This weekâs rebroadcast from 20041 features a lightly edited transcript of Johnâs first meeting with Big Fish author Daniel Wallace at a Richmond, Virginia IHOP in 1998. For context, the film was released in 2003.
John: What was your original intention with Big Fish? Did you sit down thinking, âIâm going to make a novel about this,â or was it pieces that came together?
Daniel: It started with bits and pieces. Originally, the very beginning was my interest in myth. Iâve always thought of myth as being a way to explain things that we canât understand otherwise.
John: Like, why thereâs thunder.
Daniel: Thatâs exactly right. Itâs always easier to have some sort of explanation, even when you may know itâs not quite accurate or not quite real. It satisfies something. Anythingâs better than not understanding. Even untruth sometimes is better than not knowing anything.
John: Did you write it from beginning to end, or did you write in bits and pieces?
Daniel: Bits and pieces. One of the earliest pieces in the book was âIn Which He Buys a Town.â That was one of the first things I wrote.
John: Did you know the character of Edward Bloom as you were writing that, or was it just the concept of a man buying a town?
Daniel: At the time I wrote that, he wasnât a dying father, but he was a father. He was the same character, but I didnât have the before and after in the context of the final plot. What I had was a way to explain adultery, and a Howard Hughesian character, a rich eccentric, but a warm, kind, handsome man that was almost old, but not quite old yet. Who is unsatisfied with his emotional life, and his life in general at home, and is looking for ways to satisfy that. And so he buys a town.
John: So you had the Edward character and the town. What made you want to tell more of the story?
Daniel: Right. I wrote a couple more scenes, and I canât remember exactly what came after that, but eventually I had 2 or 3 together, and I could see a story developing and a beginning, a middle and an end. And eventually, I wrote the book in just myth form, no death scenes. It was basically what you see there, without the death scenes.
John: Told by?
Daniel: Well, see, you didnât really know. You had to assume a lot. You had to really really work at figuring out what was going on. It was clear to me what was going on, but my agent read it, and he submitted it to a couple of publishers in that form, and they didnât really know what was going on. That so often happens when youâre writing for yourself and have to think of other people. You have to add explanation you didnât think you needed. Iâm sure youâve found that in your work. So I went back and did the death scenes. To me, the son was always the narrator. He was trying to explain his father. To me the book is really no different, with or without the death scenes, because I know so much that I didnât feel like I had to say.
John: Thatâs so much of what the book is â whatâs left unsaid. Itâs like a tree thatâs been pruned back really tight. You can sort of sense where the rest of the tree was without seeing it.
Daniel: What stands out to you as an example of that?
John: Meeting the wife, the mother, the encounter with the father-in-law, which is clearly something that actually did happen at a certain point, but itâs being told through the prism of everything has to be exaggerated, and much much bigger-than-life. Whatâs so interesting is that the father-in-law is actually a person who the son can go back and verify.
Daniel: His grandfather.
John: He can see what heâs actually like, versus what the father is telling him. Yet in terms of the book, we never focus on the son trying to rectify those inconsistencies. Itâs more his frustration that the father is maintaining this charade, this bravado. But before you had the death scenes, there wasnât that ticking clock, there wasnât that urgency about finding it.
Daniel: No, it was much more a literary exercise without the death scenes, and it wasnât cohesive. It didnât have the humanity. The myths are so far out, you really needed to have something to sink your teeth into, real people that these myths are based on. And you needed to have a real father, that was dying there and be able to apply these myths to him. Without the death scenes, the book did not work as a book.
John: So, in the writing, how much did you generate versus how much actually made it into the book? Was there more stuff that got dropped?
Daniel: There may be 20 pages that got trimmed, not that much.
John: Whole scenes or stuff within scenes?
Daniel: The original version of the book was darker than it ended up being.
John: Darker, in that you didnât have the resolution, or the overall tone?
Daniel: There was this real anger and bitterness, resentment, toward the father. And in a much earlier version there were footnotes to the book. It was actually written with footnotes so that a lot of the mythological scenes were explained.
John: Were documented.
Daniel: Were documented saying, âThis is based on blah blah blah, there was no actual giant. Toby so-and-so was a big guy who livedâŚâ and there was all that explanation. âThere was no ferocious dog. It was just some dog that was next door that always humped my fatherâs leg as he was trying come home and he would kick him offâ or something. So, I got rid of those.
John: Why did you get rid of the notes?
Daniel: The footnotes were hard to read. I really love the idea of footnotes. Do you read Nicholson Baker? Or Tim OâBrienâs new book Tomcat in Love has footnotes, and they were a good idea, but theyâre hard for a reader.
John: It breaks the flow.
