The New Yorker Radio Hour - A Master Class with David Grann

Episode Date: September 8, 2023

David Grann is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of two nonfiction books that topped the best-seller list this summer: “The Wager” and “Killers of the Flower Moon,” from 2017, which Martin Scorsese has adapted into a film opening in October. Grann is among the most lauded nonfiction writers at The New Yorker; David Remnick says that “his urge to find unique stories and tell them with rigor and style is rare to the vanishing point.” Grann talks with Remnick about his beginnings as a writer, and about his almost obsessive research and writing process. “The trick is how can you tell a true story using these literary techniques and remain completely factually based,” Grann says. “What I realized as I did this more is that you are an excavator. You aren’t imagining the story—you are excavating the story.” Grann recounts travelling in rough seas to the desolate site of the eighteenth-century shipwreck at the heart of “The Wager,” his most recent book, so that he could convey the sailors’ despair more accurately. That book is also being made into a film by Scorcese. “It’s a learning curve because I’ve never been in the world of Hollywood,” Grann says. “You’re a historical resource. … Once they asked me, ‘What was the lighting in the room?’ I thought about it for a long time. That’s something I would not need to know, writing a book.” But Grann is glad to be in the hands of an expert, and keep his distance from the process. “I’m not actually interested in making a film,” he admits. “I’m really interested in these stories, and so I love that somebody else with their own vision and intellect is going to draw on these stories and add to our understanding of whatever this work is.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Here's my man. Hey, how are you? That's good. Good to see it. The New Yorker, over 99 years, has been privileged to publish a lot of astonishing writers of nonfiction. And David Grant is certainly among the best.

And yet David's work lately has become as popular as it is great. Killers of the Flower Moon has held a spot on the bestseller list for almost two years running, and a film version directed by Martin Scorsese opens in theaters next month. David's latest book, The Wager, also hit number one this summer, and it's been sold to the very same Martin Scorsese for a movie as well. And at the same time, I can report from long years together as friends and colleagues that success has not spoiled David Grant. No one I know is less complacent about his work, and no one I know is less self-satisfied.

His urge to find unique stories and tell them with rigor and style is rare to the vanishing point. And David has worked like crazy to get where he is today. I had been wanting to write for the New Yorker for a long time to write these kind of unusual narratives that I like to do, eccentric topics. and in my usual style, I was terrified to do so. So it took me about 10 years to work up the courage to pitch a story. And I wanted to find a story that I couldn't fall on my face on. And so I kept looking. I kept looking.

And eventually I found the story, Old Man and the Gun, which was about a serial bank robber who was also probably the greatest. Well, he robbed Banks into his 70s. And then he was also probably the greatest prison escape artist in American history. He broke out of St. Quentin in a kayak in which you painted on the side, rub it up, dub. And I thought, you know, and he used a hearing aid when he robbed Banks into a 70s. I was like, nobody can mess this story up.

That story, the old man in the gun, was David Grant's first for the New Yorker, and it later became a film with Robert Redford. We'll talk about the movies a little later, but the foundation of David's success is his deep, almost obsessive writing process. So if you've ever wanted to write anything in nonfiction, get out your notepad, because in our conversation, David Grand delivers a kind of master class. So before coming to the New Yorker, you wrote for The New Republic, The Times Magazine, even if I remember right, a piece or two for the Atlantic.

That is correct, yes. What was the difference here? You seem to, if I remember correctly, it has always been my impression, the worst thing I could ever do to David Grant is go to you and say, could you do a profile of, I don't know, Donald Trump or Senator so-and-so who's in the news? That was just distinctly not your thing, but you had had a background in that kind of thing. That was my background. You know, it's funny. You take the jobs you get as an aspiring writer, and my first job was at the Hill newspaper. I was actually hired as a copy editor.

