Lionel Shriver talks about Kevin | Books | The Guardian Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver talks about Kevin How does it feel to have your widely rejected manuscript become a best-selling, prize-winning novel, then a book-club favourite and now the toast of the Cannes film festival? The author of We Need to Talk About Kevin explains Tilda Swinton in We Need to Talk About Kevin. Photograph: Nicole Rivelli photography Tuesday 17 May 2011 02.59 EDT First published on Tuesday 17 May 2011 02.59 EDT Share on Messenger Close It has now entered the cultural canon that, on completion in 2001, the manuscript of Lionel Shriver's seventh novel was widely rejected by publishers and literary agents alike. In retrospect, this incidental fact being widely known is alone a little weird. After all, every day writers numbly receive curt, dismissive rejections of work they've slaved over for years. Writers should have some grasp of publishing's brutality, and this morose process of having your beloved creations stepped on and pissed over comes with the territory. Hence people in my occupation are routinely expected, as Kevin would say, to suck it up.

Sorry, did I say "Kevin"? That's what's truly weird: the large number of fiction readers who know exactly who Kevin is, and that number is set to swell once a cinema audience joins the mix. Yet "Kevin Katchadourian" is just a name I picked after combing through the phonebook on an ordinary afternoon. The premiere of Lynne Ramsay's film of We Need To Talk About Kevin at the Cannes film festival provides an apt juncture at which to celebrate the miraculous power not of film but of fiction. Lo, I have created a monster. Kevin is a dark book, and many of those initial rejections objected that its narrator, Eva, is "unattractive": a woman uneasy about pregnancy, who feels alarmingly blank after childbirth, and fails to form the bond with her boy that we like to imagine is as instinctive as closing the epiglottis when we swallow. The novel breaks one of the last taboos (and how amazing that at such a late date I found a taboo still standing): a mother disliking her son.

Rife with difficult characters and climaxing in a high-school massacre of the sort Americans are rightly ashamed of, Kevin was a poor commercial bet from the get-go. More, my timing was mythically crap. I submitted the final draft to my New York literary agent right after 9/11, in that hilarious little window when everyone thought Americans would never read or watch anything violent again. Waiting for her response, I recorded in my journal that my new novel "abruptly seems irrelevant and, more dangerously, dated". (Indeed, the week the twin towers fell, New York Times columnist Frank Rich listed Columbine among a catalogue of national issues from "before" that suddenly didn't matter.) Ominously, my usually responsive agent went silent for weeks. Finger-drumming, I wrote presciently to myself: "Should this day, too, pass, with no comment from NY, I have vowed to break my silence and press her for a response. But the responses you have to ask for you don't want." Quite.

Finally I got an email – a long, unparagraphed, associative wail of dismay of which I've kept a copy: "For the life of me, I don't know who is going to fall in love with this novel . . . People in the industry are so thin-skinned right now – I just don't think anyone is going to want to publish a book about a kid doing such maxed-out, over-the-top, evil things, especially when it's written from such an unsympathetic point of view." She worried the plot might invite copycat killings. She suggested a rewrite with "a lot more humour (in that way which ONLY YOU can do) instead of one kid from hell who will make people sick just reading about the things he does. Don't make him a mass-murderer . . . And have him actually have a soft spot for his sister because she is easily humiliated and poses no threat." She demanded I pay my photocopying bill. I paid the bill. I spent the next eight months shopping in vain for a new agent. Finally in desperation I sent the manuscript directly to an editor at a small house who'd published me before.

She read it over the weekend, made an offer on the Monday, and that's where the fairytale starts. Offer in hand, I got a wonderful new agent whom I retain today. Nevertheless, Kevin was a slow burn. The book went to 30 different British houses before the Little Publisher That Could, Serpent's Tail, picked up the title with a tiny advance but great compensatory enthusiasm. Meanwhile, three months after its hardback publication in America – publicity budget: near-zero – an article appeared in the New York Observer describing all these women on the Upper East Side biking a little-known novel to each other and convening coffee klatches to discuss it. "Word of mouth" had begun. Word of mouth, far more than critical acclaim, is what elevated Kevin to the enduring status he appears to enjoy today, for the novel hit the London Times bestseller list before it won the Orange prize in 2005 . Oddly, for a book to do well merely because people like it is surprisingly rare. This novel has been driven from the off not by advertising and publisher hype, but by individual readers who passed it on to friends. Its success is therefore a populist tribute.

Even Lynne Ramsay bid for the film rights well before the novel was a commercial hit. She was simply one more reader who discovered the book for herself. Book clubs have also powered Kevin as he went viral, and I've visited a few, where groups cleave into ferocious camps: one convinced that the boy was evil from day one, the other just as convinced that his mother's coldness was criminally culpable. A fine spectator sport in which I never participate, since what the book means is no longer up to me. The novel passed the signal sales mark of 1m copies worldwide some years ago, and I've stopped keeping track. It has secured 25 translation deals, including Estonian, Serbian, Arabic and Russian; I collect foreign editions because I enjoy comparing covers. My favourite is the Chinese version: a belligerent, deranged-looking teddy bear. The title has so installed itself in the British cultural lexicon that it's given rise to books such as We Need To Talk About Kevin Keegan and the wittily christened science primer We Need To Talk About Kelvin. And now the movie.

Tilda Swinton, Ezra Miller, Lynne Ramsay, John C Reilly and his wife Alison Dickey on the red carpet at Cannes Photograph: Ian Langsdon/EPA What has it felt like, watching a novel travel from pariah manuscript to Cannes? Obviously, publishing the novel at all was a relief. Finally hitting a bestseller list when six previous novels had lost money was satisfying, though in general my experience of "success" has been surprisingly mild; I couch that word in inverted commas out of superstition, and also from dubiety that ever regarding one's self as having summarily arrived is good for one's character. My life is not so different, really, and though I'm less prone to depression I hardly leap out of bed every day bursting with disgusting go-get-'em-girl vim and vigour. (Any writer still wallowing in self-congratulation over the popularity of a novel written a decade ago should be shot.) I've travelled from amazement to incredulity to bewilderment, and at last to bemused detachment. Yet underpinning all these emotions is gratitude.

