S8 Ep25: The Year of the Locust with Terry Hayes

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[00:01:44] Due to the themes of this locust's bold bending of conventions will surely make it one of the most talked-about thrillers

[00:03:03] of the year.

[00:03:04] As always, a couple of times. And that's so, it's terrific to connect with, you know, with yourself and with the wider public. Thank you. Yeah, so I'm right outside Philadelphia. Our audience though is, it's about, it's close to about 50, 50 US and UK

[00:04:21] with a strong representation from Australia

[00:04:25] is usually what our audience is. screenwriter to spy novelist. What motivated that shift? Well, my mother, who's no longer with us, my mother said, well, his problem is it can never hold a job. I don't know. Maybe there's some truth in that. I don't know. But, you know, I'd been a migrant child. I was actually born in England, but they went to Australia when I was five. So,

[00:05:40] obviously, to me, Australia is home. And so but more than a bit. But I read, I read all the time and I escaped into stories. So, you know, you're seven or eight years old, I don't know. And you go to the local library and

[00:07:01] then you go to the local bookshop and you look what you want to do with your life. He says, that's a good idea. Study hard and you can go to a really good university. Well, you don't go in there and say, I want to be a writer. Not the sort of school I went to. I said, I want to be a journalist.

[00:08:20] It's a very elite so I think to this day, I'm the youngest for a foreign correspondent and Australian newspapers ever said, so that was pretty interesting.

[00:09:41] And I write some good stories, quite a bit about the CIA

[00:09:45] for enough. he said with how he seems missing couldn't hear half the dialogue. And he's sitting next to me explaining to me what's going on. Anyway, at the end of it, he said, what do you think? And I said, very interesting. What else do you say? I couldn't understand it, you know, but I didn't want to say, wow, I, I made more movies, I had some extreme experiences, I saw the last of Hollywood Baba lot before it became really corporate. I saw the drugs, the hookers, everything,

[00:12:20] I mean, I saw outrageous behavior,

[00:12:22] really outrageous behavior.

[00:12:25] Some migrant kid from England, you know,

[00:12:28] when we landed in Australia, Yeah, that's putting it mildly. So you mentioned being exposed to the secret world as Lacare like to say, as a foreign correspondent. I was, what, aside from that, maybe if there's more, what led you to write in the spy genre? Are there any particular influences or inspirations

[00:13:43] that shape your approach to it?

[00:13:45] Well, Lacare's brilliant, well,

[00:13:47] so of course she stood now, I mean, George Smiley is an incredible character. And the sense of fatigue, he captured that entire sense of fatigue about Britain itself. And it's withdrawal from the world stage from being a, well, not from being a world power.

[00:15:01] And the consequences of that. thing about spice and I use this in Pilgrin, well this idea in Pilgrin. My spies have secrets long before they work in the intelligence world. When you're a foreign agent or an intelligence agent and you're entering another country, the first thing you have to do is invent a legend.

[00:17:23] because I'm psychologically unsound. And yeah, my children say that all the time.

[00:17:25] They say, well, you know, he's unhinged.

[00:17:28] And I'm probably right.

[00:17:30] And he used to,

[00:17:32] to be here about teenage years,

[00:17:34] we have very, very long holidays

[00:17:36] for some of vacation in Australia.

[00:17:38] It's over Christmas.

[00:17:39] So he finished school in sort of like early December,

[00:17:42] and he don't go back to the beginning of February.

[00:17:44] So I'd set a lot of stuff which Herman Hesse, I read all the collective works of Herman Hesse, well, my god, put a gun to your head. And that so when I came to David Kormel's work,

[00:20:04] And that's what I tried to do in PILM. Nothing like a car race, right? Dr. Bido, I should be compared to that. No, I think it's warranted.

[00:20:10] Oh, thank you. That's the hard compliment anybody could ever give me.

[00:20:16] I tried to show some people having grey sun pressure,

[00:21:26] world. I had only had the experiences of a country that lost an empire and was now flailing around on the world stage trying to find a role. I had none of those things. So I drew

[00:21:31] on my own experiences, but I did learn. Keep an interesting, keep them turning the page,

[00:21:39] try a very best, try to be a really realism that James Bond that never found. So, look, it says somewhere in locust, it says, none of us ever escaped the mighty gravitational pull of our childhood.

[00:23:02] And that gravitational pull was really strong for me. And I've never escaped it this is not a good idea, you know. But also I was sick of Scott Murdock or whatever his name is. I don't even know what his thrill name is. Well, who knows? I mean, he's childhood is so lost in the weeds, you know. I do have to write pilgrim to a contractor to do that. That's my

[00:24:21] next book. So I'm going to damn well have to work out what we better call it, what is real name even doing everything 24 seven, you'd get a bit jaded with it. You're thinking, now already, you know? So when it came time to do locust, I wanted to do a denied access area spy, one of the guys that's really at the spearhead who goes into the most forbidden areas.

[00:25:41] Now, there are women that do it,

[00:25:44] but I am not equipped to write that. There is a whole sequence in Pilgrim where he ends up in a storage facility in Bodgerman, in Turkey. There's crashing boats and huge cruises falling from overhead gyms and he's running and leaping and doing God knows one that costs $50 million to film.

