Lee Child - Rancho Mirage Writers Festival 2016

so I have to introduce I'm really honored to we have a women angel who I learned is really one of the serious collectors of mysteries first editions he is a successful businessman he started Supercuts he's very active he knows why but both so active in the Palm City Art Museum he met our speaker at the airport he has been with him for two days he took him to desert European motors he got him in the rolls-royce Wraith which I understand you may have bought and so please will you give a warm welcome to one of the great citizens of our community Gary grace Thank You Jamie it's my privilege tonight to introduce some Lee Child a man who's written has published 20 Jack Reacher novels in the last 19 years it's been true they've been translated into 50 languages and are available in 99 territories worldwide and have sold over 100 million copies Jack Reacher bus isn't that amazing but before I bring Lee up I'd just like to take a moment to tell you a little bit of how it started there was a guy named Jim grant grew up in England he was in theater television writing for a long time and in August in 1994 his boss called him in said there was going to be a major restructuring at the television studio and it was inevitable in the near not-too-distant future he was going to his job was being eliminated so Jim wasn't going to let any grass grow into his feet so he put Plan B together right away and decided that he wanted to remain in the entertainment industry and he thought sort of in a broad way and so he thought I think I'll write a novel so off to the stationery story when he bought a pencil three pads of paper a pencil sharpener an eraser and he got to work six months later the first Jack Reacher book was completed he got an agent and the agent said oh I love this but I got a few suggestions here or there so here comes the first rewrite so draft two and then a few more suggestions and draft three and so now it's time to get a now he's already been laid off now and you know funds are getting a little scarce it's time to get an agent so he gets an agent the main a publisher excuse me the agent got a publisher Putnam in the United States and the editor there loved the books that I want to buy it but I'd like you to change it substantially I'd like you to the subject you're writing about I don't think is a good subject you should write about another subject so so we're now we're to another rewrite and but which one went pretty quickly and by December of 1995 he has his book is complete the editor buys it and gives him a two book contract and it's a good thing Lee says because he was seven weeks from going broke he had enough money for one more mortgage payment but not for two and so he gets an advance on the books but now it's not going to come out for fifteen months so what is there to do in the meantime well he'll write another book so the first thing one of the first things he does he goes out on a research trip and so as a result of this research trip he decided that he doesn't like research trips as a matter of fact that that's the only one he's ever done in writing a book and he doesn't start with a plan or an outline he just starts with some with two or three broad ideas of what he'd like to see covered in the book so I could go on and on with stories but I know you didn't come here to listen to me so without further ado I'd like to introduce to you mr. Lee child what the one thing I left out of that was when he got the agent he gave himself a pen name which is lead child so Jim grant is actually his real name well thank you very much thank you that's something we always say thank you very much when you come on stage after a round of applause but I really really totally mean it thank you very much for this invitation to be here I've just had the most wonderful time I have met a tremendous variety of other writers because normally I'm at a crime convention or a thriller convention this is a more general convention where there are different kinds of writers I've really really been privileged to be among them and accepted as their colleague we've had great conversation I have really enjoyed meeting all of you what a tremendous pleasure it has been to to talk and get to know you I've done events on four continents of the world inexplicably nobody has invited me to Antarctica yet but I've been everywhere else and I do not agree with what Jaime said about this being the best writers festival in America in my experience is the best in the world I've had a really sensational time and as I say thank you very much for for inviting me and I always try and do what people want me to do my mother told me that and in the program it says you want my story well it started a regrettably long time ago my story I was born a little to the east of here about 7,000 miles east in a town called Coventry England now Coventry was the site of the first really destructive urban air raid of World War two and even though my earliest coherent memories stemmed from about 12 or 13 years after World War two the town was still in ruins it was still a ruined landscape and I would play on ruined streets in and out of burned-out shells and buildings we would climb up and down these ruined places like Jungle Jim's we had the greatest time ever it was it was just really good I had an elder brother who his name is Richard who is a very smart guy he he is now a nuclear scientist and but he was a very skinny scrawny kid he had he had what you'd now call I guess an eating disorder he hated to eat he still hates to eat if I said to one of you let's go to dinner you would you might well say no but you would probably regard it as a pleasant suggestion if I said to my brother Richard let's go to dinner that would be the same thing as saying let's stick needles in our eyes