The novelist and director struck up a friendship and Kaui ended up reading the screenplay and reviewing the casting videos, as well as discussing details down to the wardrobes that key characters would wear. Payne talks about this in a Q&A following a screening at the recent Hawaii International Film Festival. “I had expected someone to just parachute in and write the screenplay,” she says, but found that Payne took his task of translating her novel, set in contemporary Hawaii, seriously - allowing him to add such details as the sounds of the geckos chirping in the background. (Kaui was adopted by him when she was 11 years old.) He met with the island’s big landowners, visited the Outrigger Club, a key setting in the novel, and met Kaui’s famous step-father, the champion surfer-turned-politician Fred Hemmings, Jr.
“He almost approached it as if he were making a documentary,” she says. She invited Payne as well as set designer Jane Ann Stewart along “to hang out and see how these particular locals party.” That was the start of a friendship, as Kaui helped Payne scout locations, particularly after he decided to rent a home in the lush Manoa Valley, a few miles inland of downtown Honolulu, for about eight months. Kaui and her husband were headed to a birthday party the next day for Kaui’s aunt, held at her grandmother’s house. Sideways was the 2004 movie about a troubled oenophile, played by Paul Giamatti, who takes a road trip through Santa Barbara’s wine country involving too much wine and some romantic misadventures. “I was nervous about what wine to order,” Kaui told me. He also offered to meet her in Hawaii that coming weekend. But, in chatting with Kaui by phone last week, she told me he’d emailed her sometime in 2008 to let her know he’d decided to direct it himself. The Descendants was optioned by Alexander Payne, the director of the unexpected hit, “ Sideways.” Originally, Payne had not planned to direct the film. The theme of our panel was fractured families (under the title “ Tales of Ruin and Renewal, even Triumph!“) I had just come out with my book on the Mondavis, and the panel also included Rich Cohen, who wrote the 2006 book on his family, Sweet and Low. I first met Kaui when I moderated a panel at Book Group Expo in San Jose.
The New York Times called it “refreshingly wry.”Īround the time her book came out, Kaui was working out of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto and writing a hilarious blog called “ How to Party with an Infant.” (Check out her excruciatingly funny post on bikini waxing, if you dare!) Her collection of short stories, House of Thieves, is stunning, particularly the title story.
A dark comedy about a dysfunctional family, it was first published in 2007 to critical acclaim. Novelist Kaui Hart Hemmings, author of "The Descendants"
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