Daniel: It really does. I love the idea of doing them, but I donât think they really work in the long run. But the darkness was something I really had to work with my editor on. She wanted a more celebratory book than Iâd written at first. She didnât want the darkness as much as I felt like I did.
John: I think the darkness comes through. What I like so much about the Edward Bloom character as the old man, was that heâs really funny. If you met him an hour ago, and you were talking with him, youâd think he was really funny. But if you were actually his son, youâd be incredibly frustrated by him, because you canât turn him off. Youâd want to be able to stop the bullshit, but thereâs no switch.
THE QUEST
John: Classically, heroes have quests. Thereâs a thing which they need to accomplish, to do. One of the challenging things about the book as I read it now is, we donât know what the fatherâs quest is, because a third person is telling it, and we canât see where heâs going. Do you think he has a quest? Do you think thereâs something heâs specifically trying to go for?
Daniel: There are a couple of times itâs alluded to, the title of the book for instance, he wants to be a Big Fish in a Big Pond, he doesnât want to be a Big Fish in a little pond. So in a very generalized vague sense, thatâs his quest.
John: He wants to be a Big Fish in a big pond, which is great, but itâs really abstract. Itâs not an achievable thing. Itâs not a grail.
Daniel: See thatâs a problem. Well, not necessarily a problem. At one point in the book one of the death scenes, the son was wondering why his father continued to work the way he did, it was this constant effort. He looked around, he didnât see anything that they really needed. The father ran his own company â it wasnât for promotion or money, it was like for the battle. It wasnât for the victory, it was for the continuation. It was almost like a life force in and of itself. Moving on through battle to battle and almost â this isnât in the book specifically â but if there wasnât a battle, he would create one. I mean my own father would make problems if he didnât have any, because he was motivated by problems. He was motivated by anxiety and worry.
John: And if there wasnât a dragon to slay, youâd have to build a dragon to kill. In talking to the studio about it, theyâve been really hung up about, âWhatâs the fatherâs quest?â And I try to explain that the storyâs a mystery. Itâs Citizen Kane in that the son is trying to understand his father. Heâs trying to understand what that quest is.
Daniel: Except thereâs no rosebud.
John: Thatâs their question, âWhat is his rosebud?â So, in talking about it, I fall back on fish and water metaphors. The father is a salmon swimming upstream, trying to get to this place. He doesnât even specifically know what it is, but heâs driven to get there, and he will go through any obstacle to do it. The father is a fish from the start. Whatever miracle that led to his birth, he is a fish. If you look at him as a man, heâs really frustrating, but if you look at him as a fish, heâs actually a very successful fish. Itâs like the ugly duckling version. I can feel it, but itâs hard to put into specific words to make that make sense.
Daniel: The son wants something out of his father that heâs not getting, and in a way itâs a negative quest. Thatâs the real tragedy of it, is that heâs not part of his fatherâs life.
John: William enters the story with a goal of making his father be real for even just five minutes â treat him like a grownup and address the reality of the situation. By the end of the movie, where William needs to get, is to accept his father for what he is. Heâll never really understand his father, but he can sort of love him in spite of it. And thatâs a really feasible, do-able movie. Thatâs not hard. The challenge is that so much of the movie will be focusing on the heroic story, the myth. If we donât know where the hero is trying to get to - if we donât know that heâs trying to get to XâŚ
Daniel: Yeah, heâs got to arrive somewhere. Well, in one version of the story, youâve got him returning to the water where he came from.
John: Which brings me to the Girl in the River. Tell me where she came from and what she is doing.
Daniel: You know, so much of what you write, you really donât know what youâre doing. I wish I could say, âOh, I know exactly what this was supposed to do and represent and be.â But Iâm sure youâve had the experience too, where you do something and you go, âWhere did that come from?â I remember her first appearance came in the first myth that you read about, where he comes to that grove and sees her in the river bathingâŚ
John: Yeah, with the stick and the snake.
Daniel: At that time, I was using her as a sexual initiation, in a way, without the sex, or this awareness of the other sex, whatever. And she wasnât going to appear again in the book. I didnât think of her as being a reappearing character. But she came back when he was leaving Ashland. When he went down to the lake, it seemed to make sense that she would be there to say goodbye to him, because she represented part of his youth â a very simple, unadorned, beautiful part â and he was leaving all that behind. And then later she comes in when the ship is sinking, and saves his life. I actually did research to find out how a boat sinks, what happens and everything. I knew he jumped overboard and went underwater, and there would be all this oil on the surface, and people get sucked under by the boat going down, and fire, and you didnât want to get oil all over you because that would make you sink. So once he was underwater, she just came back. Then, Greek myths, heroes, usually have a goddess that watches over them and protects them, like Athena was Odysseusâ protector. I think it was Athena. You know how it goes, some of the Gods are against them, and thereâs always one that is for them and saves them all the time, and that was sort of a take on that.