so he was even though it's three and a half years older than me he was this scrawny emaciated little kid he still is he still squirt he looks like a famine victim he's 60 something but when he was a kid he I was I remember December 1958 I was about three and a half and he was six and a half and he was a geek he was a nerd he was the skinny little guy was sticky-out ears and we went out on I'm one of those ruined streets to play and really it was on that street the jack reacher was born because he had a tricycle my parents had bought him a tricycle probably third hand from some kind of flea market and he was writing its tricycle down the street and I was following along behind on foot and around the corner came this other kid this other six and a half year old called Nicky who did not have a eating disorder he was like a normal size six and a half year old and he was the neighborhood tough and Richard was riding his tricycle Nicky came around the corner and shoved Richard off the tricycle and took possession of this tricycle and Richard said Nicky give that back to me or I'll smash you and I stood back and took great I'm going to see a fight so I stood there and watch them shape up to each other and then Richard turned around and walked back to say something to me and I thought what's he going to say is he going to say tell mom I died a hero but no he leaned in close and said go smash Nicky which which taught me a number of things right there first of all it taught me the art of delegation secondly it taught me it's probably better to be of the officer class than an enlisted man but whenever we went out to play my mother would always say pro-forma she would tell me do what Richard tells you so I was I had to do it so there I was three and a half and I was pretty big for three and a half I did not have an eating disorder I ate everything so I had to do it so I walked over to Nicky and I thought how do you actually smash somebody and I'd seen you know I'd seen stuff on the television so I thought well I'll give it a try but I was pretty nervous and I guess you know a little wobbly in the leg and the sidewalk was all still smashed up from the the wartime bombing and it to be absolutely totally frank I tripped I kind of tripped on my momentum smashed Nicky I totally laid the guy out and Richard got his tricycle back and I I was aware my hand was hurting and I looked down and I cut my hand and I had two little white things stuck in it which I would suddenly realized when Nicky's teeth which I always point this out just in case somewhere in the world Nicky is in the audience with it with his lawyer they were his baby teeth obviously so there was no major damage done but I kind of liked it I thought that is pretty cool and of course haven't done that once then you get a reputation you're some kind of dangerous psychopath and so I learned how to fight a little better and also traded on that reputation as being a dangerous psychopath and and really really started enjoying it then we moved to another nearby city the city of Birmingham England moved there when I was four and Birmingham is effectively the same city of Detroit same industry same type of demographic same it was pretty prosperous people were working it was fine except you know it's not a glamorous city not very good-looking city and I enrolled in school and I know that here you have elementary school and then maybe middle school and junior high and high and all that kind of stuff we only had two schools your education was split into two phases primary came first and then secondary came second so I went to Cherry Orchard primary school which sounds awfully nice Cherry Orchard but God knows what they were talking about there may have been Cherry Orchard there some hundreds of years before but there was nothing there now except I suppose now what you would call it is a Superfund site in what in one corner of the yard this black oily pollution was bubbling up there was a nearby river that it was compulsory that if you fell in the river or came in any kind of contact with the water you immediately had to go to the hospital for a stomach pump so it was that kind of a place but I liked it mostly because but already by that point I was falling in love with with entertainment it was a very basic school we learn nothing except the three hours reading writing and arithmetic but what you would call the principle and what we call the headmistress was this battle-ax of a lady called Maisy Lister who was a strict disciplinarian she wanted us to learn what we needed to learn but she also was she absolutely loved American musical theater so twice a year once at Christmas once in the summer she would organize a show which was basically all her favorite show tunes strung together with an entirely meaningless plot and I went the first one of these shows I saw I went as an audience member I just totally fell in love with the whole concept because these bright beaming children up on the stage these bright beaming parents just just loving the whole thing that was the transaction that I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing I wanted to be in that situation so immediately for the next show I rushed to try out for it and I ran into that thing you know that thing where does something you can't do but you don't know it yet I went up to the teacher and said I want to be in this show and they gave me a lyric sheet and said sing this song and so I started singing it and I as I was singing it I was thinking to myself why are these people going pale but by the end of the song it was clear to me I could not sing so I became occasionally I was kind of third sphere carrier from the right but most of the time I spent making the he's backstage and that set my career then I went to to secondary school and I won a scholarship to a