How did you feel when Scorsese and DiCaprio were interested in turning the book into a film?
There was a bidding war between Brad Pitt and Scorsese/DiCaprio. To me, this whole thing has been surreal. A bunch of people told me they loved the book and my agent said that the book was going to be a big hit here and internationally, that it would be made into a movie. But I’d learned my lesson from younger years about hype, so I didn’t pay it much mind. The book was edited, I sat down with this producer who loved the book and she sent it out to a bunch of people. Well, no one wanted it. A couple rejections came in just because people didn’t like the title. So then Terry Winter, a writer for the Sopranos, read the book and went nuts for it. When he said he wanted to write the script, Alexandra, the producer, called back the top 10 people in the industry and said that Terry wanted to do the screenplay, so of course then they read the book. DiCaprio and Scorsese were the first to look at it, the Brad Pitt, then Mark Wahlberg, then Clooney. It all happened so fast, and eventually the b
