joined the Peace Corps after college. Bonnar taught ESL—English as a Second Language—at a community college for many years. She currently divides her time between tiny houses on a New Hampshire salt marsh and by the Sea of Abaco.
Here Spring dreamcasts an adaptation of her new novel, Disappeared:
If I have any say in the matter, when Disappeared becomes a film, the #1 thing I’d insist on is filming in Morocco. The novel begins in Ouarzazate, a small city which happens to be just down the road from Atlas Studios, one of the world’s largest film studios. If you’ve seen Black Hawk Down, Kingdom of Heaven, Babel, The Mummy (1999 version), Star Wars, Martin Scorsese’s Kundun, or Ridley Scott’s epic Gladiator, you’ve seen the area.Visit Bonnar Spring's website.
Also near the studio is Ait Benhaddou, a United Nations World Heritage site where the first scene in Disappeared takes place. This part of Morocco is on an arid plain at the edge of the Sahara Desert, where the sisters really begin to get into trouble. Throughout the novel, the setting—stony desert, blowing sand dunes, Roman ruins, ancient petroglyphs—is integral to the action, and all of those locations are within a day’s drive of Atlas Studios.
Sisters Fay Ohana and Julie Welch are the two main characters.
Julie, the older sister, is short with wispy dark hair. Her only concession to femininity is wearing bright red lipstick. She has the angular features of a young Audrey Hepburn. These days, either Lily Collins or Rooney Mara would be excellent in the role.
Where Julie is a boyish brunette, Fay is blond and voluptuous—a dead ringer for Katherine Heigl in her Grey’s Anatomy days.
I always imagined Yasmin, Fay’s mother-in-law, as having the angular cheekbones—and elegant stoicism—of Vanessa Redgrave.
Yasmin’s daughter, Nadia, is the character who has the greatest physical change during the course of the book. If a production company could persuade Salma Hayek to look unkempt and gaunt for the first half of the film, she would be my first choice.
And her gutsy son, Hamid, should be played by Pierce Gagnon—when he was five, playing Cid in Looper.
It’s not just hair and body type, though. As Lady Gaga will tell you, repeatedly, in different and ever-more theatrical ways, acting is “not an imitation, it’s a becoming.” All these actors (again, with the caveat that a director could get Salma to look emaciated) have the personality and talent to become my characters.
Q&A with Bonnar Spring.
The Page 69 Test: Disappeared.
--Marshal Zeringue
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