very prestigious secondary school it was one of those old old English schools the school itself was 224 years older than the United States and it cleaved very closely to the Oxford University syllabus which at that time regarded anything after the Year 1485 as dangerously modern in fact more or less there was no history after 1485 that was more or less than journalism so we learned all the traditional stuff I can read ancient Greek I can read alas in all that kind of stuff that's that's what I did and at the same time working in in the theatre they had a theatre group and I left it to the detriment of my schoolwork really and then you know years go by and you end up you got to go to college and I thought all right what what should I do and I kind of ignored it the way that you get to college in England is you at that time anyway you did these things called a levels which are examinations advanced levels and by this time it was already 1973 I think yeah 1973 so I took those exams but of course for me the Age of Aquarius had had dawned in a big way so I did the exams and then I went on a trip with a friend of mine called Mick Cleary and we went to Europe and I remember being in Corsica I remember being in Switzerland I've got no idea how we got between the two I I remember being on a train at one point go in somewhere and sleeping in the corridor and it's just a long back now but less it practically all summer long and then I got back home pretty late in September and amongst the mail that had arrived for me was the results of these a levels and they were actually not too bad I mean by no means was I an A student but they were not terrible it would get me into University so I brushed I thought oh okay I better get this sorted out because University was about to start and I went down to the Central Library in in Birmingham and of course all the other conscientious students had been doing this for four months and so the prospectus is that brochures for all the colleges were really well thumbed and the one I liked I liked one in particular because it had a picture of this very nice building with this beautiful blue sky because all college brochures look like that but I was rather captivated by that and especially because on the next page there was a picture of the student theatre that looked really great I thought yes I would really like to to go there the only problem was it was so well thumbed the cover had fallen off the brochure and I didn't know which college it was and I was leafing through the text and it said we do this and we do that and I said yes fine but who are you and eventually at the back I found a mention of who they were so I called him on the phone I was outside the normal application procedure I called him on the phone and said I would like to come and they said well what do you want to study and I hadn't really thought about that so I said well what have you got and they said well we have a vacancy in the in the law department and I said sure I can do that because in England law is an undergraduate degree you do your undergraduate degree and then you do a professional qualification then you're a lawyer and it's a three year course so I went to the University to do law and this three year course actually took me four years because I wasn't paying very much attention because of course I was working in the theatre I did eventually graduate and I got I didn't bother with the professional qualification so don't worry I have never practiced law and I never will but it was a good degree to have actually it was very interesting and that is what I always say to young people now if you don't want to be a lawyer do a law degree because it means that you can you pay attention to parts you like you ignore the parts you don't like and it really doesn't matter what whether you're top of the class or not so I did that and but basically worked in the theatre and we did had a lot of fun but the problem was I you know being young being a student I was very earnest and very serious about things and I had read this book by very famous British theatre director called Peter Brook and the book was called the empty space and he made a very persuasive case that all the theatre needs really is is an actor's a script and an empty space in which to perform and I was very very convinced by that argument did not need backstage technicians like me really I was superfluous in that world so I decided alright I'll I'll try television because television you definitely do need backstage technicians otherwise it can't happen so I applied for a job and this was again it's very hard to tell young people about those days it was 1977 I guess I was the worst student ever and I was very lazy about getting a job I was married by this point and I remember my wife saying to me are you going to get a job and I was watching Wimbledon tennis on the television and I said yeah I'll think about it and I watched it was a women's semi-final on the Wednesday afternoon and it finished and I thought all right better get a job and I looked around the apartment and there was a newspaper from the previous Monday so I looked in that and there were three jobs that I could possibly be interested in and I applied for them and I got all three that's how easy it was in 1977 it was really really simple and so I had to choose between these three jobs and I chose the one that it was at a company called Granada television in Manchester England so I went there and it was it was just a terrific it was a terrific place I remember I was being try it was a little awkward personnel-wise because I was being trained by the woman I was going to replace back then many British jobs had a compulsory retirement age and that particular job you had to retire when you were 60 you couldn't stay on even if you wanted to and so this woman