NIGHTWOOD

THE SCREENPLAY

The adaptation of the novel into the screenplay

I’ve optioned Djuna Barnes’s legendary novel, Nightwood, and have written the screenplay. The novel’s
extraordinary, beautiful language is justly famous and its characters are some of the most iconic in literature
and most fabled in the gay world. The insightful, powerful outcast, Dr. Matthew O’Connor, wild girl Robin Vote
and assured, unknowable Nora Flood are unforgettable, as is the love between Robin and Nora, which is
one of the great love stories in literature.  

I’ve set Nightwood in contemporary times, as I feel the audience would know these characters far better
if their story wasn’t set in the 1930s, as it is in the book. There is a profound energy in Nightwood that
makes it accessible to an audience today. Even though Nightwood is a story about people who are on the
edges of society, Barnes was able to write beyond the obvious uniqueness of these characters because
she had a grasp of the complexities and contradictions of ordinary people’s lives and of their dependence
on (and love of) the love of others, and this makes her characters timelessly contemporary.