Terry Hayes: ‘In Hollywood meetings, the dumbest idea tends to get the most currency because everybody can understand it’

What is the secret to writing a bestseller? Publisher Leonard Woolf believed successful books came from writers whose “psychological brew contains a touch of naivety, a touch of sentimentality, the story-telling gift, and a mysterious sympathy with the day-dreams of ordinary people”. Whatever the secret sauce is, Terry Hayes has it. He was born in England, brought up in Australia and worked as a journalist before turning to screenwriting. His screenplays include Mad Max 2: Road Warrior, Dead Calm (which launched Nicole Kidman’s international career), and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. His 2013 fiction debut, I Am Pilgrim, a plot-fuelled spy thriller, was a multimillion global bestseller that thrilled critics and readers alike.

A decade later, The Year of the Locust looks certain to repeat this success. But it isn’t the book publishers initially wanted. “Everybody wanted Pilgrim 2,” says Hayes. “I couldn’t do it. I could not work up the enthusiasm to spend another few years with him!” Pilgrim is a difficult, uncompromising character with a very troubled life and upbringing. The Year of the Locust centres on a CIA operative known as Kane. Wanting to write a very different character to Pilgrim, Hayes decided that Kane comes from a very different background.

Kane is a denied area spy who is sent to the badlands where the borders of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan meet, in order to exfiltrate a man with vital information for the safety of the West. Unable to control the storm he finds himself in, Kane is forced to ride it out, working alone in a trade he describes as “full of cheats, fraudsters, liars, fantasists and double-crossers”.

With an accrual of disappointments and putting up with people, I finally said, There’s no future in screenplay writing or making movies in America. I thought, I’ll write a novel

After decades writing for film, Hayes had become tired of the movie-making machine. “I think most people would be amazed at how little-read executives in Hollywood are, [with] no knowledge of film history ... In all of these meetings, the dumbest idea tends to get the most currency because everybody can understand it.” His frustration grew over the years. “I wrote a version of Planet of the Apes, which I think most people agree is a really good script. I went to a meeting at 20th Century Fox. Oliver Stone was going to be the producer. Oliver is a highly talented guy. And the executive vice-president said, ‘Do you know what this screenplay needs? A baseball game. The humans and the apes should play baseball.’ So I said, ‘For what purpose?’ He said, ‘It’ll be entertaining. Americans will love that’.” Hayes laughs. “Things like that would happen, and you can’t afford to be petulant. So, what with an accrual of disappointments and putting up with people, I finally said, There’s no future in screenplay writing or making movies in America. I thought, I’ll write a novel, which I’d always wanted to do.”

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Hayes’s wife, Kristen, is his first reader. In early drafts of Locust, she recognised Kane as her husband. “I said, What? I’m not a spy, I don’t go round killing people, I don’t do awful things! ‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s you. The sense of humour, the conflict and morality ... Always trying to balance things between what’s right and what’s wrong. That’s realistic.’ I was sort of offended but deeply encouraged.”

His writing process is “the search for clarity”. The Year of The Locust is a whopper at more than 670 pages, but to get there, he wrote a million words. Entire subplots didn’t make the final cut, including one about a submarine service station under the North Pole. It’s a book with the boldness of a movie: just as viewers completely buy in to Tom Cruise’s ability to scale mile-high buildings and avoid every bullet aimed at him by professional killers, Kane is endlessly resourceful, lucky and skilful, yet both he and the plot remain completely believable. The novel features a horrifying crucifixion scene. (Kane thinks, “In many countries in the Middle East it is not enough that people are punished; everybody else must be warned.”) Hayes says, “one of the things you learn from the movies is that it’s not enough to have one good idea.” So he built on the scene, including the crucified man’s children and wife as captives. When Kane sees the cross, and the victim’s family chained underneath it, “the moral dilemma that he faces is between his humanity and his career. He chooses humanity, which I think helps bond him to the reader.”

The cops drew up and they recognised [Mel Gibson]. They said, ‘Hey Mel, give us an autograph’. They’re so rude. They’re in a patrol car

—  Hayes on the high price of fame

In my imaginary casting of the book, I chose Cillian Murphy for Kane. “Definitely Murphy could do it! In Peaky Blinders he was fantastic, and then to see him do Oppenheimer ... When I saw the first episode of Peaky Blinders, I said, This guy could be a movie star.” What makes a star? “It’s that thing they said about Marilyn Monroe, that she was lightning in a bottle. God knows why; it wasn’t because she was a great actress. Yes, she was attractive, but you go to Beverly Hills and sit in any restaurant, and you’ll see hundreds of attractive young men and women. I don’t know what it is, and I don’t think anybody else does either. But if you’ve been in that business for a long time, you do recognise it. It’s not definable, but it’s recognisable.”

He and his Kristen lived in Ireland 25 years ago, first at Mount Juliet in Thomastown, then Kinsale. They had moved to London and were planning another relocation to Paris when they discovered they were unexpectedly expecting their first child. Kristen’s parents lived in Los Angeles, so Hayes asked would she prefer to return there. “She said, I’m not raising children in Los Angeles, not in the movie business. That’s too distorting, that’s too crazy.’ I said, ‘I think you’re right, who needs to grow up with children they don’t like?” So, they moved to Switzerland, where three of their four children were born. “Then my parents got very ill and so we went down to Australia to look after them. This was in the midst of writing Pilgrim. My brother died – he was three years older than me – then my dad died, then my mom died. All in a year.” Such enormous loss informed the writing of the book. “I can see the point in Pilgrim where it was the worst.”

The distortion of the movie business is a subject he returns to. “It’s been my good – or ill – fortune to spend quite an amount of time with some people who are extremely famous. Nobody in their right mind would want that life.” He describes walking down a street in New York with Mel Gibson when, “cops drew up, and they recognised him. They said, ‘Hey Mel, give us an autograph’. They’re so rude. They’re in a patrol car. So he says, ‘No, not today guys, sorry’. My God the language from the cops! Cursing him out because he wouldn’t give them an autograph.” Nothing, Hayes believes, ever compensates “for the lack of privacy, the constant scrutiny of what you’re wearing, what you look like, who you’re going out with, what your kids are doing.”

“Kristen and I were living in New York, and Tom and Nicole had invited us to dinner. We used to go to an Irish pub on Second Avenue. I don’t drink, but they had a pool table, and Kris likes playing pool. Tom and Nicole after dinner said, ‘What do you want to do?’ and we said, ‘Well, we often go and play pool,’ and Tom said, ‘That sounds great’. The damn bar owner called everybody he knew, who then called photographers. We were stuck in this bar while there were hundreds of people out on the street. It was awful.”

Hayes still writes for screen. “Only if there’s a director involved, and the director and I like each other, or have a similar view of the world, or of what makes a good movie.” He enjoys the solitude of novels compared with filmmaking, and doesn’t go on holidays, “because I would find it almost impossible to pick up the reins again”.

He is planning a book about storytelling called Interviews with The Madman. But before that, and much to his publisher’s and readers’ delight, he decided it was time for a sequel to Pilgrim. “I’m looking forward to doing it now because I’ve had that long break.” He smiles. “I’ve thought a lot about him.”

The Year of the Locust by Terry Hayes is published by Bantam