Friday, March 1, 2019

Interview / Don Winslow

Don Winslow

Interview

Don Winslow

Scott Myers
Jun 20, 2017

New York Times best-selling novelist and screenwriter.

Currently I’m reading a kick ass novel: “The Force” by Don Winslow. How good? This is what Stephen King wrote about it:

“The Force is mesmerizing, a triumph. Think The Godfather, only with cops. It’s that good.”

Some previous Winslow novels picked up by Hollywood and set to be adapted into movies: ‘The Power of the Dog’ and ‘The Cartel’ to go along with the previously produced Savages.

Here is a terrific interview with Winslow with Bilge Ebiri from The Village Voice:

I know that you had to do a lot of research into the drug war for The Cartel and Power of the Dog, and that it took a lot out of you. Given the drug angle in The Force, did that research affect the nature of the story you’re telling here?

Maybe subconsciously. There’s definitely a fatigue and a sadness that came out of writing Dog, and especially Cartel. You can’t live with that every day for years without it affecting you. Not to be overly dramatic about it; I can’t in any way compare myself to Mexican journalists who really lived through it. One thing that I found out about cops — having lived with them forever and hung out and all of that, specifically toward researching this book — is the effect that the work has on them. They’ll deny it, by the way, because it doesn’t fit the image. But there’s a winnowing, an erosion effect that happens, just dealing with what they deal with every damn day. They really take it home with them. And the effort to deny that and to compartmentalize it makes things even worse.

Do you feel like the cops you interviewed for The Force opened up to you more because you had a kind of shared knowledge?

Maybe, but when I go to talk to somebody for an interview, I’m not interested in educating them about me. I’m interested in learning from them. A lot of the cops that I talked to were old friends. But others, no; I would just say, “I’m a novelist, and here’s what I’m doing.” I think that they opened up to me for a couple of reasons. One is because other people had said, “This guy’s OK.” And another thing is that I was just honest with people. One thing about cops is that [they’re] used to being lied to all the time. Cops are harder to penetrate than drug cartels.

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