was coming up to 60 she was training me I was 22 very nearly 23 and so it was a little awkward but she was a nice woman and she had been there so long she knew everybody I started on a Monday and on the Thursday she said to me come we're going to have lunch with some actors who were in the building doing a show so we went and we had lunch with four actors Laurence Olivier Alec Guinness Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud that was that was my introduction to that company and it just got better from that point on we made some fantastic shows we made jewel in the crown Brideshead Revisited prime suspect cracker it was just the greatest job ever I really loved it and no doubt I would still be there except one day my boss said something to me that made it just impossible for me to continue he said you're fired which is what Gary was referring to not due to any felony or misdemeanor on my part at all it was just the usual thing it was the 90s it was I was 39 years old by that point I was an expensive veteran I had benefits a pension excellent salary all that kind of thing so so I was I was out at that point now obviously being British age 39 my first instinct was well can I retire and I went over and over the figures and sadly I couldn't I couldn't make it work I could I couldn't make it work to retire at 39 so I thought alright I've got to do something else what can I do and I said I know I'll write a book I've read some how hard can it be but seriously when I say I'd read some actually I had read thousands tens of thousands of books because that's all we had you know going right back to the beginning that's all we had we had back then television was black and white there were two channels and they and they were off the air for most of the day so obviously no computers no video games stuff later there was nothing else to do other than read and everybody read even the even the kids that couldn't really read tried they had what now is called graphic novels they would you know they were very happy with those everybody tried it was as a at the primary school it was a like I said a tough area pretty pretty gruesome I went I went to school every single day with a knife in one pocket and a book in the other pocket that's what people did and so I had read thousands and thousands of books including one book that really changed my life ultimately and this came from the Elmwood Public Library which is why I love libraries so much my life was essentially created by libraries it really was but it was nothing like the Rancho Mirage library believe me the Elmwood Public Library was on a bomb site behind a ruined church and it was what in England we called a Nissen Hut what you would call a Quonset hut leftover from the military it was just his little Hut full of books well full of about probably 300 books of which the children's section had about maybe 50 and one of the books they had was clearly part of a series but it was a like a remnant it was the only one but of the series in the library the series is called my home in and one imagines that it was you know my home in France my home in wherever but the only one that that my library had was my home in America and I got this book out when I was probably four or five and it was a cardboard book with 12 pages and it was a picture of what they thought obviously were typical representative American homes there was New England saltbox you turned the page it was a prairie farmhouse you turn the page is California bungalow so in the page and the only picture drawn from the inside looking out was at this little apple-cheeked boy sitting on a low window ledge looking out over Manhattan at night and I thought I am that boy it was like if you read a memoirs by transgendered people they tell you they say they knew they were trapped in the wrong body I knew I was trapped in the wrong country I was that boy what why wasn't I there and right there at the age of four or five I that was my ambition to move to New York City and it took me a hell a long time frankly so where were we yeah so I was going to write a book and so I did like Gary said I went out and bought paper and pencil I couldn't afford a computer didn't have one this was 1994 when I started and very few people had computers I certainly didn't and I wanted to emphasize to myself that this was real you know this was a job I didn't want to just make it like a hobby and going by the gear I I wanted to earn the gear so I wrote the first book in pencil and I didn't buy the computer till that book had sold so I wrote the book and unhappily it sold and then I bought the computer wrote the second book and and off we went and in the meantime I had like I said it in college I had met this American girl in college he was studying overseas she was from New York and she was absolutely stunning I mean she was a total babe and I mean absolute knockout I cannot tell you and I you know like I said it was 1973 and you know what it was like back then I thought that she was just wonderful I thought this is going to be a great couple of weeks and just last August those couple of weeks turned into 40 years so but I had made a sad misjudgment because I thought she you know she's from New York we're going to graduate together I'm going to get my green card and off we go but I'd missed an obvious clue she was studying in England now why was that because she was a rabid angle file and she would not leave she totally would not leave and then we had a kid and the kid was in school and we had jobs normally we couldn't get away so it was a question of how how was I going to get everybody over to the States and of course losing my job actually turned out to be a good thing because I lost my job being a writer becomes you're independent as to where you live you don't have to live near anywhere our