Interview with John Brandon
John Brandon is the author of the short story collection, Further Joy, and four novels, Arkansas, Citrus County, A Million Heavens, and Ivory Shoals, which is forthcoming from McSweeney’s. His shorter work has appeared in Oxford American, The Believer, ESPN the Magazine, GQ, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The New York Times Magazine, and Grantland. He holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Florida and an MFA from Washington University in Saint Louis. He’s the chair of the BFA and MFA Creative Writing Programs at Hamline University and has recently spent time as the Grisham Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi and as the Tickner Writing Fellow at Gilman School in Baltimore. His debut novel, Arkansas, was adapted as a Hollywood film in 2020.
Terry Horstman grew up in Minneapolis and is the all-time lowest scoring basketball player in the history of Minnesota high school hoops. His work has been published or forthcoming from Flagrant Magazine, The McNeese Review, Taco Bell Quarterly, A Wolf Among Wolves, among others. He is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Hamline University and the executive editor of the Under Review. He is currently at work on his debut essay collection, which is shockingly about basketball. He lives and writes in Northeast Minneapolis.
This interview was conducted at the Hamline University Creative Writing offices on November 30, 2020. It has been edited for clarity and length.
Terry Horstman: A huge part of this year has been our changed participation in and consumption of sports. We are both big sports fans. I think you’ve had a bit more of a successful sports cheering year than I have. Your Tampa Bay Lightning won the Stanley Cup. The Rays won the American League, and the Bucs signed Tom Brady, which is all pretty exciting. What has following sports in 2020 been like for you?
John Brandon: You’re right, I mean as far as pandemic sports fanning goes, being from Tampa has been pretty good. I’m also a University of Florida alum and they’re playing well.
TH: And the Raptors can’t play in Canada so they’re starting this season in Tampa as well!
JB: Yeah! It’s been a lot. I have two sons, so I’ve been watching a lot with them. It’s nice to have Tom Brady on your team when you don’t live there because now I can watch them on TV. They were never on Monday Night Football or anything before. It’s been good. I was really proud of the Rays. I want to point out that we lost. The Dodgers were the ones celebrating at the end, but my question is what’s the bigger accomplishment? Coming in first place with the second highest payroll? Or coming in second place with the lowest payroll? They were so fun to watch because they already overachieved just by being in the postseason. Every time they won was just another layer of icing on the cake. It was fun.
TH: I’m glad you brought up the University of Florida. I first met you during my first semester in the MFA program at Hamline. We read your novel A Million Heavens and you came to our class. I was excited about that because before I was in the program, I had read your work before, not any of your books, but your college football coverage for Grantland. How did you come to find yourself writing about your favorite sport for what was at that time one of the most popular places for sports writing on the internet?
JB: It was mostly just luck and happenstance. And you can’t do this now because of COVID, but the advice I would give to people was just to go out. You know, go out and leave the house at night. This writer named Brett Martin, who was a long time writer for GQ, came through Oxford, Mississippi where I was teaching. He came through for a day or two, and all the other faculty there at the time were a little older and had kids. We had a dinner for him and when everyone else had to go home, we stayed at the bar and kind of became buddies. He knew I was a big college football fan and not long after that there was a meeting at GQ about how to get a bigger imprint in the south. They offered for me to write a blog about SEC football on the GQ website. I was like, I’m thinking about college football all day Sunday anyways, so I might as well write this blog. I did that for a season. It was fun, and then my editor from GQ got hired onto Grantland so he just brought me over and said “Keep doing this, only now it’s gonna be at Grantland.” So I did that for two seasons.
TH: And then you expanded to covering national college football there.
JB: Yeah. That was interesting because I came up with this recurring gimmick. It started with the blog. I didn’t mean to do this, but I went right into this persona of being kind of a jerk. Just kind of snide. I was hoping it was funny too, but also trying to needle everyone a little bit. I think the first thing I wrote really dug in on Ohio State when they were having their problems. That one got me a lot of enemies. And my reaction to that was “Well, this is good. This is working.”
I’ve never used that tone for anything else before. It just felt right for doing that column.
TH: It’s pretty easy to get college football fans going.