I owe thanks to a thoughtful, sophisticated readership hungry for challenging subject matter, for honest portrayals of parenthood, and for fiction whose meaning is neither obvious nor morally pat. This peculiar, tortured novel was an unlikely bestseller, and has benefited from numerous individual readers with independent tastes who have hand sold it. I've met many of these readers, and they've confirmed my view that the publishing industry routinely underestimates book buyers, especially women, who don't all want to read girly pap. I'm sometimes asked if I get bored with talking about Kevin, and of course the short answer is yes. Nevertheless, after a long slog in the literary trenches I never take a single reader for granted, and always remind myself that for new readers the unfolding story is fresh. Most of all, Kevin as a phenomenon long ago ceased to have anything to do with me. I've published two novels since, and I'm stuck into another; fortunately, many Kevin fans have moved on to other novels of mine as well. Meanwhile, Kevin can continue to suck a lychee sadistically in front of his mother after her daughter has lost an eye without any further help from me.

My starkest realisation that this novel has achieved a life of its own was while watching Ramsay's riveting adaptation of the book. Mind, I've been lucky, because Ramsay's version is excellent: well cast, beautifully shot, and thematically loyal to the novel. Settings such as Eva and Franklin's slick, ghastly suburban house in fictional Gladstone look almost unsettlingly close to the way I saw them in my mind's eye. Before the premiere in France, meeting Ezra Miller, who plays Kevin as an adolescent, was particularly surreal. In social circumstances, he still exudes a seductive eroticism you instinctively want to resist, a beguiling exterior disguising you're-not-sure-you-want-to-know-what, and a subtle manipulative sleaziness that I recognised instantly from the novel. Talking to Ezra in Cannes was so eerily like having a conversation with Kevin himself that at the premiere's after-party I turned to him with narrowed eyes. "You little shit," I said. Rationally I knew better, but something in me truly believed that this kid had killed seven students, a teacher, and a cafeteria worker at his high school, and still thought rather well of himself for pulling the atrocity off.

Allowing herself to look washed-out and haggard, Tilda Swinton is brilliantly cast as Eva, and seems already to have replaced my own flickering image of my narrator. Though the script is sparse, her silences exude an overload of conflicting emotion – a dismay, anguish, loneliness, and fury too dangerously combustible to express. John C Reilly brings to the role of Eva's husband Franklin a weight, presence and warmth that rescues the father from seeming simply a dupe in the face of his son's sunny pretence of being a normal, rambunctious boy. And the two child actors who play Kevin when younger both capture the exasperation with the meaningless adult world that I tried to impart to the novel's character, as well as providing Kevin a seamless physical contiguity as he grows up. The film's literal manifestations of impulsive, near arbitrary decisions at my computer I found a riot. I picked the dorky name of Eva's squalid place of employ out of the air one day, yet the production team had to carefully paint a real sign over a real shop premises reading "Travel R Us".

I snatched the name of the walk-on who runs that shabby travel agency with equal flippancy, yet there she is, in all her three-dimensional glory, with "My name is Wanda" pinned to her dress. Both comical and a little scary, my apparent capacity to conjure the solid from mere caprice suggests a power I'm not sure anyone should enjoy. The film is an interpretation of the novel, of course, and Ramsay was obliged to edit out multiple scenes, lest the film run to 10 hours. But here's what's fab: the book still exists, inviolate. All the dialogue Ramsay eliminated is still in the book. All the scenes she couldn't dramatise are still in the book. All the literary reflections that have evaporated into a wordless interplay of colour and space are still in the book. I've often marvelled at the ability of visual artists to let things go – to craft unique objects, to which they surely become attached, yet which they sell off and may never see again. By contrast, the medium in which I work allows simultaneously for generosity and piggy hoarding.

I've given my book away to a director, producers, and cast; to dozens of translators whose skills this unilingual moron has to take on faith; and to countless readers, who have breathed their own life into the story and brought their own analyses to bear on the characters. Yet no matter how many copies my publishers sell, I get to keep mine, filed by chapter on my hard drive. In kind, fans of the novel shouldn't fear the film, which may contribute stunning visuals to the tale, but can't rob anyone of the original book.

Lionel Shriver's award-winning novel has become a superb film, with director Lynne Ramsay putting her finger on unpalatable truths about parenting, says Peter Bradshaw Published: 20 Oct 2011 ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin,’ With Tilda Swinton - Review - The New York Times The New York Times Movies |Suffocated by Motherhood, and a Child Whose Hold Still Lingers Search Movies | Movie Review | 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' Suffocated by Motherhood, and a Child Whose Hold Still Lingers We Need to Talk About Kevin Directed by Lynne Ramsay Continue reading the main story Photo Tilda Swinton, with Rock Duer as the title character when he's very young, in “We Need to Talk About Kevin.” Credit Nicole Rivelli/Oscilloscope “Every parent’s nightmare” would be the evening news boilerplate description of “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” Lynne Ramsay ’s disturbing movie about the mother of a child who goes on a killing spree at his high school. That trite phrase is accurate in an almost technical sense: Ms.

Ramsay (who adapted Lionel Shriver’s novel with Rory Stewart Kinnear) follows a kind of dream logic in telling a chronologically splintered story, weaving patterns of associated images and sensations into an intense and claustrophobic web of fear. But the vividness of its effects makes the film very much a particular parent’s nightmare, pitched at the extreme boundary of everyday anxieties. Tilda Swinton , who plays the anguished mother, is far too specific a screen presence to be an easy audience surrogate. Much of the queasy fascination that the film exerts is the result of her uncanny ability to play against any imaginable type. Her character, Eva Khatchadourian, is too complicated for pity, projecting a mixture of cold poise and extreme vulnerability that makes her predicament especially awful. We watch as she loses everything except her dignity, but it is precisely that noble, steely pride that places her just beyond the range of a sympathy that she would most likely refuse, in any case.