daughter by that time was almost finished with high school and ready for college so we moved at that point 1998 we we moved to the states and I am I am a legal immigrant just in case Donald Trump is listening I'm completely legal I jumped through every hoop of which there are many including you have to have a chest x-ray when you when you enter the United States as an immigrant you have to carry with you a chest x-ray proving that you do not have tuberculosis all of that kind of stuff so here we are we're we arrived in the US and part of that immigration process part of the paperwork you have to do you have to get a police report from your home country to prove you're not a felon you also have to list all your previous visits to the US so that they can check you're not a felon over there and so I had to go back through all all my old passports and in that from my first visit in 1974 till the immigration in 1998 I had made 100 visits which is kind of why I felt able to or somewhat slightly entitled to write about America because I'd seen a lot of it you know visiting my wife's relatives we'd go here and there we'd spend an awful lot of time in the country and so that's why I felt able to write about America that I felt like seeing enough of it and seen a lot of it anyway and of course I rather self defensively adjusted Reach's story so that he was a military brat and therefore he hadn't been in America much either so if I made a mistake it was plausible that he would be making the mistake you know that was a purely defensive move and then it was just a question of writing another book and another one and another one waiting for something to happen and it happened very slowly and this is what people forget about publishing is that it's it happens slowly people look at me and they think oh yeah you know bestseller always been a fixture well it's not like that at all I was it was like being published by the witness protection program for a very long time it built up slowly year-on-year and it was in fact in America it was my it was the 12th book before I hit number one and it so it was it was a long slog but then it did and it just kept on getting exponentially better and better until until here we are now which is I got to tell you very very gratifying there is no better job than this and for that I have to thank you all for buying the books you know basically thank you very much it's it's we have a we have a saying in the business it's better than digging a ditch and it really is it's a really it's a really terrific job and I'm very happy that I'm doing it and I'm really one of those very lucky people that I've never had a job I didn't want to do my old job I was very happy every day this job I'm very happy every day with a bit of luck I will complete my entire career having been happy to go to work every day because at this point in publishing I'm just beginning to think maybe possibly I'm not going to need to get another job after this this could be the last one also what happens you know when I come to a thing like this it's as a number-one bestseller we get treated exceptionally well I mean the the people here have been so nice and so charming the library staff have been fantastic the festival volunteers have been fantastic I have been looked after to the point where I feel completely sort of helpless and I am completely helpless because because it being looked after like that it's exactly like getting a it's like getting GPS in your car I used to be able to go find my way anywhere I could go anywhere and find my way and then I got a car with GPS which I ignore completely because it was kind of a newfangled thing and then my next star also had GPS and I tried it out and now I can't even cross the street without GPS and it gets a bit like that you come on a thing like this and you get reams of paperwork you know a publicist or an assistant or both will compile this this paperwork and it tells you everything what flight you're on who's going to pick you up where the hotel is what you've got to do and they always give you a little description of the event in it and they and this particular one said leave some time for Q&A so that's what I'm going to do now I'm going to leave some time for Q&A so if anybody has a question stick up your hand shout it out and I will repeat the question and then answer it this guy always think if I'm gonna have trouble I look around just yet I don't have a problem I was Hollywood is a different and what he has explained they must have tied you down yeah well I just want to just want to select bet with myself here that the first question would be about Tom Cruise which and the question was how come Tom Cruise is playing Jack Reacher because those of you who very kindly read the books know that Jack Reacher is six feet five probably 250 pounds the kind of guy ugly as well the kind of guy that if he were to walk in now we would all go a little bit quiet because we're all a little bit worried about seeing such a person so how does Tom Cruise play that person well it's a very good question and there's a bunch of answers to that one is that I'm tempted to say it's not my decision because what happens is you sell stuff and this deal was done in 2005 which is now what 11 years ago and so you need you need money you want to do the deal and so you do the deal and once once you've sold something Hollywood is completely outside of you control done that is kind of the answer I would like to give but it's not entirely true because it was true in 2005 but it was six years after that 2011 that they actually started to think about making the movie you know it went into what they called development which means that it spends a long time with nothing happening and during those six years the as I said the book series built up and up and up until it was