Guardian: One more hour. "And one night I got a call saying Tobey Maguire loved the book and wanted to play the main part. Even more weird, I was asked to write the adaptation. Novelists are not generally hired to adapt their own novels, and I'd never written a script. So why did they give me the job? Because I was cheap. As an absolute novice, they paid me the WGA minimum. Why did I take the job? Because they paid me the WGA minimum. It was eight times more than I earned selling the novel.

Twelve weeks later, I'd finished the first draft of the script. I handed it in to the producers and awaited their verdict. I'd been warned that script notes were torture for writers, an exercise in moronic sadism, but I got lucky. The producers gave me a concise, accurate analysis of the script's many problems. My chief mistake was following the structure of the novel too closely. I'd essentially rewritten the book with centered dialogue and capitalised character names.

A novel is a solitary endeavour; a movie is collaboration. Part of my pleasure in writing this adaptation has been surrendering to the idea of collaboration, the idea that what begins in one mind can become the work of a hundred." Word.