John: I think sheâs an important character to re-appear. Itâs great that sheâs the same age every time. You think sheâs one thing at firstâŚ
Daniel: A young girl.
John: And nothing else. But then she keeps coming back and re-appearing, and even at the end sheâs the same age, and you know sheâs not part of the normal scheme of the world. She becomes an important rhyming device. Movies, I think even more so than books, need to be able to rhyme visually and thematically.
Daniel: This is a great book for that, donât you think? Getting back to the water thing, and the girl. One of the great pieces of writing advice that Iâve gotten, always have three things. My friend called them three horses, and you ride one horse for a while, and then you get on the other one, and you move around between the three things, and you juggle them. And it can get pretty complex, but still youâre dealing with three things, and it keeps you in the story, it keeps the writer part of the story, and the reader. I guess thatâs the same thing with this movie.
John: The biggest difference between movies and a book, is a book you can stop and think about things, but in a movie youâre not allowed to stop. So itâs important to create a system by which you can understand how to watch a movie, and rhyming is one of the main ways you do that. The other simple way is in the first ten minutes of the movie, you give the instructions on how the movie functions. You donât give everything away, but you set up the speed at which the movie will happen and what expectations you should have. One of the big challenges in adapting this book is that you have two story lines, each of which has three acts, but you have to move back and forth between them as smoothly as you can.
THE DEATH
John: Talk to me about Edwardâs transformation into the fish. At what point are we supposed to stop taking William literally? In the death scenes, weâve been taking them more or less at face value, and suddenly weâre not supposed to. At the very end, magical realism sort of swoops in.
Daniel: Itâs all real until right here, where he dies. [Shows John in book, bottom of page 174.] This is where everything merges. The only people who have not liked this book have not liked it because they wanted the father and son to hold hands and come to some touching conclusion, and have some real understanding. Well, that never happens. But this is where the son makes it happen, or whatever is going to happen, happens.
John: What I did like so much about the ending, is they didnât have that âLetâs hug and cryâ and âWeâve grown so much.â I like that he dies like a real person, in terms of what you actually show on screen. I was there when my father died and when my grandmother died. Death is a really strange thing, because itâs not like this event, itâs just suddenly an absence. And thereâs the weird moment â do you call somebody, or what do you do next? In terms of our story, Iâd love to be able to let Edward die the way a natural, real person dies. As weâre at his funeral, we start to see some people from the mythological world, but in their actual real versions. So the guy who was a giant was just this really tall guy.
Daniel: Sort of, maybe, tubby and real big.
John: Yeah. Itâs not The Wizard of Oz, but there is a payoff. One thing that the studio asked from the start was, can we bring back more characters from earlier on in the story?
Daniel: Like in the town?
John: Exactly. Even if the character doesnât play a big function in the scene, we can still recycle somebody. For instance, the wedding. The giant can show up in the background, and those types of things. As we get further into the story, weâll see the father-in-law/grandfather, both as the mythological version and as a real person. Weâll see him in both contexts. Getting back to William, up until the last scene, he has never been part of the mythological version of the movie. Heâs only in the real world.
Daniel: And then he gets to enter the fantasy world.
John: So you can have both the poignant moment â the easy sad moment of the fatherâs dead in the real world, then go back and re-tell the death the funny way. You can actually end the movie on an up note, on a funny. So thatâs my instinct, at least.
Daniel: I think that would be cool. I think that would work.
THE DETAILS
John: Letâs talk about location. The book right now is set in Alabama.
Daniel: Central to Northern Alabama. I visualize that because thatâs the place that I know. I canât really write about things until they become history of my own life. I canât write about whatâs happening here today, for instance, in the story, itâs just impossible for me to write that way, although other people do. I canât write autobiographical, but I can take the scenes from my childhood and use them as the backdrop of my characters. The only ways that Alabama is important specifically is there is a reference to it never snowing, so you have the hot climate. Then you have the red clay, which is all over the place, and I donât think you have that anywhere. In the book the father goes to Birmingham, he goes to Auburn for college, which is a university in southern Alabama, and a reference is made to an Alabama-Auburn football game which is a big rivalry. But, when I was starting on this tour, one of the marketing guys was thinking that in order to boost sales, we could say âHometown boy, Danny Wallace coming to Chicago to talk about his new book set in Chicago,â and just have a different edition printed for each city. I couldnât think of setting it anywhere else, just because I donât know where else to set it.
John: It feels Southern, but not Deep Southern.
Daniel: Not regional.
John: And not urban, but not really rural either.
Daniel: And I donât know how small towns in Colorado are, but when you get into really small towns where families have been for years, thereâs this feeling that theyâre all inter-related somehow. And that the people look different, they act different, and theyâre very clannish and odd. And in a small town, if youâre odd, thatâs okay in a way. You can be a contributing member of that town, being really odd, and everybody has their place. You see it in a lot of southern towns.
