"I don't know when I've been affected so strongly by a piece of writing. And I just knew I had to make it into a film," says filmmaker Keith Gordon of Scott Spencer's 1986 novel Waking the Dead. Waking the Dead is a compelling romantic drama about a love so deep, it transcends death. Academy Award-winning actress Jodie Foster serves as the film's Executive Producer, and it is the production company that she founded, Egg Pictures, that brought Gordon's dream project to fruition. Gordon says, "This movie got made for one reason alone: because Jodie wanted it to get made."
"Egg Pictures is the perfect place for Waking the Dead," says Foster. "We love stories that come from the heart, that deal with love and longing and the human experience, yet told from an intelligent point of view. Our goal has always been to tell human stories that tap into the collective unconscious. We also believe in putting all of our faith and trust into the filmmaker. It is his vision that we're here to support. So, Waking the Dead, like all of our films, has a strong directorial stamp."
Filmmaker Gordon has been personally involved with every aspect of Waking the Dead, from screenplay to production. Gordon's three previous films as director -- "The Chocolate War," "A Midnight Clear," and "Mother Night" -- were also adapted from novels, with Gordon also having written the screenplays for the first two films. He comments, "When you love a book, and when you're touched deeply by a book, the reason you want to make it into a film is in that book. I think Hollywood has this odd habit of taking wonderful books and throwing out things like the characters, the plot and the ending."
"My goal, when I adapt a screenplay from a novel that I'm really affected by, is just to not screw it up," laughs Gordon, "and to try to stay with those characters and that story. I think a lot of writers in Hollywood who are purely writers feel they've got to put their stamp on something. Whereas, I'm a filmmaker who sees myself more as an editor when I adapt. My feeling is, I'm just trying to take what was wonderful about the book and make it work in cinematic terms." This particular source material presented challenges from the first, as Gordon explains: "My job in adapting Waking the Dead was distilling 500 pages into a story that could be told in a couple of hours, without losing the essence. That was the hard part."
Gordon first began work on Waking the Dead earlier in the decade, as he recounts: "The book has been through many hands and many incarnations in its trip to being a film. It was sent to me in 1991 by Griffin Dunne and Amy Robinson, then at Double Play Productions. They were going to team up with Spring Creek Productions, who had also liked the book, and knew Scott Spencer.. .They brought me in. There had been a couple of screenplays done over the years [including one by credited screenwriter Robert Dillon, whose draft was in fact never read by the filmmakers], and were very unhappy with them. They sent me the book and said, 'Look, we love this book. We want to have somebody to come in and start from scratch and be a writer/director and take this on.' I read the book on an airplane, and just fell in love with it: I was flying from New York to California, or California to New York. I started weeping on the plane -- there was a passage with Fielding aboard a plane, thinking, 'I don't mind if the plane crashes, because I've lost the love of my life, and so who cares if I die now?' And I just thought about the woman that I love, and sat there on the plane blubbering, being incredibly moved, and feeling, 'I have to make this into a movie."'
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