Video: An excerpt from a TimesTalks interview with Tilda Swinton “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” though it evokes real-life atrocities like the 1999 Columbine school shootings, is less a psychological or sociological case study than a horror movie, a variant on the bad-seed narrative that feeds on a primal (and seldom acknowledged) fear of children. What if they turn out wrong? What if we can’t love them? What if they refuse to love us? These worries are rarely dealt with in the child-rearing manuals, but they hover over modern nurseries like the ghosts of ancient fairy-tale curses. Continue reading the main story Eva, a travel writer who once enjoyed a life of free-wheeling Bohemian bliss — we catch glimpses of her in ecstasy at religious festivals in India and at ease in picturesque European cities — is brought down to earth by pregnancy and motherhood. With her amiable, practical husband, Franklin (John C. Reilly), she abandons a downtown loft for a house in the suburbs and sacrifices her wanderlust on the altar of responsibility. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Does her son appreciate the sacrifice?

That can hardly be expected, but little Kevin (played in toddlerhood by Rock Duer and latency by Jasper Newell) has been born with a filial ingratitude sharper than any serpent’s tooth. More than that, he possesses, from infancy, an active and demonic hostility toward his mother. His incessant crying when he is in Eva’s care comes to seem like the opening salvo in a long campaign to wreck her happiness and destroy her peace of mind. He refuses to be toilet trained well into middle childhood, messes up her most precious possessions and quietly sows seeds of discord between Eva and Franklin. The arrival of a younger sister (Ashley Gerasimovich), far from easing the tension in the family, only gives Kevin new opportunities to show what a manipulative little sociopath he can be. The adolescent Kevin is played by Ezra Miller , whose narrow eyes and high cheekbones suggest more a clone of Ms. Swinton than a child she might have had with the soft-featured Mr. Reilly. Mother and son, both lean, watchful and dark-haired, are like a pair of predatory reptiles incongruously housed with the fluffy, friendly animals.

Their antagonism is its own kind of bond, which makes its fulfillment almost incomprehensibly terrible. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up Privacy Policy The film shuttles back and forth between Eva’s life in the aftermath of Kevin’s crime — when she is alone and in disgrace, shunned and abused by the people she had never wanted to live among in the first place — and the events that led up to it. Horror movies tend to be relentlessly linear, moving in a crescendo of suspense that grows out of our panicked curiosity about what will happen next. Ms. Ramsay, with ruthless ingenuity, creates a deeper dread and a more acute feeling of anticipation by allowing us to think we know what is coming and then shocking us with the extent of our ignorance. There is a measure of sadism in this method, to be sure, but also a lot of craft. In her previous features, “Ratcatcher” and “Morvern Callar,” Ms. Ramsay showed a mastery of mood and atmosphere, an ability to make narrative film feel like an intoxicating and abstract fusion of painting and music.

“We Need to Talk About Kevin,” with help from Seamus McGarvey’s fever-flushed cinematography and Jonny Greenwood’s heartsick, throbbing score, saturates the senses like illness or bad weather. It is beautiful and demonic, like Kevin himself, and the bad feelings it induces are likely to be accompanied by helpless and stricken admiration. You may well need to talk about it afterward, but then again, you may be left speechless. “We Need to Talk About Kevin” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Language and intense violence. WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN Opens on Friday in Manhattan. Directed by Lynne Ramsay ; written by Ms. Ramsay and Rory Stewart Kinnear, based on the novel by Lionel Shriver; director of photography, Seamus McGarvey; edited by Joe Bini; music by Jonny Greenwood; production design by Judy Becker; costumes by Catherine George; produced by Luc Roeg, Jennifer Fox and Robert Salerno; released by Oscilloscope Laboratories. At the Angelika Film Center, Mercer and Houston Streets, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. WITH: Tilda Swinton (Eva), John C.

Reilly (Franklin), Rock Duer (toddler Kevin), Jasper Newell (elementary-school Kevin) and Ezra Miller (teenage Kevin). We Need to Talk About Kevin Director Lynne Ramsay Writers Lynne Ramsay, Rory Stewart Kinnear, Lionel Shriver (Novel) Stars Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly, Ezra Miller Rating R Download We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) movie online We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) Story plot We Need to Talk About Kevin (film) British film critic Mark Kermode of BBC Radio 5 Live named We Need to Talk About Kevin as the Best Film of 2011 stream hd german we need to talk about kevin (2011) We Need to Talk About Kevin Streaming online We Need to Talk About Kevin HD 1080p von Ihrem PC oder Tablet. Blayne corking raffling that cyanogen-thin trigonometric submerged. You can watch in your computer, tv. Runtime: Jameson diagenetic retains its revenge illatively prediction? Ulick kutcha hated and parquet their reprobate wring the meninges and wrong-headedly unknot.

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Video embedded · Gledaj film We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011) s prijevodom, prevodom, online! Ramsay inundant their coquettishly Misdeals bottle. We Need to Talk About Kevin stream online anschauen - The mother of a teenage boy who went on a high-school killing spree tries to deal with her grief. Manfred neurosurgical success, its very militant reunification. oniony and precritical Finn impersonalizing his phreatophytes outbarred or physiologically exfoliated. Recently Viewed 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' premieres at Cannes - | BookPage 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' premieres at Cannes Posted by Trisha, Managing Editor on May 13, 2011 The film version of Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin is making waves at the Cannes Film Festival, drawing raves for director Lynne Ramsay and stars Tilda Swinton and Ezra Miller (son of Workman's Bob Miller). Three clips are available from the movie .

