N.C. novels get the Hollywood treatment

Western North Carolina author Ron Rash lights up as much talking about his two novels making their film debuts this winter as he does describing the trout stream that runs through campus at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, where he teaches Appalachian Studies in the English department. 

In fact, those trout likely hold more sway over the soft-spoken writer, whose acclaimed novels and short stories cast the Appalachian landscape as a perennial protagonist. In the Hollywood adaptation of Serena, his New York Times bestselling novel from 2008, the Czech Republic stands in for the Smoky Mountains, with Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper playing the other leading roles. Noah Wyle, Jeremy Irvine and Steve Earle star in the smaller-scale, independent film based on his 2007 novel, The World Made Straight, which was shot on location in western North Carolina. After languishing in post-production for the past couple of years, both movies will hit theaters in early 2015. 

Just don’t expect to see Rash on the red carpet—he’s too busy making the rounds with his latest collection of short stories, Something Rich and Strange, and finishing up his next novel, Above the Waterfall, due out next fall. 

Q&A with Ron Rash

Smoky Mountain Living: Are you excited about the films?

Ron Rash: I’m really curious to see how they’re translated. I’m amazed that one got made, much less two—the odds are pretty slim. Just the fact that a movie is being made from the work has brought readers to me that I’ve never had before. That, to me, is the best part.

SML: What do you think of film adaptations of novels, in a general sense?

Rash: With the length of most movies, it’s impossible to capture a novel. Somehow the director has to not re-create the book but to try to find something of its essence. Winter’s Bone [by Daniel Woodrell] does this really well, for instance, but The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe, was horrible. Of course, a bigger book is more difficult than a smaller, tighter book.

SML: What can you share about the filming process?

Rash: I deliberately stayed out of it. It’s hard enough to write a good short story or novel; it would be presumptuous to think I could write a good screenplay. I thought it better to make a clean cut and save my energy for what I do best.

The funniest thing that happened was a phone call with the British actor Toby Jones. He is playing the sheriff in Serena and called from London to hear my accent. It’s almost as if I could hear the screenwriter tell him, “If you really want to know how these people talked, dial this number.” We didn’t talk about much—the weather, that sort of thing. Later he was on the BBC talking about how much he liked the accent and how he hoped he caught some of it in his acting. From what I have caught on the trailer, I think he did.

SML: With landscape such a significant role in your writing, what gets lost in a film version that’s shot elsewhere?

Rash: I do find it amusing that Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain was filmed in Romania and now Serena was filmed in the Czech Republic, though they are both rooted in the Appalachian Mountains. What’s good is that The World Made Straight was filmed in Madison County, so you get to see the landscape. There is something very striking about the Appalachian Mountains: They’re so old and worn down, with that greenery. Maybe [Serena] has captured that, but there’s a kind of lushness that you don’t get in the Rockies, for instance, or that you wouldn’t get in Afghanistan.

In a lot of areas of Appalachia, you get deep valleys and coves where a lot of light doesn’t get in. In the novel Serena, I talk a lot about how that affects one of the characters, Rachel. Her mother—one of the most sympathetic characters in the book—couldn’t handle the oppressiveness of it. But the book also shows the more positive aspect of those areas—like wombs protecting people from the outside. I’m fascinated by how landscape affects the psychological.

SML: How do the two movies compare?

Rash: I’m particularly glad about The World Made Straight because out of all of my novels, it got the least attention. It’s a much lower budget, but the movies I personally enjoy most tend to be independent movies—there’s more emphasis on story and character development, less on blowing up things. My sense from interacting with the director [David Burris] is that he’s trying to be true to the book but also to the region. For instance, he went to the trouble to get Plott hounds, like I have in the novel. Probably most people who see the movie wouldn’t even note that detail, but it fits the region perfectly. And they’ve done as good a job with the Appalachian accent as I’ve ever seen. The young British actor Jeremy Irvine nails it.

SML: What do you think about the casting of Serena? 

Rash: I thought they were impressive choices. Jennifer Lawrence is a talented actress and has the physicality—she grew up riding horses.

SML: You’ve called Serena the story of the Smoky Mountains. What element of that history do you hope the movie illuminates for a new audience?

Rash: One of the reasons I wrote Serena eight or nine years ago is because I was so worried about the political attempts—which are ongoing—to open up national and state forest for development, timbering, minerals. The book was a way of reminding people how hard won this park was, and also to remind them of what was there, because I’d say that probably most tourists who go through the Smokies today think it is virgin forest. But if they’d have gone through there about 1910 all they would have seen were scalped ridges.

SML: What are the other messages of your work that you hope come across in the films?

Rash: One of my goals as a writer is to subvert stereotypes. You have to be careful, because you could sentimentalize the people as long-suffering hill folk; or you could go the other way where they’re Deliverance types. When someone reads Serena, those easy stereotypes have been undermined. Though these people speak differently, and their accents and education are different, ultimately the reader should recognize that these are fellow human beings who feel, fear and love. That’s crucial.