What they didn't realize is I'm not the best at grammar, and I'm also partially blind. So the idea of me as a copy editor is a bit hysterical. And in that chaos as it is, I then quickly rose to executive editor there. But because of that first job, I just needed a paying job. I was always thought of as this political person, got to cover campaigns. And you hated it? Ish. I think that the truth is you need to love it so much to be able to penetrate the veil of consultancy and political speak and to get the interstreet.

And there are people who do it amazingly well. I didn't love it enough to want to spend all that time getting through press secretaries and consultants. You know, my idea or my dream of reporting is to spend hours with a subject to disappear around them, to observe them in their job or their profession. They forget I'm even around. And the turning point really came when I was at the New Republic, and I did a story on Congressman Trafficking. Probably many listeners will not remember him.

He had this crazy hairdo that stuck up on its head. He was a congressman from Ohio. We later learned that that was a toupee, but I never thought it was a to pay because nobody... That was the least of his problems. Yeah, that was the least of his problems. And you never would think that anyone get a toupee that bad, so everybody assumed it was real, because nobody would ever get a to pay that just thought. Hard to believe.

I'm wearing a toupee. Yeah. And he was a congressman from Ohio, and I learned that he was being investigated by the Justice Department on allegations of corruption. And I made a trip out to Ohio to Youngstown, where he had been car, He was congressman of. And I went to a courthouse. And in the courthouse, I found a transcript of a wiretap from that was made by a mobster.

And I'm reading this thing. And suddenly, you know, the honorable gentleman from Ohio is talking about taking bribes from the mob, about people coming up swimming in the Mahoning River. He is dropping the F-bomb every other word. I'm just like, so there I pierced the vehicle. I was just like, oh my God, this is not how you ordinarily hear the dialogue of D.C. And I thought, you know, these are the kind of stories I want to tell. And these are the voices I want to get, these real unvarnished voices. And it was also the first time I realized the power of archives.

I really was like, oh, my God, this transcript was just sitting around gathering dust in some box. Probably no one had looked at it for 25 years. And I was just astonished by what it said. I think it's hard to emphasize too much the degree to which it's become, if not impossible, but then impossibly difficult to write about anybody in American public life today who has a measure of fame, whether it's a pop star or athletes or politicians. And if I, you know, called you up and David, I'd really love you to do a profile of Beyonce. I think all I would hear at the other end of the line is click. Yeah. It just wouldn't be for me because of that.

I mean, if somebody was willing to really let you spend time with them to observe, I mean, then I would, you know, be happy to do it. Because it's not that these people aren't interesting often. I mean, sometimes fame doesn't correlate with interest, too. I mean, that is, you know, when you cover athletes as you have, I mean, you know, one of the things you learn about athletes is, you know, the best person is not necessarily the most talent is not necessarily the most interesting on a team. They're not the most articulate or insightful about their.

craft. But there are people in these fields who are really interested. There are politicians or president, but it's just penetrating. It's so difficult. Well, in The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, which is your collection of pieces, largely from the New Yorker, there's a profile there of an athlete who was enormously, enormously famous in his time in the major leagues for the Oakland A's and the Yankees and so on. Ricky Henderson, a great base stealer. You were then seeing him, I think, at the age of, he was in his 40s, late 40s, and in, not even a minor league team, but some off the radar something team.

And at that point, he comes before you in all his humanity. Yes, and, you know, it was interesting because that was a story. I had followed Ricky Henderson, who was far past his prime, but was desperate to get into the major. And he was a very flamboyant player.

He always used the third person. and Ricky this, Ricky that. He wanted to get back into the big league. And he wanted to get back into the big league. And he'd been doing this for years. And I had actually, before I came to New Yorker, pitched this and everyone was like, no, he's his moment's gone. Nobody cares about him anymore.

