Constance Sayers's "The Star and the Strange Moon"

Constance Sayers is the author of the best-selling novels A Witch in Time and The Ladies of the Secret Circus, the latter receiving both a Publishers Weekly and Library Journal starred reviews. Her work has been translated into six languages. In her spare time, she is the Chief Revenue Officer for a media and information company. She splits her time between Alexandria, Virginia and West Palm Beach, Florida.

Here Sayers dreamcasts an adaptation of her new novel, The Star and the Strange Moon:

For me, books are very cinematic and incredibly visual so I “need” to cast my characters. I mean there would be no Luke Varner in A Witch in Time without the actor Callum Keith Rennie (Californication and Battlestar Galactica). I need to cast the characters to write for them.

For The Star and the Strange Moon, the idea was the mystery of film. The old superstitions about could a film steal your soul. While I was excited about this book, I had only the idea of a main character, a down-on-her-luck actress named Gemma Turner. While I was in Paris doing research, I came across a photo of a striking redhaired actress named Françoise Dorléac. I wrote her name down with a plan to come back to her later, but found I was haunted by her photo. She has a rather tragic story: The older sister of Catherine Deneuve, Dorléac was killed in a car accident in 1967 as she rushed to get to the airport in Nice. She was only twenty-five and there is certainly a feeling that had she lived she would have been a major star. On screen the actress is mesmerizing. The muse of François Truffaut, her performance as a flight attendant who gets caught up in an affair with a married man in The Soft Skin elevates the entire film. She also pairs up with her sister (and Gene Kelly) in Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort, which is a film a bit thin on plot, but so visually striking it’s like Technicolor eye candy. When I began to think of my main character, I always pictured Françoise Dorléac’s face as though I’d cast her in the role of Gemma Turner. Her relationship with Truffaut was an inspiration for the initial relationship between Gemma and Thierry Valdon.

For Thierry Valdon, there is only one actor that comes to mind, and it is the magnificent actor, Assaad Bouab from Call my Agent and The Pursuit of Love. When he’s onscreen you cannot take your eyes off him. He has the complexity to pull off a complicated character like Thierry Valdon.

Visit Constance Sayers's website.

My Book, The Movie: A Witch in Time.

The Page 69 Test: A Witch in Time.

Q&A with Constance Sayers.

--Marshal Zeringue