Stephen Chbosky
The filmmaker on why writing his second novel felt like coming home
Asingle idea was uppermost in the mind of stephen Chbosky when he began to write his new novel, Imaginary Friend. he was thinking about how, especially as children, we stare at the sky and pick out shapes in clouds. what if, thought Chbosky, a little boy kept seeing the same face staring back? and what if the little boy began to communicate with the cloud? “i wanted to know what that cloud was, and i wanted to know where it was going, and i wanted the boy to follow the cloud,” he tells SFX, speaking via skype from his office.
he expected the book to be “a 200-page yarn, a little things-that-go-bump-in-the-night scary story” – but that’s not how things worked out. “when i hit page 700, i realised this was a very, very personal, almost spiritual, supernatural story that was equal parts heart and terror,” he says.
the heart comes from the central relationship: the love of single mother Kate reese, a woman fleeing an abusive relationship, for her son, Christopher. the terror comes from the cloud leading Christopher to the woods, where primeval horrors lurk. as for the personal elements of the story that Chbosky references, they’re present in the way the book deals with Catholic guilt – although he emphasises that the book is not anti-religion – in a setting based in great part on his own hometown of pittsburgh.
it’s a novel that recalls stephen King, perhaps no surprise considering that Chbosky says of King, “he’s been my favourite writer my whole life. i can’t think of a better american storyteller in fiction.” Chbosky identifies with the idea of a storytelling tradition rooted in the north-eastern usa. “there are a lot of characters in the north-east, and he seems to have met all of them,” says Chbosky of the maine-born King. “those he hasn’t met he just makes up.”
DOWN TO EARTH
From Chbosky’s perspective, this north-east literary tradition has a strong working-class element. “[pittsburgh people] love it when you succeed but they hate it when you act like you’ve succeeded,” he says. “i think that’s a very UK thing as well, which is, ‘don’t get too big for your britches.’” in part because of the puritan influence in the area, it’s a place where “you hide a lot more emotion than you share”.
Chbosky left pittsburgh when he headed for film school. it was a choice rooted, he explains, in a conversation with his father when he was 12. Chbosky told his dad he wanted to be a writer. “he said, ‘well, great writers are great readers,’ and then he left the room to smoke a cigarette and watch the penguins play hockey on TV.”
as someone who “read” more movies than books and really wanted to be a novelist, what was Chbosky to do with a remark he says he took as “a statement of fact frozen in time”? the answer was simple: write for cinema. “i was actually a born novelist who spent my entire life training to be a filmmaker,” he says.
those he studied under included his mentor, stewart stern (1922-2015), who wrote the screenplay for Rebel Without A Cause, and whom Chbosky first encountered at a Q&a session given by the writer. “he is, to this day, the greatest in-person storyteller i’ve ever been around,” he says.
But when Chbosky first attended the university of southern California, stern was absent following a heart attack. “i made him a mixtape,” he remembers, “and i wrote him a letter telling him how much he changed my life and how much he meant to me, and i signed with a pseudonym because i didn’t want him to think i was using his heart attack as a way to curry favour or a way to get an agent or something.” eventually, stern figured out who he was and the two became close.
PERKY BLINDER
Yet it wasn’t film that gave Chbosky his biggest break. that came in 1999, with the publication of The Perks Of Being A Wallflower, an epistolary coming-of-age novel he would eventually both adapt for the screen and direct. By november 2012, it had sold more than 1.5 million copies. helped by the novel’s success, Chbosky built a career in hollywood that, by 2017, saw him co-writing the script for the live-action version of Beauty And The Beast, and directing Julia roberts and owen wilson in Wonder.
why did it take him so long to return to novel-writing? the way Chbosky tells it, he took a while to figure out what he wanted to write. “when i wrote and directed the adaptation of The Perks Of Being A Wallflower, not only did i find a love of directing movies, but i also rediscovered my love of books,” he explains.
going forward, he wants to be a director, screenwriter (preferably adapting his own work), and a novelist. of these three, it’s the latter that seems most important: “i feel like i have returned to my first love and the thing that maybe i was always meant to do.”
Imaginary Friend is available to buy now, published by Orion.