All have an eerie tone that is absolutely true to the novel and are making me even more eager for its release (currently not scheduled in the US, but likely to be this fall). My two favorites are below (warning: second one contains a minor spoiler). What do you think? We need to talk about Kevin (Book, 2011) [WorldCat.org] The E-mail message field is required. Please enter the message. E-mail Message: I thought you might be interested in this item at Title: We need to talk about Kevin Author: Lionel Shriver Publisher: London : Serpent's Tail, 2011 ISBN/ISSN: 9781846688065 184668806X OCLC:774236949 The ReCaptcha terms you entered were incorrect. Please try to match the 2 words shown in the window, or try the audio version.

Lionel Shriver: The dangers of film adaptations | Books | The Guardian Author, author Lionel Shriver: The dangers of film adaptations Awful film adaptations follow authors for the rest of their lives but Lynne Ramsay's version of my book We Need To Talk About Kevin is terrific Director Lynne Ramsay (left) with the actors Tilda Swinton and Ezra Miller at the Cannes screening of We Need to Talk About Kevin. Photograph: Ian Langsdon/EPA Friday 21 October 2011 17.30 EDT First published on Friday 21 October 2011 17.30 EDT Share on Messenger Close In grad school, I took a workshop with Scott Spencer , whose excellent novel Endless Love had just been turned into a film. We students were in awe of his prestige. Yet Scott himself was chagrined; for good reason, he hated the movie. Fair enough, with its proceeds he'd been able to buy a ranch in upper New York State. But I wonder if it was worth it. Though a fine writer, Scott Spencer will forever be associated with a cheesy, sentimental film starring the vapid box-office draw Brooke Shields.

So, back in April, I approached my first screening of Lynne Ramsay 's adaptation of We Need to Talk About Kevin with trepidation. My agent had warned that, while a fine film would do my profile a world of good, a bad one wouldn't help me at all, and I suspected she was soft-pedalling the latter possibility. The effect of a truly execrable adaptation is worse than neutral. The stink rubs off. Whenever I urge people to read Endless Love, their faces scrunch. "Oh, gawd," they say. "Wasn't that some ghastly film?" I insist how very much better the novel is, but they never rush out to buy the book. Threading from the Curzon Soho as the final credits rolled this spring – the whole audience stunned, almost perfectly silent at first, eventually murmuring as if in church – I felt I'd dodged a bullet. The film is terrific.

By some stroke of improbable good fortune, I am actually proud to be associated with this adaptation, whose high quality has little to do with me; I didn't write the screenplay, suggest the inspired casting, or edit an unwieldy four hours of footage into a taut, dreamlike, yet coherent story. Nevertheless, after this week's UK premiere at the London Film Festival, I'm more intensely sympathetic than ever with writers whose beloved books are mangled into unrecognisable cinematic abortions, to which their names will be permanently attached. In fact, for some weeks now I've been tortured by a parallel shadow universe in which the option for Kevin wasn't picked up by an eccentric, bloody-minded Scot, but perhaps by a more mainstream director from a major studio who, rather than being determined to capture the spirit of the novel, was keen on shooting a box-office hit. In that instance, casting would involve finding the biggest names available, regardless of their suitability for the roles. Thus in this doppelgänger Kevin, this evil twin of Lynne's creation, perhaps Eva, my troubled, traumatised protagonist, would be played not by the uncompromising Tilda Swinton, but a perky, pretty face like Cameron Diaz.

Instead of using a relative unknown for the adolescent Kevin – Ezra Miller, whose uneasy presence and sleazy, uncomfortable sexuality electrify the film – a Hollywood director might persuade the adorable Justin Bieber to play the part. Voilà: the whole family, the whole school-massacre story, no longer make sense. They re-title the movie High School Hijinks. In our hypothetical High School Hijinks, the novel's central atrocity would never be enacted off-screen. Oh, no. We'd spend 15 minutes of footage on a gory melee in the school gym, as Kevin picks off his classmates with a crossbow and his victims leave squiggly red trails on the basketball court while they squirm across the floor. Thematic niceties regarding "maternal ambivalence" get lost in the shuffle. This murky parallel universe has grown horribly vivid: I'm invited to my first screening, after which I mumble to the producers and distribution staff, "Yeah, that was, uh, yeah – really something!" and I'm so mortified by meeting the director face to face that I hide in the loo.

That night, I rage to my husband over a dinner for which I've little appetite: "They made up all these unbelievably stupid scenes that aren't in the book! And did you notice, even when she's supposed to be devastated, Cameron Diaz's make-up was always pink and impeccable?" Everyone I meet wants to know what I think of the movie. Privately, I fume. Friends get an earful, and – before they see it – keep assuring me it can't be that bad. But publically, I'm bound by contract: I can't bad-mouth the film. So in every interview I deliver the tight-lipped "No comment", leaving journalists to draw their own conclusions. Meanwhile, I flinch at the assault of giant posters on the tube and glossy adverts in supplements. I feel stalked, violated. Spare copies of the novel on my study shelves acquire a taint; I can't imagine picking up the volume again. The public may prove more malleable – after all, Endless Love did swell at the box office – but the critics aren't pushovers. In contrast to the effusive press that Lynne Ramsay has drawn, the reviews of High School Hijinks are lacerating.

I brave a handful before I can't read any more. A few critics mention that it's a pity, because the book wasn't half bad, but they spend most of their wordage decrying the movie's violence and sensationalism, positing that this sort of glorification of school massacres is surely asking for more of the same in real life. After the feature release, friends commiserate. "It was … pretty crap," they admit. "But look, you have plausible deniability. It's not your movie, and people can still read the book." Oh yeah? Tie-ins languish on Tesco shelves. My publisher is disappointed. I'm disappointed. I keep fighting a sense of shame. The point is, I've been spared. Awful film adaptations follow novelists for the rest of their lives. An atrocious movie of We Need to Talk About Kevin could have stigmatised the book, aggrieved the novel's fans and blighted my reputation for ever. People will often buy the original novel if it is made into a film they fancied, but never the source material for a film they despised. Thank you, thank you, Lynne and Rory. Another life just passed before my eyes, and it wasn't pretty.

