Sandi Tan is adapting Elif Batuman’s TheIdiot and envisions the movie “as being like Alfred Hitchock’s Vertigo told from a female point of view,” annaesilman writes
Photo: Christopher Bernabeo Sandi Tan was having trouble sleeping, so she decided to fly to Australia. “I like to take extreme measures to achieve simple things,” she says, sitting across the table from me at a restaurant called Orsa & Winston in downtown L.A. Last year, the 46-year-old auteur was in the midst of a promotional frenzy for her acclaimed documentary memoir, Shirkers, and was averaging around two hours of shut-eye a night.
Shirkers won the World Cinema Documentary Directing Award at Sundance, and found a huge audience when it aired on Netflix. Now Tan regularly receives fan mail from teenagers across the world who feel like her story is their story and are newly invigorated to go out and make art of their own. “The most thrilling thing for me has been these kids from the middle of nowhere writing to me in broken English and Spanish with crying-face emojis on Instagram,” she reflects.
In many ways, adapting The Idiot makes total sense as a follow-up to Shirkers. Both are time capsules — stories originating from the author’s younger selves, that were rewritten and recontextualized later. Batuman wrote the first draft of The Idiot when she was 23; she didn’t rewrite and publish it until two decades later. Both are also about intelligent, creative young women who are preoccupied with the written word.
Ideas for how she is going to convey a narrative that takes place mostly in a young woman’s head pour out of Tan at our dinner table: “So the book’s basically the intelligent, creative young woman’s Twilight, right?” I admit I’d never thought of it like that. “It’s about this woman who is head smart and heart stupid — that’s why she’s the idiot,” she explains. “And she’s being sucked into this vortex of obsession by this guy, and by the end of it she gets destroyed.
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