Nick Hornby: ‘I couldn’t write Fever Pitch now. One of the things that made it was its lack of perspective’

The acclaimed author on adapting Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn, fate versus chance, and losing his obsessive side…

You have written four screenplays: Fever Pitch, An Education, Wild and Brooklyn. What lessons have you learned over time about how to do it?
The hardest thing – compared to writing novels – is to keep yourself up throughout the process because it is so long and so dispiriting and there is never any sign of an end product. You spend an awful lot of time, if you have another job, thinking: what is the point of this? And then things get made and turn out well and you think: gosh, that was the point.

Is the technique of writing for the screen about less-is-more, showing rather than telling?
Screenwriting is about condensing. But I like writing dialogue and minor characters are fun. There is an intertwining of commercial need with art: producers always want to “cast up”. If you can find room for a Jim Broadbent or a Julie Walters [playing minor roles in Brooklyn], it will boost the film’s commercial prospects. It is joyous to look at a minor character and wonder how he or she can become more major.

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