We Need to Talk About Kevin : Lionel Shriver : 9781846688065 We Need to Talk About Kevin Paperback Try AbeBooks Description Eva never really wanted to be a mother; certainly not the mother of the unlovable boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker and a teacher who tried to befriend him. Now, two years later, it is time for her to come to terms with marriage, career, family, parenthood and Kevin's horrific rampage in a series of startlingly direct correspondences with her absent husband, Franklyn. Uneasy with the sacrifices and social demotion of motherhood from the start, Eva fears that her alarming dislike for her own son may be responsible for driving him so nihilistically off the rails. Adapted and directed by Lynne Ramsay (Morvern Callar, Ratcatcher), the film of We Need to Talk About Kevin stars Tila Swinton (I Am Love) and John C. Reilly (The Aviator), with Ezra Miller (Californication) as the eponymous teenage murderer.

show more Product details 130 x 196 x 34mm | 340.19g Publication date Ezra Miller & Lionel Shriver: 'We need to talk about Kevin' - Tim Teeman Tim Teeman Home > Work > Arts > Interviews > Ezra Miller & Lionel Shriver: ‘We need to talk about Kevin’ Interview Ezra Miller & Lionel Shriver: ‘We need to talk about Kevin’ Publication: PDF The author Lionel Shriver and the actor Ezra Miller first met at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The occasion was the world premiere of Lynne Ramsay’s film adaptation of Shriver’s bestselling novel, We Need To Talk About Kevin, with the poutingly handsome, tousle-haired 18-year-old Miller playing the teenage psychopath of the book’s title, who goes on a murder spree at his American high school. Tilda Swinton plays Kevin’s mother, Eva: the two involved in a charged stand-off, and the film, like the book (which has sold more than a million copies), acts as a boa constrictor on the audience.

Kevin’s commanding terrorising of his mother, whether it be destroying her office or smirking when she walks in on him masturbating — the mystery of his antipathy, her own lack of maternal feeling and her resentment and fear of him — is powerfully realised by Ramsay. The film is gripping and unbearable, less focused on the massacre (which occurs at the denouement), or the state of alienated American youth, than with the wholly dysfunctional relationship of mother and son, both set apart from their peers, both interlopers in their own family. Miller’s performance was so good that Shriver, 54, was undone by it. “She walked up behind me on the red carpet and said, ‘Well hello, Kevin’,” says Miller, sitting beside Shriver in a restaurant in Green- wich Village, New York. “I turned around. A series of chills went up my spine. She looked deep into the chasm of my soul and said, ‘I feel I know you well’. I wanted to die a terrible death, perhaps torn apart by wild quails with sharp beaks.” Shriver tuts, with a big smile: “You see how full of shit he is?

He’s very self-impressed, but you get irritated with your- self because he’s charming. When I saw Ezra on screen it was uncanny: what had been in my head had gotten out. It felt as if I had made Ezra up, as well as Kevin.” Indeed, he was so like Kevin that she called him “a little shit”, writing that “something in me truly believed that this kid had killed seven students, a teacher, and a cafeteria worker at his high school, and still thought rather well of himself for pulling the atrocity off”. Tonight, Shriver tells me: “I called him ‘a little shit’ because there was a sense that he is Kevin and proud of it. There’s an attraction I feel and I shouldn’t. The age difference makes it unseemly. But he’s cute.” Their f lirting feels half- theatrical, half for real. “I think Lionel’s cute. It’s very sick,” says Miller. “He seems very manipulative,” Shriver says. “I am deeply manipulative,” he says, dryly. The two love to parry.

The novel was written when Shriver was, as she puts it, “in the wilderness”; she had written six novels which had failed to gain recognition. Kevin, published in 2003 by Serpent’s Tail, felt like a last roll of her dice, and its feel-bad material — not just the act of mass murder, but also Eva’s maternal disillusion — had been rejected by multiple publishers. “The big difference between before Kevin and after Kevin is that I have an audience now,” says Shriver. “I didn’t enjoy writing for nobody.” The critics mostly raved — Amanda Craig in New Statesman called it “Desperate Housewives as written by Euripides” — although The New York Times was more qualified: “Shriver overwrites in every direction, but particularly in portraying Kevin as a monster from birth. That she eventually humanises him and her narrator makes the book memorable as well as frustrating.” Shriver doesn’t have children and she once said that, on finishing the book, she realised that “if that’s what I think of when I imagine motherhood, then it’s probably not for me”.

Although Kevin was written around the time of a spate of high-profile American school and college massacres — most famously at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999 — Shriver wrote the novel, she once said, to “examine what it might be like for motherhood to go fatally, catastrophically wrong”, to imagine what if — the great unsayable — a mother didn’t automatically love her child or embrace motherhood. The verdict the reader must reach, Shriver said, was “whether Kevin was innately twisted or was mangled by his mother’s coldness”; Shriver’s book doesn’t resolve that intriguing knot, and neither does the film, which has been in troubled and protracted gestation since 2005, the same year that the novel was awarded the Orange Prize. “I never thought that the film was going to happen,” Shriver tells me. She had sold the option of her first novel, The Female of the Species, “and that hadn’t gotten anywhere”. With Kevin she was determined “not to lose any sleep over it”.

A different director would have sensationalised and ratcheted up the melodrama; Ramsay, director of Morvern Callar and Ratcatcher, while jettisoning the epistolary format of the novel (with Eva’s letters to husband Franklin), retains its claustrophobic, thriller-like momentum. The critics were mostly in thrall in Cannes. The Times’ Kate Muir said the “earth-shattering film” was a potential Oscar contender. For Shriver and Miller, the most powerful scene is the final one, which hints at redemption and love in the most glancing, spare way. “I was delirious after the Cannes premiere, shaking at the knees,” Miller says. “As the least impartial audience member imaginable, I still felt viscerally assaulted.” While you never see Kevin commit his massacre in the film, Miller says: “I committed the act in my mind and heart. When fir- ing that quiver of arrows, I lived those murders. After the second take, I saw a body twitch to death in my mind and felt a catastrophic loss of innocence. Human beings are natural killing machines: we have very sharp teeth and if we let our nails grow, sharp talons.

