“Adapting a novel into a screenplay is perfectly normal and fun for me. At first it scared me, but I have no qualms about it now.” This is how famous Croatian writer, journalist and screenwriter Ante Tomić described his work on film, participating in the festival’s literary side program titled Read This!
Among the many screenplays he wrote, the most were for Rajko Grlić’s films. Their collaboration resulted in five screenplays, four of which were made into films. Discussing his work in the shade of the CineChill zone, Tomić revealed that his favourite film working with Grlić was The Constitution.
When asked by moderator Morana Zibar whether he’s already thinking about a possible script while writing a novel, Tomić replied: “While I’m writing, I think more in terms of scenes than literary chapters. At the same time, I don’t like to include too many essayistic segments into the plot. I like to put out the same thing more than once, in the form of a book, a play or a movie, I’m very cunning like that.”
The fact that he is both a novelist and a journalist does not seem to complicate matters for him. “Some of my colleagues have a very hard time with this. I think, on the contrary, that writing for newspapers is a great thing and you learn how to put a sentence together, which is very useful when you switch to fiction”, reveals Tomić.
He also admits that his approaches in writing for newspapers and for film are different. “In the newspaper I can sometimes be fierce and mean, but in a book I prefer kindness, warmth and a nice optimistic finale. I like to write happy endings because in life things always ends badly, so at least let everything turn out okay in my books.”
When asked what kind of movies he likes, Tomić threw a curveball saying, “I know you probably expect me to say that I love Bergman or some other classic director, but I actually like comedies, the not too clever kind. For me, Dumb and Dumber is a masterpiece and I watch it every time it’s on TV, and I adore Will Ferrell as an actor. I would love to be a writer on a show like The Big Bang Theory.”
Since Read This! is a program in which famous writers present their latest books and give reading recommendations for the summer, Ante Tomić presented his new novel Hope, a witty and light-hearted story with a happy ending and an old-fashioned humanist message. In the novel, set on one of the Croatian islands, the lives of a dozen characters of different nationalities and religions intertwine during three days. These include couples who cannot have children and vow to the patron saint on her feast day.
In addition to his own novel, he recommended a summer reading list consisting of the Croatian translation of Czech writer Josef Škvorecký’s The Cowards, Herzegovinian writer Almin Kaplan’s Šušanj, and his colleague Ivica Ivanišević’s Prošlo savršeno vrijeme.
