nOne-year-old girls reciting Don DeLillo’s prose – it sounds like an extreme English slang, but for the filmmaker ben rivers It was the foundation of his new film, and the culmination of an unlikely friendship with the literary giant. DeLillo is an almost mythical figure of contemporary literature. His prose is precisely crafted, his narratives are sophisticated and his preoccupations are preternaturally prescient: conspiracies, terrorism, nuclear power, hypercapitalism – the 89-year-old New Yorker has been at the forefront of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Rivers, a 53-year-old independent filmmaker based in London, has been a lifelong fan, he says. So one day in 2017, he was stunned to receive a letter from DeLillo himself.
A mutual friend had sent DeLillo a DVD of Rivers’s 2015 film The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers, a hallucinatory parable set in semi-abstract Morocco, and the author responded with a hand-typed letter. “He thought the film was really powerful and he was looking forward to seeing it again,” says Rivers. “It was a beautiful thing to receive and very meaningful to me being such a big fan of his.” Rivers later sent DeLillo another of his films: 2019’s Krabi, 2562, co-directed with Anocha Suwichakornpong, “and he wrote about it too, saying he enjoyed it”.
You can see why Rivers might be DeLillo’s kind of filmmaker. His work would be more at home in an art gallery than at a multiplex; It prioritizes fantasy and mystery over more traditional film concerns such as story rhythm or character development, and he often uses grainy 16 mm film rather than digital.
Their correspondence encouraged Rivers to write to DeLillo in 2020 asking if he could adapt his 2007 play The Word for Snow for his latest film, Mare’s Nest. “He said he couldn’t really see it as a movie, but he gave me his blessing to use it,” says Rivers. The one-act play is a dialogue between a pilgrim who visits a professor on a remote mountain top in search of answers at a time of climate change, but also of a kind of decline in language and meaning. The professor has only cryptic answers: “The logic of the answer has fallen apart”; “What does this or that language mean?”; “The word for snow would be ice.”
“I read it during the pandemic, which was appropriate,” says Rivers. “At the same time, I started filling a notebook with scenes and fragments of a children’s film set in the near future where there are no adults. So then I thought that this play, even if it was written for three adult men, would be really powerful coming out of the mouths of children. And once I had that in my mind I couldn’t get rid of the idea.”
Mare’s Nest is not a straight adaptation: The Word for Snow forms an important scene within a larger story, following a young girl, Moon, as she wanders across a strange, post-apocalyptic, adult-free landscape. (The film was shot on location, including Menorca, Snowdonia, and a studio in London.) This is no Lord of the Flies – the kids seem to be doing fine without us. They are not fighting among themselves or eating each other; Instead they are playing, sharing and living in nature but reusing the remains of civilization. “They’re kind of reinventing themselves,” says Rivers. “They’re coming up with their own rituals, objects that have lost their previous meaning and are given new meaning.”
As well as DeLillo, Mare’s Nest also includes a monologue borrowed from writer Daisy Hildyard and excerpts from the work of Portuguese playwright Fernando Pessoa. (Reverse’s lead actor, Moon Guo Barker, is the daughter and longtime friend of Xiaolu Guo, the British-Chinese novelist and filmmaker.)
We think of literature and cinema in terms of straight adaptations of authors like Jane Austen or Stephen King, but Rivers takes a different approach. Literature has always been a big part of his creative process, he says, but he rarely takes it for granted. Literally. For example, The Sky Trembles… The film that first caught DeLillo’s attention was an interpretation of the Paul Bowles short story, but was almost unrecognizable from the source material. When I first met him on his 2012 film Two Years at Sea – a dialogue-free study of a Scottish monk living in the woods – he explained how it was inspired by Knut Hamsson’s jungle novel Pan and Francis Bacon’s utopian fiction The New Atlantis. It’s a space in which Rivers often works: a kind of Arcadian, possibly post-apocalyptic world that is neither utopian nor dystopian, but strangely promising and liberating.
Rivers’s work is not only informed by literature, it is arguably closer to it, with its fascinating, often mysterious narratives, told primarily through images rather than dialogue. “When you read a book,” he tells me, “obviously each person has room for their own imagination. And that’s hard with film. So how do you try to make films open enough to engage the audience, and not just be a passive receptor?”
Some other filmmakers have attempted to adapt DeLillo’s work, but they have often failed, or taken so many liberties, that they end up being something else entirely. For example, the 2022 version of Noah Baumbach’s White Noise turned DeLillo’s most accessible book (about a feuding family fleeing an unspecified “airborne toxic event”) into a charming satire starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig, but the novel’s cerebral wit and quick dialogue rhythm got lost in the need to make it more dynamic and “cinematic.” Even worse was the French film Never Ever, which turned DeLillo’s 2001 novel The Body Artist into a throwaway erotic thriller. The rights to DeLillo’s 1997 magnum opus Underworld have also been sold, but it’s hard to imagine how anyone could adapt it faithfully.
River Rates’s only film is David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, based on DeLillo’s 2003 novel and based entirely on the stretch limousine of a billionaire finance bro (played by Robert Pattinson) as he travels across a turbulent Manhattan. Critics didn’t like it, but for Rivers it was better to stick to DeLillo’s cold, deadpan tone and preserve his precise language.
This is what Rivers wanted with Marez’s Nest, and the scene in which the child actor repeats DeLillo’s dialogue – in a dark cabin, around a fire, in grainy black and white, creates a singular magic. “They do it with such straight faces, you just pay attention to the words,” he says. It took some work (and an autocue) to get his child actors to memorize those words, of course, but he’s extremely proud of them. “They’re nine years old. I didn’t expect them to understand everything. But then again, I Don’t understand everything. I have read it many times and it still remains abstract and sometimes absurd.
And has DeLillo seen Mare’s Nest yet? Rivers says he has. “He said he was impressed by what I did with it – it was a big relief.”