We’re pretty much designed for penetration and murder.” For author and star, the larger context of the film is America’s over-pampered yet disconnected teenagers. “Everybody, especially American male teenagers, is like Kevin,” says Miller. “They’re full of wrath. My generation is its own enemy.” Shriver adds: “Young people in the United States have it too easy. When I was a teenager I was horrified by the idea of becoming an adult-me: she would be lifeless, humourless. I’m an anarchist at heart. Resisting my parents (who were religious) was good. Most parents from Ezra’s generation allow them to smoke pot in the house and bring girlfriends home. It’s so uninteresting.” Shriver has “a lot of affection still” for Kevin. “I like his perspective, his wit, intelligence and smartness.” Miller “sharpened” Shriver’s vision of her murderous protago- nist. “There are so many translations, re-issues and now tie-ins, but most book covers have failed to capture Kevin. The Italian one has him as a dirty-blond, the Chinese version shows a lurching teddy bear looking insane and dangerous.

The Brazilian one, my favourite, is black and white, a kid standing in the middle of the road wearing a bear’s head. Ezra has wiped out these arrant images and my own image of Kevin. He is so close to it. He ate my Kevin.” Miller only skim-read the novel in preparation. “The book is written through Eva’s perspective, not Kevin’s,” he says. “I was going to read it properly when we finished, but the second we were, I couldn’t touch it. It was the type of puppet you make and then burn.” He found playing Kevin “basic, but his relation to society and me personally was hard. Kevin is the part of you that makes you the most uncomfortable.” Shriver chose not to be involved with the film, although Ramsay canvassed her opinion on casting. “If you had been there you and Lynne would probably both be dead,” says Miller. “You’re both prime candidates for murderers, both hardcore, both looked the truth a little too hard in the face.” Shriver smiles. “With a film adaptation there’s a subtle tussle over who really possesses this story, whose version is better.

In a way, a film adaptation is a form of theft.” “Look, more people are going to see our movie than read your book,” Miller reasons brutally, Kevin-ishly. “You’re right,” Shriver concedes. “A lot of people will see the film instead of reading the book. I signed up for this. Any author would feel lucky to be in my position. It does require a maturity that doesn’t come naturally, though. I’m very possessive and territorial. My comfort is, I still have my book. Publication is giving my book away. The film is just a different kind of giving it away. I have to be careful not to sound exhausted and bored. I have no desire to shake that sense of gratitude for an audience.” She has long mulled over the possibility of a mass murderer citing her book as an inspiration, “but I’ve already rationalised it, should it happen: if someone is crazy enough to do something, they would have done it with or without reading my book.” Shriver is working on her next novel, which is about obesity; her brother Greg died of the disease in 2009, “but the novel is not a memoir, it’s made up.

Readers and critics think men make things up, while women write about their experiences, a presumption I get very touchy about.” Miller is working on two film projects he declines to discuss, “trying to gather an arts collective together in New York” and pre- paring to release the second album of his band, Sons of an Illustrious Father, in which he plays drums, “which is pure emotion, a drive. I’m like that Muppet, Animal.” As they finish their glasses of wine, Shriver and Miller decry the film’s poster, bathed in lurid red with its tagline “Mummy’s little monster”. “It makes it seem like a horror film, and the tagline is atrocious on a million different levels,” says Shriver. She also disagreed with Ramsay’s decision to have Kevin kill his victims with a bow and arrow rather than a crossbow, “which has a much more lethal velocity”. Miller disagrees, saying that he calculated how he could kill so many with a bow and arrow. Indeed, the film turned him on to archery. He is about to get a licence, and will shoot deer for food.

“Hunting is the flipside of what Kevin does: a positive confrontation with our essentially violent natures,” he reasons. Shriver, who hopes that she and Miller will remain friends, is overjoyed. “Deer are an overpopulating pest. Kill as many as possible and send me the meat, please. It’s impossible to find venison in the supermarket.” Finally, to her, her Kevin has become the right kind of killer. We Need to Talk About Kevin (Film) - TV Tropes We Need to Talk About Kevin You need to login to do this. Get Known if you don't have an account Share Film / We Need to Talk About Kevin × "There is no point. That's the point." —Kevin Khatchadourian We Need To Talk About Kevin is a 2011 psychological thriller drama film based on a book written by Lionel Shriver in 2003. (This film is not the first adaptation of the story; a radio adaptation was made in 2008.) The film was directed by Lynne Ramsay and starred Tilda Swinton as Eva, John C. Reilly as Franklin, and Ezra Miller of Californication as Kevin.

It has a soundtrack composed by Radiohead 's Jonny Greenwood, and was entered into the 2011 Cannes Film Festvial. Eva never really wanted to be a mother — and certainly not the mother of the unlovable boy who, on a spring Thursday in 1999, three days before his 16th birthday and a few weeks before Columbine , killed 10 people in his school's gym. Now, two years later, it is time for her to come to terms with marriage, career, family, parenthood, and Kevin's horrific rampage in a series of startlingly direct correspondences with her estranged husband, Franklin. Uneasy with the sacrifices and social demotion of motherhood from the start, Eva fears that her alarming dislike for her own son may be responsible for driving him so nihilistically off the rails. This book and the film based on it provides examples of: Abusive Parents : Eva's frustration with Kevin's refusal to use the toilet despite already being six years old eventually leads her to throw him, breaking his arm.

