The first time David Benioff read Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, he could only marvel at the power of its ending. The second time he read it, intimidation set in, the novelist and screenwriter having secured the post on the novel’s adaptation. “I was like, ‘Oh my goodness. What have I gotten myself into?’,” he says.

After weaving together fourteen drafts, Benioff would later find himself in the post hallways, working on writing English subtitles to translate the film sections in Dari. Watching the cuts of any film come together, Benioff admits, is often brutally painful, but here, with Marc Forster at the directorial helm, the experience was somewhat different. “This is the first time where I was just ecstatic,” Benioff says. “I would see many of the scenes, almost all the scenes, before the movie was all put together. I could just tell after watching ten minutes of it that it looked really good, that it looked the way I pictured it and that Marc had done an incredible job.

“It’s not an easy movie, and they were working under extraordinarily difficult circumstances, because (the crew) shot in places where no one had ever shot a movie before. The fact that he not only completed the movie but made, in my mind, such a beautiful movie is a great testament to his talent and to his will. He’s just an amazingly strong-willed director.”

In a break between interviews and meetings with SCAD students at the Savannah Film Festival, Benioff here speaks about the story’s structural challenges, building a relationship with Hosseini and the importance of nuance brought to the table by a cast of actors, who with the slightest of gestures, breaks his heart.

SM: Structurally you had to deal with three decades, three main sections of story going from childhood to [Amir’s adulthood return to Afghanistan], and I know you only wanted two characters to play Amir. So I was hoping that you could give me a brief idea of how you had to do that. How do you condense a piece of literature and maintain its emotional integrity?

DB: It was tricky, but the novel has such a strong internal propulsion, the narrative drive is so powerful that even removing as much as I had to remove in order to make it work, or hopefully work, as a two-hour movie, it never lost that sense of pushing forward powerfully towards a climax. And, I think that’s to Khaled’s credit that he came up with this story that’s so well conceived that you can remove essentially 80 percent of it, and it still works.

There are so many scenes that I love from the novel that I included in the first draft. For instance,…Hassan is born with the hare lip, and there’s that wonderful scene where Baba brings in the plastic surgeon from India, and he repairs Hassan’s hare lip. I included it in the first draft, but the first draft was way too long. It would have been a three-hour movie if we had shot the first draft. It was too bulky and too frontloaded. There was too much of the childhood, and that made it feel like you were rushing through the America scenes and rushing through the end, and so we had to change it.

One of the things that you asked about the structure, some of it is just trying it. There’s the Beckett line, “(Try again.) Fail again. Fail better,” which I always think about with screenwriting because the first draft is the first attempt, and it’s not quite working. The second draft is also not quite working, but hopefully working a little bit better. Our shooting script was the fourteenth draft, and I think it was the strongest draft.

SM: What was your first impression reading the book?

DB: I loved the story, particularly those opening scenes, the childhood scenes in Kabul and then the ending. That’s what I look for either with an original story, if I’m coming up with a story, but also with an adaptation, if I’m choosing someone else’s work, is the really powerful ending. I always feel like—not to sound cocky about it—I can get the rest of it working if the ending is working.

For insistence, another book that I’m adapting and that we’re trying to make is For Whom the Bell Tolls, and I think that’s one of the great endings in American literature. There are certain problems with the adaptation of it, or certain difficulties I should say, but they don’t frighten me because I know that as long as we keep driving toward that magnificent ending, we’re going to be okay. That’s what I felt when I read the book the first time.

It always seemed like the toughest thing would be how to handle the second section essentially…The first time I met with Khaled we had a lunch together, and I sat down, and we had just met a minute before, and I thought there was going to be an extended chit-chat, small talk, and his first line to me was, “What do you believe are the significant structural challenges with adapting my novel?” Woah. I’m on the spot. And, that was what I said, trying to make it work with those three sections but particularly with the American section.

Then also another significant change in the script [from the book] was the long post-climax in Pakistan where they’re trying to get immigration papers and there’s a suicide attempt, and it just felt to me like the climax of the story is Amir finally standing up and doing the right thing, standing up to Assef, the Taliban, the Taliban commander and trying to redeem himself from this childhood sin, this sin of omission. To have after that 45 minutes of screen time seemed to me very anti-climatic, so I wanted to get to the end quickly after that point…

SM: Talking about meeting with Khaled, both being novelists and writers, how did you develop a vernacular?

DB: We always got along well which helps and is not always the case with screenwriters and novelists working together. I think he always knew that regardless of whatever changes or cuts I wanted to make, he always believed that I loved the book and that I wanted to create an essentially faithful adaptation. So, that helped a lot because there was a certain level of trust there.