And I thought, no, no, no, like, this is such pathos. Like, not only here, this pathos are somebody who had been at the very pinnacle of his career and is struggling with that great riddle of mortality, which is just come so young for an athlete. I mean, 43 old for an athlete, but, I mean, in his prime for most of his prime for most careers. And, you know, what is that like psychologically? And he also, because there was no press, I mean, he was somebody who was surrounded by press in his career and, you know, we just blow them off. He suddenly was like, come on down. He let me sit on the dugout next to him because it was

so lowly. So this always struck me about you, David. You're getting better and better all the time. Who are you learning from? What are you learning from? What are you reading in nonfiction that's that you said, ah, ah, I need to pick up on that. Well, I'm fortunate enough to work with so many great colleagues, whether it be, you know, Burkhart Builder, Lawrence, Wright, you know, you just pick up the magazine. You read these people who do it, and they do it so well there. He's been doing it for a long time.

Jane Mayer as an investigative reporter. I also read a lot of fiction. You know, I tend to read more fiction for pleasure because I have to read so much nonfiction for work. And I'm just hopefully studying techniques of getting better with language and how to structure stories. And what I realized is, you know, as I did this more, is that you are an excavator.

You know, you aren't imagining the story. You are excavating the story. The most profound revelation I had, was when I was working in a story here for the magazine about a squid hunter. And that story came about in very funny circumstances. I was new to the New Yorker. I was, as I am wanting to be behind on my contract, produced a certain number of stories.

I'm getting David Remnick-Legina's watch when he walks by my office. And I'm frantically at that stage. I had had a little boy, and, you know, you're worried. I knew you're worried about your job. Are you going to make it at this place you've wanted to be at? And so I was frantically calling around everybody I knew for a story idea. And I eventually called a friend of mine. He said, well, why don't you look for the giant squid?

That would make some news. And I really thought it was a myth. And then I got off of when I looked it up. And I said, well, sure enough, it was a real creature. And, you know, I had this, you know, I had eyes the size of a human head, had these tentacles that stretched as long as a school bus. And yet at that time, no scientists that ever documented one alive. And I thought, well, okay, well, that's interesting.

But there's no story, right? How are you going to tell a narrative? make a Wikipedia entry, but how are you going to tell a narrative based on that? Lo and behold, I then learned there were these giant squid hunters who had obsessively devoted their lives to trying to become the first to capture this creature. And then eventually I learned there was this giant squid hunter in New Zealand named Steve O'Shea. It was probably the most obsessed of all. And he had come up with this very novel idea.

Rather than trying to capture the big calamari, as he called it, he was going to try to capture the baby. It was only the size of a cricket. And then I went down to you, David, and to my longtime editor, Daniel Salaski. And I, you know, I may have committed that sin that reporters sometimes do in their desperation, which is to oversell a story. And I'm like talking about squid migration patterns. And I said, look, he's inviting me to go down to New Zealand, and he tells me we're going to make history. And look, I'll bring you back a photograph.

No one's ever had a photograph. He's going to capture this baby and grow in captivity. We're going to make history. And you looked at me, and you said, And he said, all right, Godspeed. And so you sent me down to New Zealand. And the second I got to New Zealand, everything began to go wrong. I mean, just everything.

I mean, you know, I got there. I took one look at the boat. And I really did think we were going to be going in some Jacques Cousteau-like vessel. And it turned out the boat was a skiff. I can't remember now. Maybe 16 feet. Maybe it was a little bigger. It had an outboard motor.

He had basically, Steve O'Shea, had basically bankrupted himself looking for the giant squid. So this was all he had. For this, I've flown all the way to New Zealand. Yeah, to New Zealand. and to capture this baby. And then his only crew was a graduate student who got seasick and me. And then he turns to me and he says to me, I should warn you, mate, there's a wee bit of a cyclone coming our way.

Great. And he wasn't exaggerating. There was a cyclone coming everywhere. There was a national emergency. The power soon went out. And I said, well, we'll just wait it out. He said, oh, no, no, we can't wait it out. Because apparently these are the things you learn on a journey like this giant squid.

only spawn at this period in New Zealand, so we've got to go now. So we head out in this little boat, and then he starts to aim towards the chute where all the ocean is funneling through, and he starts to aim right towards it. I take my flashlight, and I turn towards me. There's a mountain of water in front of us. I look behind me, there's a mountain of water, and the boat is just sloshing about jumping, and he turns to me and says, you won't find this in New York, will you, mate? I'm paraphrasing these quotes.