in 2011 the book series was significantly bigger than it had been in 2005 and so it was important to them that I was on board with the idea of cruise and so I got this call I remember it well March of 2011 I got this call from the producer that they are going to fly to New York and wanted to take me to dinner and they mentioned which restaurant which was a very expensive restaurant and so immediately by just by the restaurant alone I knew they were going to tell me it was cruise and sure enough I get I go to the restaurant and there they are the the producer of the director and we I sit down we we start the small talk and they just going on and on they're clearly just working around to it and I think come on guys just tell me it's crews right and they said yes it is what do you think and at that point I had a split second where if I had if I had thrown a complete tantrum they would have probably cancelled the project so I had a split second to decide now the problem with with actors is that and like I say I know actors like I told you I've worked with actors all my life I had that lunch with those very famous actors I I know a lot of actors I've been around actors I've got good friends who are actors and here's the truth about actors especially film actors they are all very small there are no large actors in the world that is a universal truth and you've got to ask yourself why you know cinema is more than 100 years old if big actors somehow worked on screen we'd have evolved a race of very big actors we'd be we'd be all talking about how big actors are but know something about I don't know what it is the optical reality the film plane whatever it might be actors tend to be small even the actors that you think are big or small and it's no good telling me oh yeah but Liam Neeson is 6 foot 2 or whatever Liam Neeson is not 6 foot 2 Wikipedia is not true that press releases are not true the only people in the world who know how big actors are our wardrobe mistresses because they have got to make the clothes fit and I was talking about this to a wardrobe mistress at Warner Brothers completely unrelated I happened to be there talking about something else and she she said and for instance you know lots of people say Clint Eastwood in his youth would have made a great Jack Reacher and I we were talking about that and she said wait a minute and she went back into this big refrigerated store that they have and she brought back the tweed jacket that Clint Eastwood wore and dirty Harry to remember that costume he wore a tweed jacket grey flannel pants and she she gave me this jacket and I could not get it on the sleeve was like they're plenty and I met Clint Eastwood subsequently or be it as an older man rather small and shrunken but you know he's about here all actors are small even the ones you think are big and so we for years we'd been going through this ridiculous thing with the reach of casting which was here's this guy who is seven inches shorter than Reacher clearly a better prospect than this other guy who's seven and a half inches shorter than Richard it just became a rather pointless thing but people have said to me what about Daniel Craig you know could hear played region Daniel Craig is smaller than Tom Cruise I mean I was on a plane with Daniel Craig by chance go heading back to London and I had to get up to use the bathroom I tripped over him so ultimately it came down to a completely binary decision did I want a movie or did I not and here's the thing and I don't want to pick a fight with anybody here but here's the thing from from my point of view a book writers point of view they say to you people people worry what are they going to do to my book the truth is they do nothing to your book your book is still there in the library it's still there in the bookstore it's still there on your shelf at home I used to say to people I promise you one thing Tom Cruise will not come to your house and steal your books and it is kind of I mean the other writers here I don't know that I bet you they would would tell you the same thing it's very frustrating if you're a writer let's say you're going somewhere you're on a plane let's say you're foolish enough to talk to the person next to you inevitably they're going to ask you what do you do you say oh I'm a writer inevitably 100 percent of the time their next question is Oh have any of your books been made into movies as if a book is not enough as if a book is like just yearning to become a movie like a chrysalis or pupa or something like that as if being a book is entirely inadequate and it's not valid until it has moved to that next stage of Nirvana and become a movie and book writers don't feel like that the book is the end product the rest of it is a completely separate issue and you know movies a different version it's way off to the side the book is the thing for me and so it really I was completely relaxed about it I didn't care who played Reacher in the movie I just wanted to see somebody else's version and to be completely I mean to be completely pretentious about it I don't want to sound pretentious but everything comes out pretentious when you talk like this suppose I was Bob Dylan and I got a call from my manager saying somebody wants to do a cover version of all along the watchtower if I was Bob Dylan what would I want to hear I've kind of facsimile of what I already did or Jimi Hendrix's opinion I would rather hear Jimi Hendrix I would like this is what I do this is what he does something completely different so I felt yeah let crews do it because actually I felt we are never going to get all the components to reach her including the size never it's just not going to happen and so why don't we forget the size and look for the other attributes of reaches and crews is a really good actor apart from all the tabloid