John: Growing up, we spent a lot of time in Missouri, where my Dad was from, and I definitely felt that. You could drive down Waverly and you know everybody in Waverly. Let me talk to you about âIn Which He Buys a Town,â because thatâs actually one of the tales thatâs very specific. Do you think Edward actually bought the town? And if so, how did the story of Edward buying the town make it to the son? A lot of the stories are William telling versions of stories that his father told him. But buying the townâŚ
Daniel: Is a little different. At that point, the son is getting a hang of the storytelling thing. This scene is not a mythology that his dad created. William is using the elements that his father has taught him in order to create an explanation for his dadâs absence and his dadâs adulterous affairs. Romanticizing it to a certain degree, trying to make it noble somehow, and in the end, even after all of his efforts, it still falls apart and itâs really sad.
John: Itâs one of the harder aspects to adapt, honestly, in that itâs odd. I guess in every hero story you have where Hercules becomes king and has nowhere else to rule and fight.
Daniel: And in some of Odysseusâ travels he does some things like bedding up with that witchy woman for three yearsâŚ
John: CirceâŚ
Daniel: âŚWho turned all his guys into pigs, and then they just drank and had sex while his wife was waiting for him at home.
John: True confessions. I have a lot of background in mythology, but the first time I read through it I completely missed the Three Labors. Is there anything else you need to warn me about coming across?
Daniel: Thereâs a lot of Odysseus stuff, but specifically, the giant, going through the place with no name, the UnderworldâŚ
John: An Orpheus kind of conceptâŚ
Daniel: The old lady and the eye.
John: Iâm trying to remember whose that is. Jason or Perseus? And was it one of Medusaâs sisters?
Daniel: They all shared an eye, and he took it from them as they were passing it back and forth, and he asked them how to defeat Medusa, and they said just donât look at her, use a mirror. Some of them, like his legendary legs, is more folk-tale-ish. I think that pretty much gets it. And there are lots of little tip-of-the-hats to other books in here too, like The Great Gatsby, Ulysses, and Moby Dick and all these things just for fun. Thatâs not important to the book, I just like to throw little things in there. But the other reason the town is in there is to illustrate the fatherâs success and his dissatisfaction with it. That heâs not going to be happy, ever. In the very first scene he asks what makes a great man â he doesnât know. He thought he might have known, but now that heâs dyingâŚ
John: He wants to be a big fish, he wants to be king, but you canât buy a kingdom. The people make you a king.
Daniel: But the son feels like the father could be king. But itâs the wrong kingdom.
John: King of the Sea.
Daniel: So I had to illustrate that he was successful and heâs so successful, heâs rich enough to buy this town. Why is that a difficult scene for you?
John: Up to that point, the son is always telling the fatherâs stories, but in this case, the son is twisting facts all by himself. The father was buying something. He probably didnât buy an entire town, but he had achieved a level of success and had real estate. And this section doesnât have that happy shine on it, so we know the fatherâs not really telling it. Because the father would never admit anything less than perfection. This is the first time weâre encountering that.
Daniel: I think that kind of humanizes him.
John: Iâm not saying itâs not exactly the right beat. Iâm just saying itâs a challenge in a movie that has been so incredibly fawning towards our character. It would be like in Forrest Gump if Forrest did something wrong.
Daniel: Itâs the last myth before the very final myth. Whereas all the myths before have mythologized him as a hero, this one helps in bringing the two versions together. The myth father and the real father are starting to merge.
John: Iâm not saying it isnât smart, Iâm just saying it isnât easy. Any other final warnings or pieces of advice?
Daniel: One little thing, and this is not that important, but I donât think that the father ever actually told the myths as theyâre written here to the son. The son took bits and pieces of stories similar to this that his father would tell and made them even bigger. All because of the sonâs impulse. Heâs working with such a bad dad, heâs really got to fight him to keep him up there on the pedestal.
John: As egocentric as the father can be, he didnât deliberately try to make it seem like Heaven and Earth moved when was born.
Daniel: And thatâs the sonâs exaggeration, his gift that he was able to do that.
John: He did probably tell his son as a little boy that once it snowed so high that we had to live up in the trees.
Daniel: And we had to walk to school that day, and look at you, youâre sitting here watching TV because itâs raining a little bit outside.
John: And whatâs so frustrating about the father is that he would never own up to the fact. The father sticks to the story no matter how old his son gets, and thatâs annoying.
Daniel: People like the father in this book know how to be, as you were saying, really entertaining to everybody else. But when you have to deal with them in your everyday life, they drive you crazy.
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The full transcript is available via the link to the original post on Johnâs site.