Marina Budhos's "Watched"

Marina Budhos is the author of award-winning fiction and nonfiction. Her novels for young adults are Tell Us We’re Home and Ask Me No Questions. Her nonfiction books include Remix: Conversations with Immigrant Teenagers and Sugar Changed the World, which she cowrote with her husband, Marc Aronson.

Here Budhos shares some insights about an adaptation of her new novel, Watched:

I have the happy circumstance of saying my book is being made into a film. Or, at the very least, it has been optioned and a filmmaker is currently writing the screenplay. However, for this very reason, we’re not right now ‘naming’ actors. Instead I can talk about what I think the film could be like:

I see the movie of Watched as pushing even further than the popular Night of HBO series (which obsessed many of this summer). That is, I think an adaptation of my novel is a chance to go even deeper into a Queens Muslim immigrant community, to get to know them better, from the inside, and to especially get to know a male teenager negotiating the gritty urban streets of the city. I’d love the film to feel like a plunge, a filmic odyssey, seen from the inside out in the paranoid swirl of surveillance.

I will say that I’d like Taylor, the detective, to be a recognized actor who can play someone all-American but who has another game and agenda going on with my main character, Naeem. My main character Naeem could be played by either a professional actor or even a non-actor, a discovery. The film needs to have a gritty, realistic feel.

Visit Marina Budhos's website.

--Marshal Zeringue