Nick Hornby may be a newcomer to Hollywood’s awards season, with a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for his script to “An Education,” but the British novelist and essayist has been winning literary honors ever since his first book, “Fever Pitch,” was honored with the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award in 1992. He’s also no stranger to the movies: “Fever Pitch,” “About a Boy” and “High Fidelity” have all been turned into films, while Johnny Depp bought the rights to “A Long Way Down.”
Directed by Lone Scherfig, “An Education” is drawn not from a Hornby book, but from a magazine article by British writer Lynn Barber; Hornby expanded the brief memoir into a warm, unassuming gem of a film that also won a Best Picture nomination, and an Oscar nod for Carey Mulligan’s luminous performance as Jenny, a 16-year-old seduced by Peter Sarsgaard’s older man in 1961 London.
The film is a change-of-pace of sorts for Hornby, who usually writes contemporary works and has few equals when it comes to perceptive, entertaining writing about pop culture and the way music can animate and sometimes dominate people’s lives. (His latest novel, “Juliet, Naked,” is one of his best.) Married to one of the producers of “An Education,” Amanda Posey, Hornby spoke to theWrap during a recent trip to L.A.
You’re too young to remember the period in which the movie is set, aren’t you?
Yeah. But if you can remember your uncle speaking in a certain way in 1966, he probably spoke that way in 1961, too. So I borrowed things from relatives, from my grandparents. And I read a lot, and thought a lot about that generation of my family, and what their lives must have been like.
And I was quite shocked by some things that I found out, like realizing that Jenny would have experienced food rationing for the first half of her life. It was a very poor country, constantly on the verge of catastrophic economic collapse, right into the ‘60s. I think 1961 had a lot more in common with 1945 than it had with 1963.
Certainly, there was a seismic shift in the culture right after the movie ends.
Exactly. By the time the movie’s finished, the Stones and the Beatles are pretty much in recording studios.
Your books have been turned into movies before, but mostly with scripts by other writers. What caused you to write this one?
It wouldn’t have happened if my wife were not an independent producer. It’s in the air at home, and because she is an independent producer in England, she’s not going to be optioning the new Stephen King novel. You have to find more creative and cheaper ways of doing things.
When I read it, it was a 10 page essay in Granta, but it seemed to contain a complete narrative and was about something interesting. I just said to her, “You should read this, I think there’s something in it.”
