Producer Rebecca Yeldham, director Marc Forster, and co-star Khalid Abdalla on the set of The Kite Runner.
Before Marc Forster became the next director to take the steering wheel of the James Bond franchise, he had bolstered his daring oeuvre with projects large and small including Everything Put Together, Stay, Finding Neverland, Stranger Than Fiction, and his latest release, The Kite Runner. Depending on whom you ask, it may have made no sense at all that Forster ended up directing this adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's best-selling novel spanning three decades of Afghan history and a heartbreaking series of missteps that drives two friends apart — especially after the epic book topped all expectations and became revered by millions of readers around the world. On the other hand, Forster's fearless and successful leadership had already made successes of films spanning a wide variety of periods, places, and characters, so why not add one more to the mix?
For producer Rebecca Yeldham, Forster was the first and best choice for Kite Runner from the moment she read the book in its galley, pre-published form. As one who had championed The Motorcycle Diaries to fruition — an adaptation that for many years was believed to be impossible — Yeldham firmly believed that a story as compelling as The Kite Runner would, in the end, overcome any obstacles that had to be traversed in bringing it to the big screen.
Forster [click here to read his interview] and Yeldham discuss their long history and why their experiences, both together and on separate projects, meant The Kite Runner would be made despite all odds and the fact that they both classify it as the hardest thing they've ever done. Paramount Vantage releases The Kite Runner in theaters on November 2.
Tell me why you first went to Marc as the ideal director to bring this to the screen whether you had to fight at any point to keep him on board.
Speaking for myself and [producer] Bill [Horberg]—who approached Marc very early on right after we'd first read the book — Marc is such an extraordinary director of humanistic dramas and I think at the core of this story is a really profound humanistic drama and relationship between a father and son and two friends. We just felt that Marc, as a filmmaker who is fearless in the way in which he ventures into unfamiliar terrain, would be somebody who would both really respond to it and render it beautifully. We were right in that he did really respond to it and instinctively feel that it could be a universal story. Bear in mind that at the time that he read it, it had yet to become the sensation that it subsequently became in paperback release. But he felt — as did we — that it could be a really remarkable story. It could transcend the specificity of its time and place and subject matter.
But at the time he was unable to commit to developing it with a view to it being his next movie, which was the audacious request that we were making of the filmmakers we were approaching. We just felt so strongly about it and wanted the filmmaker to become a partner in developing the screenplay that could make that commitment and Marc couldn't. He said, "I've got this other development and in fairness to it and its producers and screenwriter, I feel an obligation to try to make that first."
So we didn't pursue it with Marc at that time. We lost some ground because of a false start with another screenwriter, who fortunately never delivered a page, so by the time we did go to David Benioff it wasn't clouded by a shared credit situation. His manager had given the book to David, so he had already read it. I'd known David from something else I'd developed for him and had a wonderful experience with him. By that point in time, the book had found success and David had to finish one other screenwriting obligation, so we waited for David but then within three months of starting to undertake the adaptation, he turned in a draft and it was amazing, And with that draft that we submitted to the studio, they felt and we felt there was a movie there.
So we started to meet with filmmakers who had approached us over this intervening period and went back to Marc. He was still trying to work out when he would become available, but we went back to him in the hopes that it would work out and feeling that he would be the right filmmaker to take this on. Meanwhile, we met with a number of filmmakers — some extraordinary auteurs and talents — but it felt like Marc was the right choice.
I think Marc's a very popularist filmmaker and I mean that in the most flattering and complimentary of ways. He cares about audience and knows how to connect with audience and wasn't interested in a version of The Kite Runner that would be a myopic, closed, insular drama. He was really interested in broadening it and expanding its cinematic scope but also its potential audience, the potential reach of the film. And I think that's the movie he's made; it's one that really has a potential to connect with the breadth of the audience base that the book revealed that this story has.
As to whether or not we had to fight for Marc, there was a moment with the studio where they were really adamant that the movie should be made in English and we — me, Marc, and Bill — were adamant that the movie not be made as an exclusively as an English language story. There was a moment where we had to really fight to keep this all together because we were really at odds on that issue. But truthfully, the other filmmakers that had weighed in on this felt the same way and felt very strongly that this was the right way to tell the story. Ultimately, the studio supported us in taking that direction and brought in outside financing to minimize their risk in pursuing that direction.
Let's go back to that fearlessness that you mentioned about Marc, which he classifies as pure naiveté and perhaps oblivion to all of the dangers and hardships that he might have to undertake — he just does it because he likes the story. Is that in any way how you operate or is it really antithetical to what a producer is supposed to do?
The challenges inherent to making this movie never in any way colored my conviction about the material and determination to develop the story. In fact, it was one of the allures of it — to have an opportunity to venture into extraordinary landscape and culture and deepen my understanding of that culture and, to be honest, of the moviemaking process. It was an incentive. Obviously, you have to be considering the practical logistics of the making of the movie when you're undertaking to make it and this was rife with challenges, some of which we only became fully aware of once we were out there in the wilds of China. But the challenges from the onset were never an impediment or even something that I gave full attention to, so in that regard of Marc calling himself naïve, I was too! (Laughs)
But as naïve as we perhaps were about how hard it would be to make this movie, we were really, fully cognizant of the obligations to the culture and people at the center of this story when we embarked upon it. We went to enormous lengths to try to render the story with care and authenticity and attention to detail. It was really important — with none of us being of that culture and faith — to go to great lengths to understand what we were doing and to understand that we were doing it and rendering it appropriately.
