Tony Grisoni Interviewed (By Someone Else!)

Etienne Barillier recently posted an extensive interview with Tony Grisoni, the screenwriter currently penning the estate-sanctioned bio-pic The Owl in Daylight, on the French PKD site Dickian.fr.

Grisoni discusses everything from his first encounters with PKD's fiction, to his favorite PKD novels, (or 'favourite' as they spell it on his side of the pond), to his research for Owl:

"I spent two or three weeks in California – meeting his friends, colleagues, ex-wives and children, going to the places he went, the places he lived. Everyone was unbelievably generous. He was a very loved, if exasperating man. My dreams throughout this period were very vivid. A recurring dream was of Phil. He appeared as a small and finely crafted bronze model of the crucified christ. The emphasis was on the beauty and preciousness and delicacy of this object."

Grisoni elaborates on the fusion of PKD's biography and fiction that he's working on:

"My idea was to have two characters – one is the historical Philip K. Dick. the other is Ed Firmley. I wanted these two characters to apparently inhabit two separate worlds - one is the fiction of the OWL IN DAYLIGHT story, the other is the (so-called) truth of historical PKD. Then I want to gradually merge the two. I want there to be a moment in the end where Ed fuses with Phil. In telling this story we take in some key moments in Phil's life as flashback from his last days in a condominium filled with Dowland's sad songs. But I have also written Phil into scenes drawn from his own fiction. The line between dreaming and actual reality is blurred. The tale folds back on itself."

Sounds like good stuff, and kudos to Etienne for the scoop!