And it was in that moment where I was, like, truly wondering whether my captain was fully in command of all his faculties. But he manages to lead us out. And we start to drop these traps in the water. And we do this night after night dropping these traps. He put me to work. You know, my favorite type of reporting is just to quietly observe. I'm the Joan Diddian of a reporter. Just disappear.

Instead, he put me to work. And so we're pulling these trap hour after all to no avail. Again and again, all to no avail. And then about the fourth, I can't remember what night it was, but one night about three. three in the morning, we pull up the trap, and the graduate student says, oh, my God, that's your dream squid. And Steve O'Shea puts his eye right up against the container. And he's like, oh, my God, Arki, which is a abbreviation for the scientific term for

Arctutthus. And we have to transfer it into another container. Now, you've got to understand, we've been doing this for nights. We're exhausted. Cyclone has passed, but it's still rough. And as we're transferring it, suddenly Steve O'Shea says, oh, my God, where the bloody hell did go and it had disappeared. We had seemingly lost it. And I looked at Steve O'Shea's face, you know, look of despair like I'd never seen before. And all I was thinking in that moment was a completely

selfish thought was, I am dead. I persuaded my editors to fly me out to New Zealand. I'm behind on my contract. And what we, I've been out of it for weeks, we had it and we lost it. There's no story. I was convinced there was absolutely no story. And it was only later. And it was only later, that I like had dawned on me and it was such a for me it was such a learning experience like that that was the story I was staring right at it and I swear to God I could not even see it that this was a story about an obsessed person who had devoted his life he had his grail and then he lost it and the pain and the anguish of that the story wasn't this Hollywood fairy tale I had concocted in my imagination which is oh we get this baby which was so much less interesting and so

It just really taught me. It was such a funny, but it was such a profound experience to realize, to always keep your eyes open to the stories. You don't know how many of these stories when they're unfolding in real time are going to end. And it's often the most interesting ends are the ones we're not even looking for. David Grant, author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Wager. We'll continue our conversation with him in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. David Grant is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of two nonfiction books that have topped the bestseller list this summer. Killers of the Flower Moon is about a harrowing case of multiple murders in Oklahoma

of Indians whose land had suddenly become valuable through oil rights. The book was adapted to film by Martin Scorsese and the movie comes out this fall. Scorsese is also adapting David Grant's newest book, The Wager, about a shipwreck and a mutiny in the 18th century. David spent years in archives and on the high seas to tell that story. Sometimes you undersell the degree to which you throw yourself into a story. And I mean undersell it in the telling of the story itself. So in your new book, The Wager, which is a story about shipwreck and imperialism and mutiny and murder, you, in the furtherance of your story,

which was all there in the archive seemingly, you made a three-week trip to, God knows where, off the coast of Chile, to find this island where the mutiny and the shipwreck occurs, and it barely shows up in the book. You barely tell us he went on this trip, except maybe a little bit in the acknowledges,

which I think is the coolest move I've ever seen. It is such a cool move. Tell me about that trip and why you don't include it. in any real way, in any full way, in the wager. Yeah, it's interesting. So, you know, I think as a reporter and a writer, you know, you're always gnawed by doubts. I mean, I am somebody by nature, you know, what I eat for breakfast provokes doubts.

