Motherless Brooklyn; The Fortress of Solitude Introduction by Charles Yu (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)

I read it in the fall of '99 when Fight Club came out, as I read this novel Motherless Brooklyn, but the novel is about a Tourette detective trying to solve the murder of his only friend; it takes place in the '90s and isn't about 1950s New York at all.

I was like what a great character--it's such a wild hot mess, smart but totally messed up, funny but also pretty painful and lonely--all of that made me want to figure it out for the film.

But it's Jonathan's book which is beloved is it's really a character study. It's a character study of This mind you you're inside his head and the plot Is is Byzantine and and sort of a frame for this character?

When I became interested in adapting it, I said to Jonathan that to the author. Yeah, John. Yes. Sorry, Jonathan Latham He he's from Brooklyn born and raised and I said look, you know if this is a this is the greatest character in the greatest like interior mental landscape and but the film a film is a tableau it's a bigger tableau and I I knew Jonathan loved noir films and I sort of proposed to him I said this is a little radical but what if we take the core of this book this guy with this condition? But we set it in a moment when if we open it up into New York social history instead of sort of dispense with the plot of the book and let it be let this Tourette detective take us into a More Chinatown scale canvas of what Chinatown is in the film.

There's this wonderful novel, Motherless Brooklyn, written by Jonathan Lethem, who was coming up in Brooklyn as a writer when I was coming up as an actor in New York.

And I said, look, I, I feel like your book, it feels like the 50s. And what would you think about putting it in the 50s?

He's a person who has enormous capacities. He's smart. He's loyal to his family. But he has a real flaw, which is he's dominated by his rage.

I think that to me, the political dimensions of this to me, ultimately, you've always got to know what you're actually trying to say emotionally.

And when you create that effect, you can take people on a journey in which they're rooting for this person. They are enjoying watching them navigate the world within their unique kind of, you know, in this character.