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There’s no surprise about where Nicholas Sparks’ latest novel has landed – number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list in its first week of release – but there is about where it started.
“It kind of came about as one of those funny Hollywood things,” says Sparks.
His 23 published novels and two works of non-fiction have sold more than 115 million copies worldwide and made him a brand name for a particular kind of romance. As a result, “those funny Hollywood things” are both more commonplace for Sparks and of a different order than they are for most writers. Eleven of his books (including The Notebook, A Walk to Remember, and Message In a Bottle) have been adapted for the screen, for a collective box office of more than $US750 million worldwide. And that gives him entree to some rarefied circles.
“My agent in Hollywood is good friends with someone at Blinding Edge Pictures, which is Night’s company,” he says, referring to M. Night Shyamalan, the prolific writer-producer-director of a string of movies dating back to The Sixth Sense. “And I guess they were talking, and they said, ‘Hey, let’s get these two together’.”
Though they’re credited as co-authors, Sparks says Shyamalan wrote “not one word” of the novel.Credit: Hachette
In May 2023, Sparks visited Shyamalan’s sprawling property in Pennsylvania. The pair had never met before, but after a few minutes of pleasantries, each pulled out a short pitch – “five to eight lines”, Sparks says – for a story that they might co-develop.
Settling on Shyamalan’s tale, they then sat down to lunch (prepared by Shyamalan’s on-staff chef) and spent another hour or so hammering out details: “Who’s the main character? What’s the setting? What’s he in town for? What does he do for a living? Maybe he’s building a house for someone. Who’s he building a house for?”.
And then, says Sparks, “we separated, and I went home and I didn’t hear from him for about 14 months”.
When Shyamalan finally did call in August 2024, it was to say that the story they had sketched out together was going to be his next film. “And I said, ‘OK, I guess I’m going to write a novel’.”
That novel was the just-released Remain, which is credited to Sparks and Shyamalan. Meanwhile, Shyamalan has just wrapped the film version, the screenplay of which is credited to him and Sparks, with Jake Gyllenhaal starring opposite English actor Phoebe Dynevor (Younger, Bridgerton).
Phoebe Dynevor, who played Daphne in Bridgerton, stars in the film version of Remain, written and directed by Shyamalan. Credit: Liam Daniel/Netflix
In truth, Sparks says, they each did their own thing with the core elements they had worked out together over lunch. “He didn’t write one word of the novel,” he says. “He was just doing the film, which included the screenplay.”
To the best of his knowledge, Sparks says, “no other project has come together like this because most projects it’s either an adaptation of a novel or it’s a novelisation of a film. And this was not.”
Rather, he likens Remain the book and Remain the film to identical twins. “What we came up with at that meeting is a single egg,” he says. “And then the egg splits, and imagine that the twins are raised by two entirely different fathers. I write the novel the way I conceive the story should be, and then he did the film the way he conceived that story. Obviously there’s a lot of similarities, but of course there are also differences.”
The novel itself is billed as a “supernatural love story”. It’s about an architect, Tate, who is recovering from a bout of depression following the death of his sister. Visiting a picturesque town in Cape Cod where he’s planning to build a house for a friend and his wife, he meets a beautiful young woman called Wren. There’s something odd about her, though…
Remain won’t win any literary prizes, but it’s a perfect synthesis of the storytelling approaches of these two outrageously successful creators. Romance and the supernatural ... you’d swear they were made for each other.
Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling in The Notebook, the first of 11 Nicholas Sparks stories to be adapted for the screen. Remain will make it 12.Credit: Melissa Moseley/New Line
You’d assume that it was he who came up with the swoony bits, Shyamalan with the spooky. But, Sparks says, “no, not necessarily”.
They were both united on the theme of the novel, he says, “and that’s basically love can save you, and sometimes it’s the only thing that can really save you”. And while they get pigeonholed in their respective genres, “it’s other people doing the pigeonholing”.
Sparks delights in telling the story of how close they came to working together on the screen adaptation of The Notebook 25 years ago. The production company New Line approached Shyamalan to do the screenplay, “because he had written a love story that made the rounds in Hollywood”.
This might have been the big break Shyamalan was looking for. But he turned it down because he was working on a project of his own … a little film called The Sixth Sense. One of the smash hits of 1999, the twisty ghost story was nominated for six Oscars in 2000, including two – as director and screenwriter – for the then 29-year-old Shyamalan.
“And when I started writing, the very first novel I wrote – unpublished – was a horror novel,” adds Sparks. “So he started with love stories, I started with horror. Look at us now.”
Haley Joel Osment and Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense. Shyamalan’s debut feature remains the highwater mark of his prolific career.
When you’re conceiving a story, are you thinking of it as building a product that you will take to market, or are you driven by a sense of ‘I have a story that I simply have to tell’?”
“Much more the former,” he says, with not a hint of hesitation. “Writing is not difficult. Writing well is difficult, and writing well for a mass audience is exceptionally difficult. And doing it over and over adds to that difficulty.”
If Remain is the example par excellence of the novel (and film) as product – the result of a pairing dreamt up by an agent – writing it was anything but formulaic for Sparks.
“It was very difficult, I had to put that novel together in three months, that’s about half the time a novel takes, and it had to have the same quality as a six-month novel,” he says. “It meant early mornings and some late nights, and sleepless nights.”
To meet the deadline for Remain he had to put aside the novel he’d been working on. And once he was done, it took a few more months to recover.
“I finished all the editing by April, and I don’t think I got my writing mojo back until July,” he says. “It was a hard, emotionally and mentally taxing press to make that novel everything it could be.”
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Shyamalan’s film is due in cinemas this time next year. That should give Sparks’ book plenty of time to sit atop the charts and fuel interest in seeing how his co-creator has scrambled the egg. But let’s not forget there were two eggs laid in that barn in May 2023; Sparks’ story remains (so to speak) as a possibility should the pair ever choose to repeat this unlikely trick. Which rather begs the question – now you know what it’s like, would you do it again?
“I would, but ideally with a little bit more planning and not such a tight time crunch,” he says.
The idea he brought to the table, he adds, “is a good story, and it could be a really good film. I think it’ll work, but we’ll see. If he wants to do something different, we’ll do something different, or if he doesn’t want to do anything, and this is it, OK.
“That was the neat thing about this project,” Sparks adds. “Neither of us needed the other in the first place, and it just became a joy to work through the project. We’re actually very good friends now, so that was very much a blessing.”
Remain by Nicholas Sparks with M. Night Shyamalan (Hachette) is out now.
