From Advocate.com, an intreview with Annie Proulx that includes this:
AP: How did you feel about seeing it on the big screen?
Proulx: It was really quite a shock because I had had nothing to do with the film. So for 18 months, I had no idea what was happening. I had no idea if it was going to be good or frightful or scary, if it was going to be terribly lost or sentimentalized or what. When I saw it in September, I was astonished. The thing that happened while I was writing the story eight years ago is that from thinking so much about the characters and putting so much time into them, they became embedded in my consciousness. They became as real to me as real, walk-around, breathe-oxygen people. It took a long time to get these characters out of my head so I could get on with work. Then when I saw the film, they came rushing back. It was extraordinary—just wham—they were with me again.
AP: What did you think of the performances by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal?
Proulx: I thought they were magnificent, both of them. Jake Gyllenhaal’s Jack Twist…wasn’t the Jack Twist that I had in mind when I wrote this story. The Jack that I saw was jumpier, homely. But Gyllenhaal’s sensitivity and subtleness in this role is just huge. The scenes he’s in have a kind of quicksilver feel to them. Heath Ledger is just almost really beyond description as far as I’m concerned. He got inside the story more deeply than I did. All that thinking about the character of Ennis that was so hard for me to get, Ledger just was there. He did indeed move inside the skin of the character, not just in the shirt but inside the person. It was remarkable.
NewMexiKen read the story again last evening and it is excellent. It’s in Proulx’s wonderful collection of Wyoming stories Close Range. Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana adapted Proulx’s story for the screenplay.
Link via kottke.org.