Rebecca Dinerstein Knight pulled back the curtain on filmmaking in general and her film specifically in Peterborough on Saturday.
“Nine times out of 10, when you see the back of an actor as she’s speaking, the dialogue that was originally spoken has been changed,” said Knight, who shared another reality about “The Sunlit Night,” the film based on her novel and screenplay that is currently on Prime Video.
“Right now on Prime, you’re seeing one-twelfth of the movie we made,” she said.
Knight, who lives in Harrisville by way of New York City and Norway, spoke at the monthly meeting of the Monadnock Writers’ Group at the Peterborough Town Library. Her account of shepherding text from poetry book to a premiere at the Sundance Film Festival laid bare some of the realities of producing works for the big screen.
“The Sunlit Night” morphed out of Knight being awarded a Clapp Fellowship upon graduating from Yale to write poetry.
“I got the Clapp,” she told her audience, and it allowed her to spend time in Norway, where the change from her native New York City would ideally spawn verse.
Back in the United States for an MFA at New York University, she was honest with herself.
“I didn’t want to be a poet. An office job seemed very cool,” she said, adding that she took to writing technical memos in the financial industry while turning her poetry from Norway into prose. When Bloomsbury Publishing picked it up, she learned that the appeal wasn’t about her work.
“It’s not about the author; it’s about the publisher. They want the next shiny new toy,” she said, explaining that this means a young, debut writer.
Then someone noted how “The Sunlit Night” is set in Norway. “Let’s make a movie. Norway is very cinematic,” she recalls someone saying as to how the movie concept was born.
Some New York City serendipity brought her together with actress Jenny Slate, and Knight wrote the screenplay herself.
“Gillian Anderson came out of nowhere. I don’t know how she got the script,” said Knight, adding that the production process was less glamorous.
The story centers on a young woman who goes to Norway for her painting and meets up with a young man there to bury his father.
“What you don’t see is how ragtag and fragile the process is. Jenny Slate and the actor (playing the young man) had no chemistry. At times they didn’t even speak to each other. The director alienated everyone,” said Knight.
The story didn’t come together and the dialogue had to be rerecorded in Germany. Nevertheless, the finished film was scheduled to open at 7 p.m. on a Saturday at Sundance, the prime slot at the festival.
When the movie started, the dialogue was not in sync with what was on the screen.
“It was one of the most-embarrassing experiences of my life,” said Knight. “It was the most wretchedly humiliating case of … it was a flop.”
She noted that by the time the bar opened after the showing, the nasty reviews were on the internet. One dividend of the experience is that she is now fluent in Norwegian.
She rewrote the screenplay for voiceovers locally in Greenfield, where her then-finance’s (now husband’s) parents live, and a new version was set to premiere in 2020.
“It was the middle of COVID, and the day my son was born,” said Knight.
The film is currently on Prime Video, and Knight shared some other little-known facts about filmmaking, including about special effects.
“The scene when Jenny is painting? The colors are all CGI – computer generated imagery – not real paint,” she said.
Knight has published a second novel, “Hex,” which is set in academia, but has no plans to push it toward a film. Doing so once was what she called “a lesson in expectations and humility.”
“I’m glad the movie exists. It’s not something a lot of people get to do,” she said.
Another lesson she took from the experience was about priorities.
“I no longer correlate artistic recognition with success,” she said.
Knight encouraged writers and others to trust their judgment.
“You know when you’ve made something good,” she said.