nonsense that he's involved in he is a really really good actor and I felt he could portray all the other stuff about Rieger apart from the size and you know people that go to the movies who've read the book and get dissatisfied about it I kind of think why you even going to the movie you you've read the book you know who did it what's the point so you know I feel I'm the least worried person on the planet about Cruz playing Reacher and I've really enjoyed his company to be honest he turned out to be a really nice guy the first time I met him was was like I said that initial conversation was March of 2011 and then the movie was going to start shooting in September and so we had what you have a party at the beginning and then what they called the read-through where they all sit around a big table and they kind of half act and half read the script and it's a very exciting moment you know it's coming to life but before that before the party I had met Cruz and as I as I got off the plane switched my phone back on there was a text from him saying come up to the hotel suite and we'll hang out and I was kind of so nervous about it because this is from March onward this is all this commentary been building up and it was I was obsessed by I was going to walk into this hotel suite and say oh hi John it was it was just this monster thing in my head and I but I walked in he's a verbally normal sized guy and very nice because I had you know when you go to Hollywood you can't go by yourself because otherwise you're a total loser you got to take your people and the problem is I don't have any people so I took my daughter who is a big movie fan big she loves the movies really understands him very well and I felt would be the ideal companion to come with this so I took my daughter and we walked and actually my daughter is quite a shy person but not around celebrity for some reason she just talks to she just buttonhole celebrities like crazy she did it's a Bill Clinton once and she and Anton were talking for ages and at one point this was as I say 2011 Mission Impossible 4 was due to come out that December and cruise said to her you should come to the premiere and I thought ok this is actually a bit of a test here and sure enough all those months later December rolled around and she not me she got a personal invitation from Tom Cruise to the Mission Impossible premiere so he's a he's a classy gentleman I've really enjoyed his company and I would you know I defend I defend him play and reach her I think he's fine I really do I like it any other question any other questions other than Tom Cruise yeah this lady what college what college Olegario is called Sheffield University in the same way that Birmingham is like Detroit Sheffield England is like Pittsburgh it's it's the Steeltown does this really really I'm certain it's a lie and I'm certain it's an apocryphal story but there's this story about Sheffield steel steel expertise which is that around the end of the 19th century beginning of the 20th century the German steel industry was was building up in prestige and technology and that some German steel mill sent to Sheffield a drill bit that was incredibly fine incredibly narrow drill bit for drilling a tiny tiny hole it was in fact more or less inconceivable that anybody could have made a steel drill bit that fine and so they sent it to Sheffield presumably showing off in some way you know staking out that or saying look at what we can do and there was no response whatsoever from Sheffield until about four weeks later the drill bit arrived back in Germany with a hole drilled through it but that was Sheffield one last question and then we'll wrap it up there what kind of research should I do and why did I choose to mate rich or a military policeman well I wanted to do something that an alienated character disconnected character somebody that just wandered the land that was my idea that somebody would wander the land with no no connections no responsibilities no loyalties and there's two kinds of people that that just wander aimlessly the first mentally old people and the second are people that have been in the military their whole life and then cannot readapt to civilian life and I thought I don't really want to write a 20 book series about a mentally ill person so I'll choose the military option and military police because I wanted it to be a kind of you know crime series basically with investigation and so on and it's very hard to find out much about it now I know a lot about it because you get invited I was invited to Fort Belvoir in Virginia by the pettalia no manner of a big deal CID battalion and I've seen it all now but of course back then I had no idea my dad who was in the British Army remembers nothing at all about the military police except they would show up outside a bar in a jeep and jump out and hit everybody over the head with a stick that's all the information I had at a time but I figured well you know we're here in Rancho Mirage right and there's a police department here and we assume that the police department is somehow kind of tougher and harder than you guys because they've got to boss you around so I figured it's probably the same in the army that the army full of trained killers but the police department in the army must be even tougher than them so that was my basic premise and I made it up from that point it's always have endlessly embarrassing for me like today with major silverware people who really know what it's like are around because I make no bones about it I make this up thank you very much

Channel: Rancho Mirage Library & Observatory

Views: 13,661

Rating: 4.8550725 out of 5

Keywords: Lee Child, Author, Rancho Mirage Writers Festival, 2016

Id: JmKTVfgV7vw

Length: 47min 47sec (2867 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 23 2016