‘Don DeLillo gave me his blessing’: film director Ben Rivers on how fan mail from the Underworld author led to his latest work
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- Don DeLillo sent film-maker Ben Rivers a hand-typed letter in 2017 after a mutual friend mailed the 89-year-old author a DVD of Rivers' 2015 film 'The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers,' calling it 'really powerful'
- DeLillo gave Rivers his blessing to adapt his 2007 one-act play 'The Word for Snow' for the new film 'Mare's Nest,' though the author said he 'couldn't really see it as a film'
- 'Mare's Nest' casts nine-year-old child actors to deliver DeLillo's cryptic dialogue — including the line 'The word for snow will be the snow' — around a fire in a dark cabin, shot on 16mm in grainy black and white in Menorca, Snowdonia and a London studio
- DeLillo has seen the finished film and told Rivers he was 'impressed' with the result, a rare endorsement given the author's notoriously difficult-to-adapt catalogue
- The film also weaves in a monologue from writer Daisy Hildyard and excerpts from Portuguese playwright Fernando Pessoa, and stars Moon Guo Barker — daughter of novelist-filmmaker Xiaolu Guo — as a girl wandering a postapocalyptic, adult-free landscape
- A screening of 'Mare's Nest' with a Q&A with Rivers is scheduled for Curzon Bloomsbury at 6pm on Tuesday 16 June
Why it matters: Rivers is openly critical of prior DeLillo adaptations — he pans Noah Baumbach's 2022 'White Noise' for losing the novel's cerebral wit, and the French 'Never Ever' for trivialising 'The Body Artist' into an erotic thriller, singling out Cronenberg's 'Cosmopolis' as the only one that works. With 'Mare's Nest,' DeLillo has now personally endorsed a screen treatment of his work for what appears to be the first time, giving a 53-year-old art-house film-maker a rare stamp of approval from an author whose rights have been sold but rarely well-served on screen.
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