Following on from "The Cider House Rules" and "Chocolat", "The Shipping News" is another adaptation of a best-selling book. Were you nervous about that?
Yeah, that never goes away - the trepidation that you have in adapting a novel. "The Shipping News" was a challenge, just by its size. It was another famous novel. This has the Pulitzer Prize mark on it, and all these things. You have to shake off and do the things you need to do to be true to the novel - mainly depart from it, and re-invent, and compress. And you know in the end it's going to be compared to the book, and some people are going to have problems. That just goes with adapting a novel to the screen.
Do you have a particular way of dealing with the authors so they know about the changes?
Well, this time I didn't meet or talk to the author [Annie Proulx]. I think it was partly because I was nervous about what she would be thinking about us having to change the story, and I didn't really want to be influenced. I was happy to hear in the end that she loved the film.
There's a mixture of different accents in the film. Was this hard to get right?
You're talking to the Swedish ear for this, so I'm impaired. But I do know that it's true that wherever you go you always have a mix of accents, and it's particularly true up there. You travel between the villages and, since they've been so isolated, you have a variety of accents going. And that was helpful to us and the cast; the fact that we could be a bit more free and not have to be too particular with these accents. For the English and the Welsh it was a little bit easier than it was for the Americans, I think.
What about the casting of Kevin Spacey?
Well, you read the book and there's an entirely different creature described physically. But to have Kevin, who has been a friend of mine for many years... I respect and admire his versatility as an actor.
