Was the film director portrayed in the novel Pasolini?
PR Yes, I had read a biography of Pasolini and I was interested in his murder and the conspiracy theories about his murder. Was he just killed in a random way, or was it a fascist plot to silence an inconvenient artist and intellectual? I thought this is probably something interesting to write about. I set it in the US, because I didn’t know enough about Italy to set it there. Once I set it in America my director could no longer be Pasolini, because in America it’s just not possible for a filmmaker to be a serious intellectual and a public figure. Pasolini’s whole public configuration was so Italian that he just didn’t make sense in an American setting. Pasolini starts to shift into someone more plausibly American and then the whole conspiracy theory and the political angle starts to fall apart. So the novel emerges initially based on Pasolini, but it got farther away. One reviewer said it was a wonderful portrait of the filmmaker Paul Morrissey. SC Paul Morrissey is a conservative het
