Max Porter on Steve: “I want my kids to see this movie and say: “We understand Dad a bit now””

Novelist Max Porter takes a fairly generous approach to adaptations of his writing. (“Fiddle with my commas all you like.”) He seems to get a thrill from letting the work take new form and fly. His first novella, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (2015), has seen multiple stage productions – which is how he met his regular collaborator Cillian Murphy – and will be released as a film written and directed by Dylan Southern in November. Plans for a movie of Lanny (2015) were announced in 2019, then stalled. But things were different for his fourth book, Shy (2023), a plotless squall of teenage rage and swagger unleashed from the mind of its narrator as he absconds from school. To Porter, the book felt unadaptable. “Prove me wrong, Pedro Almodóvar!” he joked when it was published. But Porter ended up proving himself wrong by finding a new angle on the book. Writing a script with Murphy’s voice in mind, Porter shifted the focus from Shy to Steve, the tormented headteacher at his ‘last chance’ reform school.

Steve is the first time you’ve adapted one of your own works for film. But do you consider it an adaptation?

It’s funny, when I see it written down – ‘adapted from the novel’ – I think, well it’s not really. I started it from scratch. Obviously it is an original screenplay.

I love being adapted. I can’t take everything on. My first job is to be raising these children [Porter has three sons]. But it felt like there was no option for me to hand this over to anyone else. I wanted to do it myself, and I wanted to make it really personal.

The anxiety of being misunderstood? This film has alleviated that to a certain extent for me. I want my kids to see this movie and be, like: “We understand Dad a bit now.” Everything from the humour, to the wildness of it to the deep tendrils of connectivity between Steve and those around him. I really liked the dry-stone walling of screenplay writing. In fact my new novel is about an actor, and is an attempt to play with screenplay formalities.

What is it about Cillian Murphy that makes him a good fit for translating your work?

We have a certain amount of shared taste in things. It’s not that they’re necessarily bleak, but they are a little bit difficult. 

We want to get into the knotty stuff, in this film particularly. I think we both share a real interest in something generative being handed to you, what in my books I’d call the ‘major chord’. You’re not just smashing a viewer around the head with something incredibly upsetting. You are offering out of the rubble some kind of generative or uplifting possibility. I think we both quite like not spelling out what that is. We’re both very committed to compassionate engagement with the notional other.

We don’t want to just create a mess on screen. We want to create a real, tender, painful opportunity for viewers to identify with. That feels to me a novelistic impulse Cillian is really into. Books and music are the cornerstones of our relationship.

Music was integral to the short film you made with him, All of This Unreal Time. Was there much conversation between you about music for Steve?

When Little Simz was working on a piece of music for Steve, I was pinching myself. I write a character who is obsessed with drum and bass and somehow less than two years later, one of the greatest living artists is creating our own drum and bass banger. There’s a nerdery involved, but that nerdery serves two purposes. One is trying to realistically ground Shy in his passion and in that moment. But also I wrote the book at that BPM so that when you are in the weather system of Shy’s trauma, it is banging along at 170 BPM and I hope you feel it physically as a reader. That was immediately very high on my list of things – can I make the script do the same thing? We have to have build-ups and then breaks, a relentless clattering in the roof, the break of a drumbeat, but also have these weird spacey moments where he’s lost. They edited Steve as if editing a piece of electronic music. Cillian and I share music most days anyway, Tim [Mielants] really responded well to my 1990s drum and bass playlist.

In the book, Shy is a white character. How did you feel about the decision to change the character’s race for the film?

Well, this hadn’t occurred to me until you just said that, but one of the things Shy in the book wishes he was, was not white, because of his cultural preferences. So perhaps it was a little gift to Shy. You want to be a bit better looking? You want to be a bit cooler? Here, have Jay Lycurgo, he’s fucking cool and gorgeous. I think it wasn’t a question of race actually, the casting of it, it was simply the minute we saw Jay’s tape. Even him out of character, in his earnestness, was deliciously Shy.

I wondered if setting the film in 1996, as in the book, might be a way to protect it from contemporary projections. With something like Adolescence, it does worry me when it’s used in a didactic way and shown in schools.

Yeah. We’re not making a didactic thing. Cillian wants to make independent cinema, hence him choosing someone like Tim to direct this movie. If we were going for headline grabbing, you know: make one about boyhood, then we’ll make one about migrants, then we’ll make one about the arms trade. And then we could all feel good about ourselves.

I adored Adolescence for various different reasons. But I’m uneasy about, as you say, “Everyone must watch this, in order to learn what we need to do with the problem of boys.” What would the verdict of our film be? “Be compassionate and keep these schools open. And if you happen to be an addict really struggling with your workload, perhaps make sure you do enough Alexander Technique.”

The fragmented text in your novels is said to reflect your notebooks. How does the film reflect your script notes?

The film is a visual manifestation of my notebook, that’s true. Something quite beautifully finished, next to a picture of cock and balls. The reason you would seek to take that energy from the working process into the finished product is to maintain some of that energy – some of the slippage between the interruption of what seems to be a hugely important cinematic moment with someone ringing a fire alarm or saying, “Nice one, dickhead”. One of my favourite bits in the film is when Steve says, “So who can tell me how old these rocks are?” And Jamie goes: “Uh, wank.” It’s in my work, right from Grief Is the Thing with Feathers – the Dad is going on a very profound moment, and Crow goes, “Eh, you sound like a fridge magnet.” It’s very important to puncture, inflate, puncture, inflate, puncture. I’d say that my notebooks are alive and well in this.

► Steve is in UK cinemas now and on Netflix UK from 3 October.