[00:27:02] You could leave it out of the book. going to survive. And I'm exhausted by all of this, you know, anguish that he has to go through. So they were the two major decisions that I made to make it different, to go down very different avenues. And for me, I can't say for the public and large, but for me,

[00:28:20] it was very rewarding. I liked the fact sort of different elements into this genre, different,

[00:29:40] that isn't commonly done is important to you. And makes sense. You're always looking, I think, when you're writing to find the emotion in things. I had a desire to go very extreme and I had to,

[00:32:07] chicklet, you know, or romances, but you want people in their late teens and 20s to read it and say, wow, those people have learned narrative basically from movies and movies and TV series, especially

[00:32:17] on streaming, have become much more bold. If believes in a comprehensible, explainable world. Well, take that guy and show some things that are very difficult to explain. His life is saved and this is not giving a spoiler away or a hug on it. But then you get to a major turn in the book. I hope it's being set up. I hope that the reader goes with it. I hope they experience some things which are unusual and spinofl. And I hope that they come out the other end of that sequence and say, I get it.

[00:35:09] I get it. This is a warning to him. This's worth the wait. But can you share any insights into why it took that long to complete any challenges or discoveries you encountered along the way? Yeah, yeah. It's not an easy topic to talk about particularly. But I guess one of the primary things was I was 200 pages into people. As I mentioned before, there were just four of us

[00:36:22] that went to died. So, So I had to take quite another time after I finished Pilgrine to think about my life and, you know, my wife, I'm fortunate, you know, the movie should be successful on that. And I like working, but I probably don't have the necessity that a lot of people do have. But I had to think about my family, I had to think about I was a good father. I did miss a cricket practice session. I didn't miss a cricket match. I watched the four of them ride horses. One of them is training to become a member of the Australian Olympic team, she hopes. So it was all important.

[00:40:20] They went to golf lessons, they went to drama lessons,

[00:40:22] they went well everywhere.

[00:40:24] And they learned French a lot of time. And finally I found a story I wanted to tell. So I sat down and told it, you know? Yeah. Well, that's good.

[00:41:40] I think it's definitely, yeah.

[00:41:41] I think you're worthy to be proud of all of that for sure.

[00:42:45] was a big creative shot in the arm for me with my own novel, which I self-published because it's the same size as this. And I knew a kid who had done nothing else. There's no way. I didn't even

[00:42:51] bother trying to query it, but you did it. You broke those rules to tremendous commercial

[00:43:00] and critical success. And that's like I told David, your publicist, that's why I wanted to

[00:44:06] landscape that is probably very alien to you, whether it's around Afghanistan, Russia, or Korea, wherever Yemen, Gaza, wherever you like. You do that. You have to travel with

[00:44:13] characters who you're wedded to, who you believe in. And somebody like me has to keep

[00:44:22] an entertaining and interesting, so you turn the page that in my view is to show people, tell people about things that they have no experience on, or no knowledge of. I mean, we go to a place called Baku, capital of Amazon, as of the Jan, and we go there and there's some extraordinary things

[00:45:42] about that city.

[00:45:43] It was once the wealthiest city in the world,

[00:45:45] you know, around the first world,

[00:45:47] we'll just talk about it's going to be some incredibly violent

[00:47:04] they know more to all of this and we know who's a lot of... That is true. Yes. You know? So it's not the length of anything, whether it's movies, novels, thematic albums by great bands. It's not the length. It's whether it's interesting.

[00:48:24] I mean, look, you't have to make David so big because it made him as a little pocket person. They could have sold him in the gift shop and everybody could have taken one home. But I guess he thought it's going to be big.

[00:49:42] She thought it's going to be the last stop road.

[00:49:45] Everything's going to be enough.

[00:49:47] What would you rather have?

[00:50:43] It's a bit like there's some Tom Clancy elements. There's those Jean-Lucare feeling to some of it.

[00:50:48] That's the pantheon in my view.

[00:50:51] I've been elevated to a status which is sort of breathtaking.

[00:51:00] That's how I'd like to be remembered.

[00:51:01] Now, none of us know, do we?

[00:52:07] shop. And I think that about myself. I couldn't have done it any better. I may not have the talent, I may not have the reach, I may not have that way of thinking that is totally necessary. I don't

[00:52:15] know. But I do know one thing. I didn't leave anything out there. I gave it line is, I know what the last line is because I know that about every book I write before I start. I can't tell you what they are. But because I may change one last. So I'm excited, but very excited by doing the novel. I now spend a

[00:53:40] lot of time with Kane and his family and I'm sick of that. So yeah, it'll be made. The film too will be whatever it will be. I hope it's good. I feel a lot of pressure because people hold it in high regard. And whenever I go anywhere and people find out what I do, they

[00:55:03] tell me that they liked it. Maybe that's telling the truth. I'm so, but it day. A really good few pages. I'm really excited by that. But mostly, I was of the opinion that it was the best decision I'd ever made to write this huge sprawling novel. Couldn't I write something like a couple of hundred pages?

[00:56:22] And I really's not good. But when you start with 500 people and they're all yelling

[00:57:41] out the back of the cave, hey, come and listen to book you've ever read? In my heart, my deepest heart, there are no bad books because I have undying admiration for anybody that wrote the first words and then got to write the end. I have, that is, I know that journey.

[00:59:03] And if somebody to do that is remarkable,

[00:59:07] they may not be books that I enjoy. joining us. It was a privilege speaking with you. Well, it's been fun. I really enjoyed it. Thank you for all the research and knowing stuff about me that probably better not know. Thank you. And you do everybody for listening. I hope you're still at work. Sure. No, I'm sorry. over 100 casino style games. Join today and play will call upon you to do a service for me.

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