{"id":2309,"date":"2012-01-01T16:24:10","date_gmt":"2012-01-01T16:24:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/wordpress\/?p=2309"},"modified":"2016-06-22T17:32:44","modified_gmt":"2016-06-22T17:32:44","slug":"elmore-leonard-interview-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?p=2309","title":{"rendered":"Elmore Leonard Interview #4"},"content":{"rendered":"

The fourth extract from\u00a0Charles Rzepka\u2019s interview with Elmore Leonard<\/span><\/h3>\n

Professor\u00a0Charles\u00a0Rzepka\u00a0conducted a series of interviews with Elmore Leonard in 2009-10.\u00a0<\/em>Crimeculture\u00a0is delighted to announce that the fourth extract \u00a0from Professor’s Rzepka’s interviews is now available.<\/em><\/p>\n

From<\/em> Elmore\u00a0Leonard Interview #4, conducted i<\/span>n\u00a0Bloomfield Village, MI.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 I jumped ahead here and I want to go back to the hanging from the roof.\u00a0 I was not only fascinated by Maurice Murray but also I realized that after\u00a0The Big Bounce<\/em>\u00a0hanging from heights, or dying from getting thrown off a building, or having a fear of looking down appears in nearly everything you\u2019ve written.<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Is that right?<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 Have you ever noticed that?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 No.<\/p>\n

\"Get<\/a>CR:\u00a0 Here, just off the top of my head, in\u00a0Road Dogs<\/em>\u00a0is the scene on the roof with Tico and Jack playing roof ball.\u00a0 That made me go back and look at your other work.\u00a0 There\u2019s\u00a0Get Shorty<\/em>, where Bo Catlett falls off his own deck to his death.\u00a0 I think it\u2019s in\u00a0Stick<\/em>\u00a0where Eddie Moke is being held off the balcony by Chuckie, who lets him go.\u00a0 There\u2019s\u00a0Glitz<\/em>, where there\u2019s a cab driver who gets thrown off the cliff and this prostitute from Puerto Rico who goes to Atlantic City and gets thrown off a roof.<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Right.\u00a0 Wow.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 That\u2019s just for starters.\u00a0 And then in\u00a0Killshot<\/em>\u00a0Lionel the ironworker is injured falling from a beam, and you have all of these really high-up perspectives.\u00a0 Take that great scene where they think Wayne is frozen, they think he\u2019s scared.\u00a0 But he\u2019s just in his head rehearsing these surprise scenarios, and he slides down the girder and walks away.\u00a0 But there\u2019s also that great shot in the opening chapter, where Armand goes to Detroit to hit Papa.\u00a0 He walks into the room, and before he says or does anything he sees the scene out the window of the panorama of the cityscape and Canada.\u00a0 It\u2019s like he\u2019s looking at his whole life through the window, like how he got here, not just the other day driving from Toronto, but it\u2019s like Walpole Island and the river and Canada and everything. I bet you in nearly every book you\u2019ve written since\u00a0The Big Bounce\u00a0<\/em>you have a scene where someone is fearful of heights or about to fall or falls to his death, or there\u2019s something to do with great heights.\u00a0 And I don\u2019t think it happens in any of your early westerns, for instance, where someone gets shoved off a mesa or a bluff?\u00a0 But even in an early crime novel like\u00a0Mr. Majestyk<\/em>, the climactic scene is where he outwits Renda and the other thugs by getting them to drive off a cliff, off a road on a mesa.\u00a0 Can you think of any earlier books before\u00a0Big Bounce<\/em>\u00a0where that kind of thing happens?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 No, but when I was starting out writing I had a dream.\u00a0 I was always falling down these stairs.<\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 When you first started writing?<\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 Yeah, and they were steep and narrow and I\u2019d fall down and you wait for yourself to hit the bottom and that never came.\u00a0 But it was that tightening up on the way down.\u00a0 Then I started to sell and I never had the dream again…. Read more<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The fourth extract from\u00a0Charles Rzepka\u2019s interview with Elmore Leonard Professor\u00a0Charles\u00a0Rzepka\u00a0conducted a series of interviews with Elmore Leonard in 2009-10.\u00a0Crimeculture\u00a0is delighted<\/p>\n

Continue readingElmore Leonard Interview #4<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":779,"featured_media":2413,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,3,21],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2309"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/779"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2309"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5803,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2309\/revisions\/5803"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}