But when I'm working on a story, the doubts can be quite large. And the doubts are always knowing at you. What don't you know? You know, what more could you learn? I also, even when people are passed, so in the wager, these people are long. since dead. I mean, it takes place in the 1700s. You always feel a certain moral obligation, I think, not to be pretentious, but a certain obligation to try to understand what these people went through. Your job is not to exculpate them or to overly extol them. It's to understand them

and narrate what happened as truth is by the law. And these are British sailors who have gone off to fight the Spanish. Yeah, got off the face and chase a Spanish guy in filled with treasure known as a prize of all the ocean. And everything, talk about everything. going wrong. I mean, it made my squid trip look like a piece of cake. I mean, they had, they face scurvy and typhoons and tidal waves, and then eventually the wage of wrecks on this desolate island off the coast of Chile. And after about two years, I had been combing the archives. There was a remarkable reserve of these primary materials that I don't know how they survive, but some survive going around the world, some survive shipwreck, their water stain, the bindings are disintegrating,

but you can go there, you can read them, you might need a magnifying glass, but you could really vividly reconstruct what happened. And yet I kept wondering, well, what is that island really like? One officer, British officer, described it as a place where the soul of man dies in him, which probably should have told me not to go. But I'm thinking... It might have been a hint. It might have been a hint.

You couldn't use Google Maps or something? There was a couple of... The other hint was that the place where the island is where they wrecked is known as a Gulf of Pain House, which translates as the Gulf of Sorrows, or as some call it, the Gulf of Pain. That should have also told me... Another hint. Another hint not to go.

But in any case, I just kind of like, oh, I better go to Waiter Island if we're going to go. And then I look around, and I start asking around, and I find that, and eventually I find a captain who's in Chilliway Island who has a boat. The captain slept by the whale of this boat just on a cushion. The boat was heated by wood, even though it was winter. We had a wood stove. We had to chop wood to heat it. And Patagonia had never been, which is partly why I felt the need to go. And if you go along the coastline, there are actually all these fragmented islands.

It looks like someone almost smashed a plate. And if you stay between the islands and weave in those channels, you're actually shielded from the... As we learned from the book. Yeah, from the brunt of the ocean. So this goes on for several days, and my confidence is growing. And, you know, we would stop the chop down wood, and then we would get water from glacial streams. We'd take a hose, and we'd coldest shower I ever had. It was like two seconds, and I did it just so I wouldn't stink.

And I didn't do it every day. It was like every three day, I'll take a two-second shower. But after about several days, as the captain turns to say, well, now if you want to get to wage your eye, then we're going to have to go out into the ocean. And we head out into the ocean, and that's when I got my first glimpse of these seas. And the boat was just rocking. It felt like a ping pong ball, and you were in the middle of it in the ocean. I was truly drunk on dramamine.

I was like, and the other thing was just kind of funny was you couldn't, you had to sit. You had to sit on the cabin floor, because if you saw it. you would, you know, you really would break a limb. I mean, you would just get chocked. So you had to just sit on the floor of the deck holding on. But you could, obviously, there was nothing to do for hours and hours. And so I had on my iPhone with me an audible recording. I was reading all of Melvo back then.

I had a, I had Moby Dick on my iPhone, which... So, wait a minute. So some guy is reading Moby Dick to get you off your iPhone. Yeah, and while I'm sitting at a store. Trying not to throw up and die. The dumbest thing possible. Like I said, I'm not very wise. I don't know why, but in any case that was yet, great novel in retrospect, not the smartest

thing to do. And we get into the bay eventually. And we were following in reverse, actually, the path that some of the castaways trying to get off the island had followed. And it was just really interesting. We passed some islands, and the captain points to them, and he says, you know, that's Smith Island, that's Hobbs Island, that's Hurdif. They sounded very British to me.

And I had some of the copies of the journals. I went and looked at them. And sure enough, those were the names of these British castaways who, after one of the castaway boats, it sank, they didn't have room for them in the other boat. And so they were abandoned on these islands. And so this was their epitaph. The captain didn't know why that was their names.

He just knew that there was name. I just found that so interesting how history, we stand on history and often we don't even know the history. But eventually we did. We got to wager on, and we explored it. It remains this place of wild desolation, completely desolate. We found some wild celery on the island, which the castaways it eaten, which had helped cure their scurvy.

