Mitchell Zuckoff is quick to admit that the one thing that truly drives his creative work is the exploration of how individuals behave during their moments of greatest intensity.
“I love looking at what allows people to do something extraordinary beyond their conception of what they are capable of, or what everyone else’s conception may be of what they might do,” he says.
Clearly, that came across in the best-selling author’s compelling turn in 13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi. So much so that, in the hands of director Michael Bay, the big-screen version (13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi) turned heads when it was released in early 2016. Like Zuckoff’s pageturner, the film version chronicles the powerful true story of six elite ex-military operators assigned to protect the CIA who pushed back against crushing odds when terrorists attacked a U.S. diplomatic compound on Sept. 11, 2012.
All of this did not escape the keen eyes of planners for the 28th annual Palm Springs International Film Festival, Jan. 2–16, 2017. Zuckoff will be joined by another New York Times best-selling author, Chuck Hogan (who penned the 13 Hours screenplay), for the thought-provoking symposium, “The Power of Words: Book To Screen,” which comes to the Hilton Palm Springs Jan. 4. Here, Zuckoff opens up with Palm Springs Life about the symposium, the writing process, and his compelling book-to-screen journey.
This kind of symposium has been well received at the festival.
Mitchell Zuckoff: I am excited about the whole concept of book to film. It’s a great area to explore. You see so many wonderful books becoming amazing movies, and talking about it in that context is something I haven’t seen done enough.
Did you suspect this book would hit the big screen?
Mitchell Zuckoff: Well, you hope … But you write a book and it’s like sending a child to kindergarten. You hope it makes a lot of friends and people play nice. And so, in the case of 13 Hours, I knew that we had something special. I knew that having the only story told by the actual guys who were on the ground, who fought that battle that night — guys who had never been heard from before and who had an amazing story to tell — if I didn’t mess it up, we had a chance of doing something really remarkable.
How long did it take to write the book?
Mitchell Zuckoff: Less than a year. It was the most awful, exhausting deadline I have faced in my career. (Laughs) But I knew that because it was Benghazi, because it was the kind of story it was, you want to do it well. Any mistake, any inadvertent error, could be seen as me trying to carry water for the left or the right. There were so many misunderstandings about Benghazi that people were just on guard.
Was there a film option set in place?
Mitchell Zuckoff: It was semi-simultaneous. I knew that the story would lend itself to a film from the moment I started talking to the guys and I knew that as I wrote the book as a fast-moving narrative, it lent itself to adaptation. As I started writing chapters, the film version fell into the place. By early 2014, Chuck Hogan was brought on to write the screenplay. Imagine the movie scene — a guy rips a page off the typewriter and gives it to someone and it’s quickly sent to print. That’s how it felt.
Can you share a few things you learned by talking to these soldiers about their humanity and the state of our world?
Mitchell Zuckoff: The over-arching thing was how modest these men were. These guys did extraordinary, heroic things that night. They watched members of their team — guys they considered brothers — die in front of their eyes. Yet they tell the story so consistently with such focus on what the other guy did, not what they did. They were always looking for ways; it seemed, to almost downplay their own heroism. I was so impressed and moved by that.
Most of the time authors don’t actually set out to write a book with the thought that it will become a movie, but can you offer some advice for people who do have a compelling story to tell?
PHOTO COURTESY OF MITCHELL ZUCKOFF ON TWITTER
Mitchell Zuckoff is honored at the PEN Awards at the JFK Presidential Library,
Mitchell Zuckoff: It’s counter-intuitive … if you step up to the plate thinking, “How do I hit a homerun,” you are less likely to do it. You have to focus on the act of writing itself, not the hope or eventual result. To write a book is so consuming and demands so much of you, and if you distract yourself by hoping that “Oh, gee, maybe a producer is going to see this,” that’s going to keep you from making the book as good as it can be. This is my seventh book. I have written all of them the same way … with fidelity to craft, fidelity to truth. This is the one that just happened to become a movie. In the end, as a writer, I have to own, and I have to be proud of, these books with my name on the spine on the shelf.
The Power of Words: Book To Screen series runs Jan. 3-4. The Symposium will be held Jan. 4 in the Horizon Ballroom, Hilton Palm Springs, 400 E. Tahquitz Canyon Way, Palm Springs. Visit www.psfilmfest.org for more information.