'5 Flights Up' and Acts of God: A Q&A with Author Jill Ciment
March 17, 2015 · from the Word & Film archive
Jill Ciment's Heroic Measures — a wry, humane novel about an elderly couple selling their Manhattan walk-up during a terrorism scare while their dachshund lies in the animal hospital — reaches theaters this spring as 5 Flights Up, with Morgan Freeman and Diane Keaton as the couple. Ciment talked with us about the strange business of adaptation, timed to her new novel Act of God.
On casting: 'The characters in my head were a Jewish painter and his wife from another era of New York. Then Morgan Freeman reads your husband's lines and you think — fine, he's always been Morgan Freeman.' The film relocates and gentles the book, she notes, without complaint: 'The novel is mine. The movie is theirs. The dog is everyone's.'
The conversation turned to her method — Ciment writes short, exact novels ('I revise until only the load-bearing sentences remain') — and to Act of God, in which a bioluminescent mold evicts another set of New Yorkers. Real estate anxiety, she agrees, is her true genre.
Heroic Measures and the film are paired in the catalog here. Read the book for the sentences; see the film for two legends bickering over square footage.