But there's virtually no other food. And, you know, being on that island, you know, it did actually really help me understand, you know, why that officer had described his place where this old man dies. and it really was. And so I don't describe this. I don't describe my own trip in the book because it didn't feel germane. My journey did not feel germane as a narrative unto itself.

It felt distracting. And yet that trip and that experience did breathe life into my descriptions, my understanding of their journals. I mean, you know, you want to describe the trees, you know, because in journals they describe things, but, you know, you can then see them yourselves. You can do it more confidence. You could do it more confident. And you know, are they exaggerating or aren't they? That was part of the thing when they're always saying they were hungry. There's no food.

I'm like, really? No food? You're starving? Can't you find any food? And I was like, oh, yeah, no, there's really, yeah. And that celery is. Yeah, the celery ain't much. One of the things that's been very striking to me in recent years is that not only are you seeking, it seems to me as a reader, stories, but stories that have greater, you'll forgive me, political, meaning, if I look at Killers of the Flower Moon and I look at the Lost City of Sea and the Wager, in particular, they're telling me something about power, about imperialism, about the strong and the weak. Yeah. And I wonder how much these sort of grander themes,

these political themes, are part of your search. Very much. So I think, like, in a way, they're, I don't want to say the most important, but I don't want to do a story if it's just, interesting or fascinating or even gripping. You really wanted to illuminate something larger and tell you something larger about the world in which we live and where we come from. I'll just tell you

quickly about, for example, about the wager, because I think that really illuminates that and why I chose to tell that one of the reasons I chose to write that book. I first came across a journal by the 16-year-old midshipman on the wager, a man named he's a boy, then John Byron, who, would go on to become the grandfather, the poet Lord Byron. I read this account. It was written in this old stilted English, and I had just kind of stumbled upon it. And the more I read, the more I was held by it,

the more I realized that this journal held the clues to really one of the more extraordinary sagas of survival, resilience, and mayhem might come across. That would not have been enough for me to them when I go write that book. But as I was doing research and going to these archives, I realized that what happened when many of the things, the castaways got back to England, they were summoned to face a court-martial for their alleged crimes. And they all began to tell their story or manipulate their stories or shade their stories.

And I was, you know, they'd be talking about disinformation and misinformation, and I swear to God, allegations of fake journals. And then I was coming home. And I was flipping on the news, and we are living in a post-truth world right now with, you know, allegate, you know, people scream about alternative facts and fake news and whatnot. And then I would go back to these archives, you know, 18th century, dusty, weird, you know, and they're having a battle over history. Who would get to tell the history? Who had the right to tell the history? If you weren't an aristocrat, could you tell the history? And also, the empire didn't want to tell the true story. It wanted to whitewash that history. And of course, time coming home and we're having battles over history. I mean, Killers of the Flower Moon,

for example, there was a teacher in Oklahoma was afraid to teach the book. So I just felt like, okay, this story has all these other dimensions. I'll find other dimensions along the journey, but it has these other dimensions. It begins to really reveal something, and it feels deeply resonant. I mean, I had no intention. It wasn't like I'm in naval story and say, oh, I really want to tell a story in the 18th century. It was like the last place I wanted to end up in a way. And I didn't know anything about ships. I mean, naval ships, naval life, the story took me there. And I just followed the story.

And the story felt larger than just its particulars. David, you've now become involved in a form that the story comes out of your hands. In other words, when you're writing your book, it's you. You are in control of the source materials. You're in control of the writing. if your editor makes a suggestion you are, I presume, free to say, I think I'll stick with what I have or not.

You're in control. It is by David Grant. Now, Killers of the Flower Moon is coming out as a film by Martin Scorsese and the wager will one day as well. The Old Man and the Gun became a film. You've had good fortune with us, and those aren't the only ones.

How does it feel to have your book land in someone else's hands, even hands as capable as Scorsese. And you're not quite in control. Yeah, no, and you're not. I mean, you really have to accept that. I would say it's a learning curve because I've never been in the world of Hollywood. I've never tried to write a screenplay.

