round, you can sort of see to the end of it, although, in fact, you may change the end. The end may be quite different, and you may begin it at a different place. But you can see much more of it when you begin it, before you begin it, and while you're writing it.

With a novel, you can't do that at all, at least I can't. I mean, I -- everything I say is personal, it's purely the way I write. Other people would be quite different. But with a novel, I find that to be able to see round a novel and to be able to see a complete novel, or anything even vaguely like a complete novel, would be like carrying the architectural plans for a cathedral in your mind, which you can't do.

It's -- a novel evolves much, much more than a short story. A short story does evolve, but simply because of the length, it's a different thing. It's a different product, it's a different commodity. A short story is a glimpse. Essentially it's the art of the glimpse. The novel is more of a mixture, more of a -- I suppose you could almost say a rag bag.

GROSS: Well, William Trevor, thank you very much for talking with us.

TREVOR: Well, thank you very much for talking to me.

TUCKER: Writer William Trevor. His novel, "Felicia's Journey," has been made into a movie opening today. He spoke to Terry Gross in 1995.

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Philadelphia, PA
Guest: William Trevor
High: Irish Writer William Trevor, discusses his eight volumes of short stories, 11 novels, several plays for stage and for radio and television, stories for "The New Yorker," "The New York Times" and other magazines, and the film adaptation of his novel "Felicia's Journey" which is coming out in limited release Friday. (Rebroadcast from 2/14/95)
Spec: Entertainment; Movie Industry; "Felicia's Journey"

Please note, this is not the final feed of record

Copy: Content and programming copyright 1999 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1999 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: Interview With William Trevor
Show: FRESH AIR
Date: NOVEMBER 12, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 111203NP.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: "Dogma" And "Boys Don't Cry": Movie Reviews
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:52

TUCKER: Hollywood hot shots Matt Damon and Ben Affleck star as outlaw fallen angels in the controversial new comedy "Dogma." It's directed by independent filmmaker Kevin Smith, who also made "Clerks" and "Chasing Amy." Our film critic, John Powers, reviews "Dogma" and another independent film, "Boys Don't Cry," by first-time director Kimberly Pierce (ph).

JOHN POWERS, FILM CRITIC: Although you hear a lot of talk about the American independent cinema these days, most indies are simply the same old Hollywood stories but with lousier production values. They're not independent where it counts, in the way they imagine the world.

But right now, there are two terrific new movies that genuinely are independent. One's about angels, the other about sainthood.

Kevin Smith's "Dogma" is a scandalously funny comedy that has Catholic groups up in arms. It stars Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as two renegade angels who discover a loophole in the divine covenant that might undo all of creation. The only person who can save the world is the last remaining descendant of Christ, played by Linda Fiorentino, who now works at an abortion clinic.

She gets help along the way from, among others, the 13th apostle, Rufus. That's Chris Rock, who claims he was written out of the New Testament because he's black.

Although "Dogma" isn't a spoof like Monty Python's "Life of Brian," it may sound like one. Smith works in the scattershot style of a comic book, spiking his religious themes with all manner of gags, jokes about John Hughes movies, a murderous send-up of Disney, and casting Alanis Morrisette as God.

Here, Damon and Affleck's angels are on a bus, and Damon, an avenging angel, is looking for a sinner to smite.

(AUDIO CLIP, "DOGMA")

BEN AFFLECK, ACTOR: You know, maybe you're wrong about this slaughter thing. How can you be sure what incurs the Lord's wrath these days? Times change. I remember when eating meat on a Friday was supposed to be a hell-worthy trespass.

MATT DAMON, ACTOR: Major sins never change. And besides, you know, I can spot a commandment-breaker from, like, a mile away. (inaudible) bet on it.

AFFLECK: This from the guy who still owes me $10 over that bet about which was going to be the bigger movie, "E.T." or "Crush Groove (ph)"?

DAMON: You know, man, because times going to tell on that one. Are you insinuating that I don't have what it takes any more?

AFFLECK: Insinuating? No. Flat-out telling you.

DAMON: Right there, right there. There's one.

AFFLECK: So? They're kissing.

DAMON: Adultery.

AFFLECK: Adultery?

DAMON: Adultery.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

POWERS: Although "Dogma" is filled with jokes, some wildly obscene, the movie itself is serious. It's the work of a devout practicing Catholic who's appalled by the petty side of his church but still eagerly promotes his faith. In fact, the movie's great flaw is that Smith spends too much time openly preaching on behalf of the Supreme Being.

Too preachy. What a strange complaint to make about a comedy that's getting picketed for blasphemy!

But it's precisely Smith's willingness to mix the high and the low, to pursue the sacred through the outlandishly profane, and to do it with mainstream stars like Damon, Affleck, and Rock, that makes "Dogma" the most daring American movie in ages.

Now, I wouldn't dream of calling Smith a great filmmaker. His cinematic technique remains too amateurish for that. But the range of his interests, the blue-collar comedy of "Clerks," the heartfelt love story of "Chasing Amy," and now this scabrous religious romp, makes him our "Mad" magazine equivalent of Goddard.

In contrast to the shaggy "Dogma," "Boys Don't Cry" has the intense focus of tragedy. Set in 1993, it tells the true story of Tina Brandon, a young Nebraska woman who tries to live her life as a man named Brandon Tina. She crops her hair, dresses in men's clothes, and even chases chicks.

But when she goes to the town of Fall City, things spin out of control. Brandon begins a love affair with Lana, played by Chloe Sevigny (ph), and starts running around with a couple of violent louts who don't seem like the type to put up with sexual ambiguity. We can sense that Brandon's story will end horribly.

The movie was directed by Kimberly Pierce, and it's a remarkably assured debut, taut, polished, and filled with issues about sexual identity. It's sort of a gender-bending "Rebel Without a Cause." And it has its James Dean in star Hillary Swank, who gives an extraordinary performance as Brandon-slash-Tina.

Swank plays him/her with such effortless charisma that we're willing to forgive the movie its shortcomings, its East Coast fear and disdain for small town middle America, and the psychological thinness of its conception of Brandon, whose criminal side the film glides over.

After a clumsy opening, the movie inexorably builds to Brandon's martyrdom. Her death is infinitely more powerful than anything in "The Messenger," Hollywood's laughable new Joan of Arc film that's opening this week all over the country.

If you want to know why we need a genuinely independent cinema, you could do worse than compare "The Messenger" to "Boys Don't Cry." Where the big-budget picture reduces St. Joan to a foxy babe with high cheekbones -- she's played by ex-model Mila Jovavic -- "Boys Don't Cry" takes a woman most people have never heard of and makes us believe that she's a modern martyr, St. Brandon.

Or is it St. Tina?

TUCKER: John Powers is film critic for "Vogue."

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Philadelphia, PA
Guest: John Powers
High: Film critic John Powers reviews "Dogma" and "Boys Don't Cry."
Spec: Movie Industry; Entertainment; "Dogma"; "Boys Don't Cry"

Please note, this is not the final feed of record

Copy: Content and programming copyright 1999 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1999 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: "Dogma" And "Boys Don't Cry": Movie Reviews
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.