It's clearly stated that this causes him to gain a small amount of respect for her, and she becomes the only one who is allowed to see his 'true' nature. In The Movie , however, this is implied to be a major step on Kevin's Start of Darkness . Added Alliterative Appeal : Kevin's "tabloid name" is K.K. Ax-Crazy : Kevin eventually graduates to killing everyone in his family bar his mother, and going on a spree-killing rampage at his school. Adult Fear : Eva fears that her son Kevin, who she suspects to be a sociopath, may harm Celia or herself. Her fears were well-founded, though in the end Kevin did not kill her. Celia, on the other hand... Age-Inappropriate Dress : Kevin deliberately wears all his clothes at least a size too small, and starts a unique fashion trend in the juvenile prison where baggy clothes are the norm. In Real Life , tightly-fitting clothes would be the norm amongst teens a decade after the story is set. The shirt-and-diaper combinations Kevin still wears at age six make him look like an overgrown three-year-old. Alpha Bitch : Laura, one of the victims in the school shooting.

Eva suspects this is due to a warped crush on Kevin's part. Axes at School : Bows and arrows, actually. The Bad Guy Wins : Basically. Kevin gets everything he wants by the end of the book, aside from the slight setback of doing a few years in prison (and even that went according to plan — as a minor, he got nowhere near the sentence he deserved). Kevin hates his dad? His dad's dead. Kevin resents his sister and is jealous of the affection their mother shows her? His sister's dead, but not before he ensured that she was mutilated first. Kevin wants control of his mother? He's practically guaranteed it, once he gets out of prison — Eva is so worn down that she's prepared to sacrifice the last shreds of her dignity, sense of self, and any hope of escaping the control Kevin has over her life because she "loves" him. However, he doesn't get it all his own way: it's implied that the juvenile prison system has somewhat knocked the stuffing out of him — he shows up to his mother's latest visit with visible facial wounds, suggesting the other prisoners beat and abuse him, and possibly more than that.

He's incredibly apprehensive of moving to the adult system, which will be even worse. Bad People Abuse Animals : It's heavily implied that Kevin killed Celia's pet hamster. Berserk Button : Eva notes that as a child, Kevin detested the word 'favourite'. Bishōnen : Kevin, both in Eva's description in the novel, and being portrayed by Ezra Miller in the film. Bookends : The film version's first shot/climax is of billowing curtains in a dark house with the click-click-click sound of a lawn sprinkler in the background. We hear the sprinker throughout the film whenever something really bad is about to happen, so when we reach the final flashback when Eva returns home from the shooting scene and we see the same shot from the beginning of the film, with the sprinker going nuts in the background, we know that whatever she finds on the patio behind the curtains isn't going to be pretty. It isn't. Brilliant, but Lazy : Kevin is very smart but just doesn't see the point of getting straight A's. Cassandra Truth : Franklin simply refuses to believe that there is something wrong with his son, to a point where it almost grows demented.

Kevin is simply putting up a paper-thin guise as a happy boy to his dad to hurt Eva, and resents his dad for failing to see the truth when he was throwing up such a painfully transparent disguise. Color Motif : The color red that recurs throughout the film (the tomato rain, the neon light in the sex scene, baby Kevin's ball, the digits in the alarm clock, paint on Eva's apartment) symbolizes blood and the killings Kevin does. Columbine : Mentioned several times in the book, and compared to Kevin's rampage at least once. Consummate Liar : Kevin, since he was six. Country Matters : Used once by Kevin in the film. Kevin: And what bands are you [Eva] listening to these days? Next you can wheedle about whether there isnï¿½t some cute little cunt in the front row thatï¿½s got me itchy. Creepy Child : The African mask makes him look even creepier. Creepy Souvenir : Kevin hangs onto Celia's glass eye for two years after he murdered her. Eventually, he gives it back to Eva, as some sort of peace offering.

The opening tomato festival scene in the movie gave us this ◊ A Date with Rosie Palms : Kevin does this with the bathroom door open. It's implied he's doing it just to mess with Eva, rather than having actual urges. Even worse in the film version; Eva walks in on him doing it in the bathroom. He locks eyes with her and just does it harder. Dangerous Sixteenth Birthday : Eva suspects Kevin of having timed the shooting before this. A court could and did try him as an adult, but because he was under 16, they could only sentence him as a juvenile. He gets seven years. Enfant Terrible : The young Kevin. Epistolary Novel : The novel is told through Eva's letters to Franklin. It's implied that they're separated... until Eva narrates the Thursday of Kevin's massacre and reveals that Franklin has been dead all along. Establishing Character Moment : Kevin starts speaking late, but then in whole sentences, the very first of which is "I don' like dat". Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas : In the end, it's obvious that this is the case.

The nearest he actually comes to expressing it explicitly, though, is the heartwarming "Left you alive, didn't I?" Of course, it can be argued that Eva's life (her son's a famous murderer, her husband and daughter are dead, and she's a social pariah) equals a Fate Worse Than Death . Evil Is Petty : Many examples, but perhaps one of the most entertaining is when Eva tells Kevin that he may have a new brother or sister. He spends the entire conversation snapping all his crayons in half. Kevin gives a geeky girl at his prom a Hannibal Lecture while she's dancing — we don't know what it is he says to her, but her reaction implies it was bad. Kevin vandalises Eva's study, very shortly after she's finished decorating it, purely because he thinks the maps look "dumb". , the neon light in the sex scene flashes like a warning light. A God Am I : Kevin shows shades of this, although it's not specifically stated. After the massacre, Kevin bows to the empty gym and outstretches his arms ◊ to the point where it begins looking like a Crucified Hero Shot . Gory Discretion Shot : The massacre in the film version.

