Cometh the 25th hour, cometh the man

From Dublin to Los Angeles – it’s a long way, but it’s getting shorter. 32-year-old novelist and screenwriter David Benioff is driving through the LA canyons and trying not to crash his car while maintaining cell-phone contact with this interviewer when we happen upon a curious coincidence.

“I started off really thinking I was going to be a professor of literature,” he says. “I actually got my masters at Trinity College in Dublin in ’94, Brendan Kennelly was one of my teachers.”
That’s funny, I tell him. I married his daughter.

“You did?!! That’s unbelievable! He was definitely one of the more charismatic teachers I’ve ever had.”

Benioff’s first book The 25th Hour, a high-class suspense novel set in New York, comes primed with characters that take up lodgings in your brain for a month, plus a bullshit-free writing style that manages to combine an obvious love of high literature with what the studio boss in Barton Fink might’ve described as “da poetry of da street”. Benioff himself adapted the book into a screenplay for Spike Lee, and the resulting $5 million film, produced by Tobey Maguire, opens in Ireland next month.

Prior to the publication of The 25th Hour Benioff had written two other books. The first he didn’t even bother submitting to anyone, the second was a sprawling 25-year span of narrative that even its creator had trouble following, and subsequently ended up being rejected by every major publisher in America. This time, Benioff was determined to keep the plot coiled tight; this story follows the last 24 hours of freedom of Montgomery Brogan, a good-looking, comfortable twenty-something sentenced to eight years in prison for dealing heroin.

“I was actively looking for a story that took place in a compressed time frame,” Benioff says. “Basically it’s a ticking clock narrative.”

This “ticking clock” framework – a noir-ish trick which, alongside such themes as insomnia and memory loss, is very much in vogue right now – propels the narrative forward at a fair clip (there are echoes of the poisoned English lecturer searching for his killer in DOA) while managing to weave together all its characters’ back-stories without compromising on pace. There’s an all-pervading sense of dread at Monty’s impending fate, culminating in a nervy will-he/won’t-he finale.

Benioff is obviously in love with the New York cityscape, and his sojourn in Ireland was relatively brief, but his time in Dublin did have some impact on The 25th Hour. A couple of days after our interview he sent me the following e-mail:

By the way, forgot to mention that I stole some of my characters’ names from Dublin. Monty Brogan is Brogan because I lived right next to Brogan’s, and Frank Slattery got his name from a butcher shop down the street.

Furthermore, the author did his master’s thesis on Beckett, although that influence remains largely invisible, save for one remarkable passage, a litany of Fuck Yous from the mouth of Monty, beginning with the line, “Fuck Jesus Christ, he got off easy, an afternoon on the cross, a weekend in hell, and then the hallelujahs of all the legioned angels.”

“It’s funny, that was the most difficult passage to convince the editor to keep in,” notes Benioff. “I had a really great editor who had been Henry Miller’s editor at one point, really old-school, and we agreed on almost everything, but the one thing we didn’t agree on was that Fuck You monologue. He didn’t want to cut it entirely, he just wanted to trim it a lot, and I thought it was really important and convinced him to keep it.

“And then when the movie was happening, Disney ended up being the financer for it, which was a little bit bizarre, and the one scene they were very nervous about was the Fuck You monologue, and it took some convincing, but eventually they were cool with it. Spike Lee is very stubborn and strong-willed and he’s not about to let Mickey Mouse determine what the movie’s gonna look like.”

The film version of The 25th Hour stars Ed Norton in the leading role, with support from Philip Seymour Hoffman and Anna Paquin. Bearing the book in mind, the casting is spot-on, almost too perfect in fact.

“I assume when the movie comes out they’ll probably do one of those editions of the book where they have the stars’ faces on the cover,” Benioff says, “and it’s kind of a double edged sword because obviously I’ll probably sell more books but on the other hand everyone’s gonna think of Monty and have Ed Norton’s face in their minds. It takes away a little bit of the power of the writer I think, but that’s the deal you make.

“The only casting that was disappointing to me was the dog Doyle, because he’s a really important character in the book and I always envisioned this ferocious, mangled pitbull, and they picked sort of a sweet looking mutt.”