And, I relied on him. I asked him a lot of questions. I’m not from Kabul. I didn’t grow up in Afghanistan. I’m not Muslim. There are many different levels where I can do as much reading as I want—and I did read a lot about Afghanistan and a lot about Muslim culture—but I’m still essentially a tourist in that world. I’m never going to know what it was like to grow up in the 70s in Kabul even if I’ve read fifteen books on the subject, and frankly, there aren’t even fifteen books on the subject. And so he was my resource. I would e-mail him late at night with questions about various aspects of life then or whatever issue came up, and he was always really helpful. He’d tell me a story about being a kid there, and it almost always helped me break through whatever problem I was having. He was a great resource, a great supporter and a great ally, and I’ve gotten to know him fairly well over the course of making the movie and now also that we’re getting the movie out there. We’ve spent a lot of time together. He’s a good man, and he seems really happy with the movie which is the main thing because he could be a great guy, and if he hated the movie, I would still feel like a failure.

SM: You could call the book in some ways a morality play, and that’s what conceptually you’d have to translate to screen. Because you’re seeing it through the eyes of children at the beginning that’s accessible, but how did you deal with the idea of goodness in terms of the way a child sees it to the way an adult does?

DB: I don’t try to deal too much with the abstractions. I’m not saying this as a rule of writing because I have friends who are wonderful writers who are the opposite. The screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, he says that he always starts with before he writes a screenplay one word. It would be a better story if I could tell you which word it was for each of his movies, but for one is was death, for one it was revenge, and so then every single scene is going to, in some way or another, hit on that theme. To me it sounds crazy, but I love his screenplays. Amor Es Perros I think is a masterpiece.

I can’t work that way. For me, I feel, and this is something that I’ve had a number of conversations with Khaled about and we actually see eye to eye on, if you take care of the story, the story’s going to take care of you. There’s no doubt that this is a story about redemption and about healing, about goodness and the possibility of goodness after you’ve abandoned it, but I don’t sit down at the computer and think, “How am I going to get those themes into this particular scene?” It’s really about, “How do I tell this scene the best way? What’s the right dialogue for these characters? What’s the right action on screen that’s going to illuminate what’s going on with them?”

The exception to that, I guess, would be that the book is told in the first person, and so we have access to Amir’s mind the whole time. The whole story is told from that point of view, but much of what we learn is coming from his ruminations. And so, one of the challenges of the script was, since we don’t have access to the character’s mind, and since I did not want to use a voice-over—and, that was a decision from the very beginning. I just had no interest in doing that.—it was, “How do we get across certain information, but also how do we learn more about Amir who’s not the most vocal?” He’s kind of a quiet kid, and he very rarely expresses what’s really on his mind. One of the real tricks was trying to get this kid across and make sure that we understand him a little bit without having to hear his stream of consciousness. Certainly, I tried as hard as I could with the script, but a lot of that really comes from the actor and comes from the direction.

The actors did a wonderful job because so many of the moments are quiet moments, and so many of my favorite things in the movie, and I’ve been telling the actors recently about this, are two words in the script. There are moments where Baba [Homayoun Ershadi] just makes a head gesture, and it’s heartbreaking. In the script, it’s like, “He gestures for Amir to follow him,” and that’s not an interesting line in and of itself. It’s a very literal stage direction, and the way he does it breaks my heart. There’s a shot of Amir [Zekeria Ebrahimi] looking through the window, and he’s talking to Rahim Khan, [Shaun Toub] looking through the window, and there’s something in his eyes that’s so powerful. He’s talking about his mother being dead, and apparently what (Ebrahimi) was thinking about when he was shooting the scene was that his father had died before he was born in a rocket attack. That’s what he was thinking, that he’d never met his father, and the character in the movie had never met his mother. You see it, and again nothing I could have written in the script would have gotten that expression on his face. That comes from someone else’s talent. That’s the wonderful thing and sometimes frightening thing about making movies; it’s such a collaborative process, and you just have to have faith in the talents of the people that you’re working with. In this case, it’s all really come together in a beautiful way.

For more information on the film visit www.kiterunnermovie.com/.

Article Post Script

SM: What is one question about your writing that you’ve always wanted to be asked but never have been?

DB: This isn’t really an answer to your question because someone asked it yesterday, and I couldn’t come up with an answer, but I think it’s really interesting. So, unfortunately, I’m going to tell you the question—but not the answer—which was, “You work on many different kinds of projects, and is there anything that unifies them in your mind?”

I don’t know what it is…My wife says that everything I work on ends with some really violent confrontation. At the end of The Kite Runner, the end of 25th Hour, the end of Troy there’s a big fight, and usually the character who gets hurt the most is actually the one that you’re most sympathetic towards. Hector is a much more, to me, beloved figure than Achilles, and Amir is more the protagonist than Assef who’s beating the crap out of him and in 25th Hour Monty’s being beat up by his friend. So that seems to link some of the stories, but I don’t know that it applies to everything I’ve worked on. This new script Brothers that I wrote that Jim Sheridan’s about to start directing also ends with a big fight, so that’s the one thing I can think of. It’s sort of a strange answer.