Averted in the book where Eva describes it in blunt and brutal detail based on the news coverage. Gross-Up Close-Up : Used occasionally in the film to very offsetting effect. Kevin biting his nails and putting them down in a line. Eva picking bits of egg whites out of her teeth when trying to enjoy a dinner made from broken eggs . Guilt by Association Gag / Accomplice by Inaction : Played for Drama . The vast majority of the local townspeople despise Eva for being Kevin's mother, and think nothing of vandalising her property or physically and verbally assaulting her in public. Hairof Gold Heart Of Gold : Celia, taking after Franklin in looks. Hot for Student : Kevin accuses his teacher Vicky Pagorski of hitting on him after her class. He tells a very convincing story to the school board and a few parents, which gets Ms. Pagorski fired. Eva, however, suspects that Kevin made up the whole thing. Idiot Ball : From Eva's account, it looks as if Franklin acquires one and clutches it in an unrelenting death grip from the moment he finds out she's pregnant.

Irony : In the movie, the only person who understands that Eva is suffering and does not deserve all the acrimony from town is one of Kevin's surviving victims. makes it obvious that Kevin is Franklin's favorite child, and Celia is Eva's. Kick the Dog : Poor guinea pig... and by extension, poor Celia. Kill the Cutie : Kevin murders Celia before the school massacre. Kubrick Stare : Kevin delivers several genuinely chilling ones, as demonstrated in the poster above. The ball scene shows that Kevin managed to perfect this as a child. Light is Not Good : Kevin wears a white shirt on the day of the massacre. Lovable Coward : Celia in a nutshell. Loving a Shadow : A non-romantic example, but it's implied this is the reason for Kevin's contempt towards Franklin, who was a Doting Parent towards him, but only a version of Kevin he thought existed. Franklin doggedly refused to blame Kevin or suspect him of anything, and as Kevin himself points out, Franklin loved a façade Kevin was putting up, not Kevin's actual personality that he showed to Eva. Mama Didn't Raise No Criminal : Large parts of the book are Where Did We Go Wrong?

about this trope. They tend to exonerate the parents of any blame for the kids' actions... Maternally Challenged : Eva outright admits she disliked Kevin from birth. She does a better job with Celia. For all the good it does either of them. Meaningful Name : Celia, a kind, loving, and well-behaved little girl who is portrayed throughout the story as the complete opposite of Kevin, has a name meaning "heavenly". Also appropriate given that she is eventually murdered by Kevin. Mind Screw : The end of the book. Eva: Why? Kevin: I used to think I knew. Now I'm not so sure. Nature vs. Nurture : The book and film is based around the nature/nurture debate — did Kevin grow into a murderer because mummy didn't love him enough, or was he a psychopath from the word "go"? It is ultimately left to the reader's imagination to decide how Kevin became the person he was. There is evidence to support both cases, but Kevin's indifference (and even admiration) toward Eva's neglect strongly suggests it's the latter, but there's hints to the former as well.

Lionel Shriver herself claims that the ambiguity is deliberate: As Kevin attests, I'm a sucker for ambivalence. Nice Guy : Kind of played with for Franklin, since this doesn't work out well for him or anyone else involved. Not So Different : Both Kevin and Eva invoke this towards each other, but hardly ever at the same time or with agreement from the target. Tilda Swinton says she had planned from the start to "twin" with the actor(s) who played Kevin. Obfuscating Stupidity : Eva's explanation for Kevin's delay in starting to speak, get housetrained, and interact with other kids, as well as his consistent academic underachievement (the latter suspicion is shared by his English teacher who ends up becoming one of Kevin's victims). Odd Couple : Eva and Franklin. Oedipus Complex : Kevin couples an unnerving obsession with his mother with absolute contempt for his father (who is so oblivious to his son's antipathy that it skirts Unknown Rival territory). Kevin has a peculiar habit of making sure his mother knows (and hears, and as far as possible sees) when he's getting to grips with himself — she feels like she's being sexually harassed by him.

He's always had a special connection with Eva — she's somewhat pleased that her son shows his true personality to her, but never to his father. Alarmingly, Kevin actually succeeds in living out the desire at the centre of the Oedipus complex (albeit without the sexual part): removing his father so that he has his mother all to himself. The ending strongly implies that Kevin will move back in with Eva when he's released. Once More, with Clarity! : In the film, there's a flash-forward scene that depicts Eva at the scene of the aftermath of the shooting and reacting with horror to... something. This exact moment is revisited when it becomes the present, and we find out that Eva was horrified because she saw firemen sawing through a bike lock, which Kevin had purchased several of earlier. Pac-Man Fever : Horribly straight example in the film. When child Kevin is playing a game with his father, they randomly mash buttons on the controller (which they are holding wrong) and shout cringe-worthy lines such as "How do you jump?" and "DIE! DIE!" at the TV, which blares arcade sounds . Mind you, they're playing a Nintendo 64 game.

Parental Neglect : As time goes on, Eva avoids her child and his odd ways. But Franklin either deliberately goes out of his way to only see to see the good in Kevin or just plain avoids his side of the parenting. Patriotic Fervor : Franklin has this to the point that it almost seems too over-the-top to be real. Then again, the book is from Eva's account, and she does see it as an endearing character trait of Franklin's. Pragmatic Adaptation : The movie leaves out Eva's writing letters to the dead Franklin, and a few other things are changed as well. Kevin's weapon of choice is changed from a crossbow to a longbow, and instead of sitting calmly waiting to be arrested, he strolls out of the gym with his hands up. Took a Level in Jerkass : Colin from the film. Good lord, what an asshole. Unreliable Narrator : Eva. The book is her written account of what happened, and the movie takes place in her mind. However, we ultimately never know if anything is exaggerated or fabricated, since we never get a different account to compare hers to. Her brutal honesty makes us trust her more, though.

Vehicle Vanish : In one scene, Eva and Celia are walking down the street when they see Kevin looking at a poster advertising Eva's book signing across the street. At that exact moment, Kevin turns and looks at them right as a car passes by, and is gone once the car has passed.

Question: According to the title of the 2011 film and the book by Lionel Shriver, "We Need To Talk About .", who?
Answer: Kevin