JB: Maybe that’s it. It’s such an easy target, so you know, shoot at it.
TH: It is interesting you landed on that voice to write in. You and I have had this conversation a couple of times on how difficult it can be to write sports fiction. It’s a hard thing to write. Meghan and I talked with you about this when we started the Under Review and now three issues in, I love the fiction we’ve seen and published, but it always gets the fewest number of submissions. None of your novels would classify as sports novels, but many of your characters make sports references where the reader can tell sports help define who this character is as a person. Do you channel that sports voice at all when you’re in a story?
JB: No, but it is enjoyable when you can kind of veer and glance off of sports in there. It’s so hard to think about plot when you’re trying to make sports central. If you have lots of room to do lots of character development, you can do something like Friday Night Lights, where it’s about football, but you have so much room. Everybody’s got a whole story within that setting. It’s really an excuse to have a collection of characters and go “oh that’s a football team.” To do a short story, it seems so hard to have sports at the center of it, but it’s not hard for a story to take place in a world where sports are.
TH: Your novel, Arkansas being released as a motion picture was obviously another pretty exciting development as part of this year. We’ll talk about how COVID affected the promotion and release of it, but I know many books that get published get optioned for film rights, but the path to a book actually being adapted for film is a road much less traveled. What was the process like for your debut novel going from someone having the film rights to someone actually making the film?
JB: Like most books that get optioned, it’s just an individual who has an interest in it. Clark Duke in this case. There’s the rare circumstance when it’s a huge bestseller or Stephen King writes something where a studio wants to make the movie and they have the money and go around spending it. In this kind of situation, it’s really unpredictable as to how it’s going to go from somebody wanting to do something with it, to that happening and it took ten years for Arkansas. Clark hustled, and pitched, and attended meetings. The only common adage that turned out to be true in that situation was getting someone attached to it. You know, getting someone excited to get studios and production companies to invest.
In our case it seemed like the main thing was getting Liam Hemsworth to play the lead in the movie. I say our case, but I mean I didn’t do any of that work. I just hear about it afterwards. Once that happened it seemed like people were willing to come in with money, producers were willing to come in, and then you can start attaching other actors and then it just takes on momentum.
It was still a really small budget. Basically everybody was working for what they call “scale,” which is as cheaply as they’re allowed to by their union. I know they didn’t have many days to film. They had to go in and get what they needed to get and then move on. It was still really tight, but it was enough to start adding people and then word starts getting around. Even after they had Liam, though, there were still setbacks. Other actors needed to drop out because they could only do it in a certain window of time. It was a lot of puzzle pieces for a while there, but yeah ten years. It was kind of strange when it actually happened. I was more happy for Clark than I was for me. He’s the one who was doing all that work all those years.
TH: So did Clark acquire the rights to the book right when it came out?
JB: Yeah it was within a year or something. There were a couple parties who were interested. It took a couple months to figure out who to go with. It came out in 2008 and it was probably optioned later that year or in 2009. Clark just saw it randomly in a bookstore. He’s from Arkansas and saw a book named Arkansas while he was browsing and that’s how he came to read it and get in touch with me.
TH: You mentioned it was a very low-budget film and I read they had to shoot most of it in Alabama as opposed to Arkansas, was that also a money thing?
JB: Yeah, it was a money thing. They wanted to do it in Arkansas and were trying to, but I guess the tax breaks or whatever determined that it was significantly cheaper to do it in Alabama. It was mostly shot around Mobile, Alabama, but they did some of it in Arkansas. They needed the hot springs scenes, which they shot in Hot Springs, Arkansas. There were a couple of other things, but mostly Alabama.
TH: I watched the movie with a couple fellow Hamline MFA alumni, and one of the most exciting things about it was it felt like each new scene brought in another A-list star in a supporting role.
JB: Yeah, I mean it’s kind of amazing. A lot of actors would get attached and then get unattached or it wouldn’t all come together in time. For Michael Kenneth-Williams’s role, which I’m so glad they got him, he was so great, at one point it was Lawrence Fishburne in that role. At one time, Walton Goggins, who is in The Unicorn, was going to play Frog at one point. That was early on, though, and he couldn’t do it because it wasn’t happening fast enough and he had to go do a HBO Show. I’m assuming that was Vice Principals with Danny McBride.
