Nick Hornby's Oscar Insta-Buzz

Novelist Nick Hornby’s screenplay for An Education has made him an instant Oscar favorite. He speaks with Tom Shone about the insanity of Sundance and his Tom Hanks obsession.

A year ago, Nick Hornby was suffering the agonies of the first-time screenwriter. The film he had spent the last four years writing and rewriting and had watched struggle to find funding, before finding it, losing it, and finding it again, was finally debuting at Sundance. “The first two-thirds contain jokes, and on a good day people laugh at them,” he recorded on his blog. “The last third is more serious, and intended to move an audience. In other words, the last half-hour is an agony of silence. (I often wonder whether I have always written would-be comic novels simply because it helps me ascertain whether people are awake at readings.) Three people leave in the second half of the film. Two of them come back (one of them, I realize, was Carey). I hate the third.”

Hornby negotiates the kind of success that would stun a small oxen, without letting it go to his head or give in to the equally treacherous lures of false modesty.

The reviews were ecstatic. An Education was picked up by Sony Classics, won the Sundance Audience Award and turned its ingénue, Carey Mulligan, into an overnight star. Hornby even found himself giving a light to Uma Thurman, during one of those sub-zero cigarette breaks that only Sundance facilitates. (He could barely reach; she was “about a meter” taller than him.) The film went on to Toronto, where it gathered ever more ferocious Oscar buzz, and where Hornby was asked for another light, this time by Penelope Cruz. When I met up with him, on the eve of the film’s premiere in New York, he seemed no closer to quitting.

“Where’s the incentive?” he said, as we patrolled the streets around Gramercy Park looking for a restaurant. “If I quit, none of the world’s most beautiful women will approach me randomly at parties or press conferences anymore. Somebody is going to have to arrange for the world’s most beautiful non-smoking women to come up to me, punch me on the shoulder, and tell me how well I’m doing.”

He goes on about his year: “It’s a bit like going from being a fourth-division football team straight to the first division without anything in between,” he says. “A few weeks after Sundance, I read a blogger who said that since they were doing 10 Best Picture nominations this year it would be good if they included a rank outsider as well as more standard Oscar fare like An Education. We’ve gone from ‘rank outsiders’ to ‘standard Oscar fare’ in the space of a few weeks. You think they’ve all gone mad after a while. We’re like, ‘Look, this one thinks we’re going to win four!’”

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“So there’s been Oscar talk in your house?”

There’s a long pause before he answers.

“Yes, because I think we’d regret not talking about it. More troubling, I think, would be to lend it a seriousness we don’t feel. Bad Karma and all that crap.”

A very Hornbyesque adjudication. I’ve known the author for close to 20 years, during which time I’ve seen him negotiate the kind of success that would stun a small ox, without letting it go to his head or give in to the equally treacherous lures of false modesty. It's a tricky maneuver, with no room for error, particularly in England, where we watch each other like hawks for the slightest sign of big-shotism, but Nick has managed to thread the needle every time. When we first met, we were both trying to make a living writing book reviews, meeting up in London pubs to swap book tips and slip American editions across the table, like samizdat. Raymond Carver, Anne Tyler, Tobias Wolff, Lorrie Moore. These days he lives in a bigger house, close to the stadium of his beloved Arsenal, and the authors we once revered are more likely to be found on his dust-jackets, but when we meet it’s always the same. “How’s the smoking?” “What’s the new Nicholson Baker like?” “What are you listening to?” “Seen any good movies?” Culture Nerd Data Transference. If you could fit our heads with Wi-Fi, it would make the whole thing a lot easier, if less fun.