""Chloé is the queen of a voice note. Sometimes I would wake up in Scotland and turn on my phone in the morning and there'd just be this cascade of notifications, and I'd think, 'Chloé's been busy," O'Farrell tells Bustle. (The longest Zhao ever sent clocked in at 58 minutes - a "veritable podcast in its own right," O'Farrell says.) "I think that's something that's very different about us. She talks herself into or out of an idea, whereas I need to have a pen and paper in my hand before I can work out how I feel about something.""
""Constructing a narrative for the page is very different from constructing a narrative of a scene. It feels like using a different part of my brain," she says. "I was really interested to see Chloé's absolute economy in setting the scene. She'd write, 'Interior, a house,' and I would say, 'There's light, carpets; this is there...' I'd look at Chloé's draft and think, 'Oh, OK, I've got to save all that for my prose.'""
Maggie O'Farrell collaborated with Chloé Zhao to adapt a 400-page novel into a streamlined 100-page screenplay. Chloé Zhao frequently used long voice notes, including one lasting 58 minutes, while O'Farrell preferred pen and paper. The pair paused work during the 2023 SAG and WGA strikes and completed the script in fits and starts. The process revealed that constructing page-based narrative differs from constructing scene-based narrative, with Zhao exercising economy in scene-setting and O'Farrell reserving descriptive detail for prose. The collaboration energized O'Farrell and reinforced the solitary nature of novel work; a new book is due next spring.
Read at Bustle
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