It happened like that. Clark would say, “Oh we got so and so.” Then it would get delayed, it would get delayed, it wasn’t happening, they’d drop and I would wait to just see what they would show up in.
TH: And of course for the role of Frog you had to settle for some guy named Vince Vaughan.
JB: Yeah, once it started rolling and getting momentum, you hear, “We got Vince Vaughan.” It’s like, “What?! Really?!” John Malkovich, Vivica Fox, all these super famous people started jumping on.
TH: Vivica Fox was absolutely amazing as Her.
JB: I know, that little part with her in the trailer. She really stole the show.
TH: You said you were getting updates from Clark this whole time. What is the writer’s role while their novel is being adapted for film? Were you invited to consult on it?
JB: Right at the beginning, you’re asked if you want to help with the screenplay or write the screenplay yourself. I say no to that. Another one of my books, Citrus County, has been optioned a few times and that’s always one of the first things that comes up and I always say no. People do it. People adapt their own stuff all the time. For me, I can’t really imagine it. I’m so attached and used to the way that I wrote it and the way that I see it. I don’t know that I’m so equipped to change it the way it needs to be changed. If somebody has their own vision of it, then I want that to be what they go with. Besides that, I’m just not a screenwriter.
The people who are coming after your books to option them, I’m hoping that they have their own connection to the book and their own kind of style as a filmmaker. That’s what I want for it. For them to take it and make it their own.
TH: Is it awkward to see your work come to life on the screen? Is it weird to see someone else’s interpretation of your work in that way?
JB: I think it’s a good reason to not get involved with the writing of the screenplay. Clark, other people who option your books, they work in that world and they understand the practicalities of casting and all those sorts of things that I don’t think about as a fiction writer. In that case, in Arkansas, it seemed like most of the characters were similar to the book, but the Kyle and Swin dynamic was tricky.
In the book, there’s no particular mention of Kyle being a great looking guy. He’s just kind of a guy. Then you get the handsomest man in the world to play Kyle. They had people they were trying to get for Swin, and they could and then couldn’t. Clark kind of always wanted to do it and I think he was ready to make the character his own and go with it.
TH: I know the premiere was scheduled to take place at South by Southwest. We were down in San Antonio the week before that for AWP and that was right when the pandemic reached its fevered pitch (no pun intended), and we were still there when we found out South by Southwest was getting canceled. What was it like to have this big, monumental occasion in your career happen during COVID and all the constant adjustments and cancellations that had to be made?
JB: It was definitely disappointing. As you mentioned, it was happening right in that time where day by day people were realizing a little bit more that this was really going to be a big problem. I was accepting what was going on with the movie just at the same time what was going on with the pandemic. AWP was kind of half happening, but we were still thinking that people were being smart and cautious, but that this will still be okay. I think South by Southwest was the first big festival to cancel. At that point it was rescheduled to be just like a regular premiere in LA, which later got canceled. So we got let down easy. It was definitely disappointing. It did pretty well streaming when it came out because we were all just stuck at home so at least the streaming numbers were good.
TH: You have several books out already, the first film adaptation of your work is all done and in the world for everyone’s streaming pleasure, what are you working on now?
JB: I can say my next novel will come out with McSweeney’s in June of next year. I’ve been working on that for the last few years, but it’s in the can now. Totally out of my hands and with McSweeney’s.
TH: They’ve done all your books, right?
JB: Yup, and I think it’s safe to say that since I’ve started there everyone but Dave Eggers has turned over, but they always manage to get great people. It’s pretty amazing what they’ve done with that press.
TH: What’s this novel called?
JB: It’s called Ivory Shoals. It’s set right at the close of the Civil War. So the Civil War is a huge part of the atmosphere, but it’s not a Civil War book. We’re not going into battles or anything like that. So yeah, look for that in June.
TH: Excellent. Thank you for taking the time to chat and be a part of Issue 3 of the Under Review.
JB: Yeah thanks for having me.