It's not a place that I've been drawn to do any kind of work. I really like what I do, and it kind of consumes me. What's your role on these films? You know, it will depend on each production. usually your role is as a resource. I mean, you're kind of a historical resource or a archival resource, and it will vary.

Some people will want you, you know, draw on you more. Some actors want to draw on you more in their methodologies and learning, you know, did this person walk with a limp? Oh, I want to hear his voice. Do you have anything in his voice you can help me? Sometimes they might want to talk out, you know, a plot point to make sure it's factually accurate

or to better understand it. So it's usually that. And, you know, but yeah. What were your interactions with people like Scorsese and DiCaprio? Working with them was pretty wonderful. They're artists, and, you know, it's not like these are people I spend time with. But a lot of ways it was like talking with an editor because they're just like really just curious. They just want to know more.

You know, the production team would call me a lot with, endless questions for research or material, which I would send them. I remember once they asked me a question, like, can you help us? What was the lighting in the room? And I was like, I was thought about it for a long time. I was like, you know what?

That's something I would not need to know writing a book. I have no idea what the lighting was like in this house in the 1920s. I know they had lights, but was it electric? But, you know, they're figuring that out visually. And, you know, with DiCaprio, you know, questions. about just, you know, he was a voracious, just learner wanting to know everything about the party, the person, the real person he was going to play. So to get back to your original, because, you know, you have to let go.

I try my best, and I have been incredibly fortunate to get in the hands of people actually know what they're doing. I have no idea how to make a film, and I don't pretend to know how to make a film, and I'm not actually interested in making a film. I'm really interested in these stories and so I love that somebody else with their own vision and intellect is going to draw on this story

and add to our understanding of whatever this work is and it was something like Killers of the Flower Moon I would see each project is different when Killers the Flower Moon the challenge is so high but one of the amazing things with the project like Killers of the Flower Moon was Scorsese

and everybody from the actors, you know, work so closely with members of the Osage Nation to develop the story, to shape the story. The Osage were involved in every element of that from there are actors to the Osage. The language is spoken to bring that world into life. And so, you know, to me, that was the most important thing in the project.

It's not how they really adapt my work. it's how they're going to develop this piece of history and the O'Sage story that matters to me. You are now, David, how old are you? I am 56. And when you look at the future as a writer for yourself, what do you see? You know, it's interesting.

It gets harder. Two things get harder, I think. Well, one, writing has never been easy for me. I've watched the way you write. You're very facile, right? I know people are much more facile. this than I am. It's always hard for me. I think the hardest thing for me

is stamina. You know, because these projects do take a lot out of me because I do these trips and because you want to do it and meet a certain standard. And so I think the biggest challenge in a way is I'm happy to keep doing what I'm doing.

It's just a level of kind of stamina. Do you see yourself like Robert Carroll in your mid-80s? No. Dealing with Moby Dick? Absolutely not. I know people don't believe it, but no. I don't. You see yourself at a certain point going, you know what?

Time to retire to Caribbean island. I don't think I could keep up at a certain level at a certain point. And there are things I love. Like, I mean, I love to read. And so, you know, so no, I don't think I will. I mean, people insist I'm completely lying and maybe I'm lying to myself.

You know, you never know yourself. That's the other great riddle when you report. You're not only reporting about others, you're actually learning about yourself. And you often don't. And just as other people, your subjects don't know exactly they often are or the way they present themselves. You often don't know exactly you are.

So I say that, and I actually genuinely believe it, but whether it's true or not, we'll find out. Many other people around me say it's not true that my compulsions will continue. I'm hoping they will continue for a very long time. David Grant, thank you so much. Oh, it's my pleasure. David Grant is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Killers of the Flower Moon, the film based on his book, opens early October. I'm David Remnick. That's our program. program for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbes of Tune Arts with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Walton, Breda Green, Adam Howard, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, and Gauphin and Putabuele, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Harrison Keithline, Michael May, David. David Gable, Amy Pearl, and Alejandro Decker. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.