Sam Wiebe's novel Last of the Independents won the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and an Arthur Ellis Award, and was nominated for a Shamus award. His second novel, Invisible Dead, was published by Random House Canada and Quercus USA. His short stories have appeared in Thuglit, Spinetingler, and subTerrain, and he was the 2016 Vancouver Public Library Writer in Residence. He lives in Vancouver.Here Wiebe shares some insights about adapting Invisible Dead for the big screen:
Most MBTM entries focus on casting, but before I get there I’d like to talk about location.Visit Sam Wiebe's website.
Vancouver is known as Hollywood North due to the number of movies and TV shows filmed here. From X-Files to Deadpool to Jason Takes Manhattan, Vancouver is visually familiar to everyone…but not as itself.
So how do you film a story set here?
In some ways this overfamiliarity is an advantage, because Invisible Dead is a book about what lies beneath the surface of the city.
Invisible Dead’s Vancouver is a city where troubled young women go missing all too often. The main character, David Wakeland, sets out to find a missing sex worker, and must eventually confront some painful truths about life in his city.
Filming in Vancouver would offer a chance to show the city streets and tourist sights we all recognize…and then send the camera down the alleys and dark places that haven’t been captured on film. There is poverty and desperation in Vancouver, particularly downtown, which is known as the poorest neighbourhood in the country. But what’s so striking is how close those streets are to the very wealthiest areas.
An Invisible Dead film would capture that connection, between what we think we know about a place and its dark reality.
And my casting for Wakeland? Tom Hardy all the way.
Writers Read: Sam Wiebe.
--Marshal Zeringue
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