John Berendt: in the garden

The author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil talks to iVillage

John Berendt has devoted the majority of his life to the written word. The son of two writers, he earned a BA in English from Harvard University, where he worked on the staff of the Harvard Lampoon. A series of prestigious journalistic appointments in New York City followed, before he turned to fiction. Since the publication and unprecedented success of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil - turned into a Hollywood movie starring John Cusack, Kevin Spacey and Jude Law - Berendt has become a celebrity in the US city of Savannah, where the book was set. He was even presented with the key to the city.

But who is the real John Berendt? iVillage found out.

iVillage: Were you pleased with the movie based on your book? What would you have done or shown differently? How do you feel about the changes they made?

John Berendt: I knew from the start that the movie of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was going to be substantially different from the book, so I was not surprised. The main thing I would have done differently would have been to use a voice-over to tell the background story of all the characters. That way each character would have been richer, and fewer would have had to be dropped. I was asked at the outset to write the script, and if I had done it, I wouldn't have changed anything or left anything out. The movie would have been 25 hours long.