I've also worked hard portraying an Ireland which is fast disappearing. Ireland was a very depressed and difficult place in the 1980s, and I've tried to include that in the script. I worked really hard to find the heart of the book.

I hoped that grief was similar to the other emotions. That it would end, the way happiness did. Or laughter.

There's no point in making a film out of a great book. The book's already great. What's the point?

It is extremely difficult to get movies that cost more than $40 million to be made these days.

It's hard to know whether certain characters come to life or not, they either come to have their own life or they don't. I've written many things in which the characters just remain inert.

And I think I often choose to do something because it's quite different from what I've done before.

I've had three novels published, and I was working a little bit in theater in Ireland. I wrote one film script just to see what it would turn out like.