A detective, an archaeologist and a general. This is not the setup to a joke taking place in a bar, but rather three of the protagonists on the pages of a new book.
"Disturbing the Bones" is a collaboration between journalist Jeff Biggers and film director Andrew Davis; it’s the debut novel for the latter. It follows a Chicago detective, an archaeologist working in the Illinois town of Cairo and a retired military general.
Davis, who’s from Chicago and has directed movies including "The Fugitive" and "Holes," joined The Show to talk about where the idea for this story came from.
Full conversation
ANDREW DAVIS: Well, it evolved from several different places. First, I think was a study that was done by Northwestern University of a, an archaeological site in southern Illinois called the Coster Dig. And they found 26 layers going back 13,000 years in one campsite. It was the most significant archaeological find in North American history. The floodwaters had preserved this incredible history of these people.
And so I thought, well, that's interesting. I said, “what's the metaphor for, for what they're gonna find from us?” And I thought about our missile silos and our bunkers and all the things that may cause us to not exist on this planet anymore. And then I had a friend who was working for the University of Illinois at one time. One of my, actually one of my mentors who's the guy who worked for the state of Illinois, and he took me down and I saw this dig site and I got very excited.
And then later on, I made a movie called "The Package," which was a story about some generals who didn't want to have a disarmament agreement happen between the Soviet Union then and America. It was Gene Hackman and Tommy Lee Jones.
And I integrated the story of this confrontation about missiles and this archaeological find and wove in and kind of "In the Heat of the Night"-type of story to it, which was involving the history of infamous Cairo, Illinois, which has a dark past in terms of racial issues and, and in the southernmost part of the Union Army where Grant's headquarters were, and I wove these three together and now I have an answer that's much longer than you wanted me to give.
MARK BRODIE: Well, so that actually leads me to one of the things I'm most interested in, which is the difference between writing for film and writing a novel. Like I, I would imagine there are some similarities but some things that are pretty different.
DAVIS: Well, you have much more freedom with the novel. You can add all kinds of texture and details and backstory that is very hard to do without making a 10-hour movie. So, that's one thing and the other thing is, you know, you have to be eloquent, you have to write in a way that's got a kind of sophistication and charm, which Jeff Biggers helped me with a lot.
BRODIE: What was the research process like to write this book as opposed to, for example, writing a movie?
DAVIS: Well, I had been working on this idea, I just realized, for many years. Jeff and I met 10 years ago and I had been thinking about this for maybe 15 or 20 years in terms of just the setting and the story and the dynamics. And I, and so we started working on a screenplay and decided that we wanted to put so much in it, let's write the novel and then we'll extract the best for the screenplay.
But, Jeff did a lot of great work about archaeologists and about what was going on in the history of southern Illinois and about military bases. There's a military base in Europe where the story is set, where we monitor the Russian missiles, and this is part of our story now, you know. So, things sort of evolved together, and we just went back and forth with giving each other ideas and leads.
BRODIE: Do you anticipate that this will be a film at some point?
DAVIS: Well, that was the goal initially. I hope we can. The business is pretty crazy right now, but if I get the right cast, maybe we can make it.
BRODIE: Alright. So I'm curious, also about the fact that this is set near your hometown. You referenced that you're a, you know, a guy from Chicago, obviously, you know, you worked on “The Fugitive,” which also had Chicago ties to it. Is there a significance of including your hometown, your community as maybe one of the characters in the story?
DAVIS: Well, I think locations are always characters in movies and certainly they should be in a book to give it a real sense of texture and visualization. Jeff knew southern Illinois, he knew the Cairo area, you know, Carbondale in the Shawnee National Forest where this is set. His family was from Kentucky across the river.
So, yes, I think location is important. I'm sort of known as a Chicago director and having the details of the city affecting the ethnicity of the characters. We have an African American cop, 60 years old, who lost his mother when he was 14. Randall is his name, and there's a, there's an archaeologist who's a young girl from Cairo, and Molly is her name. And so, you know, it's, it's, it's something that comes with reaching into the soil and in the buildings and the streets to get these characters to come alive.
BRODIE: So, do you anticipate that you were gonna continue writing novels? Like, did you like it enough that and find it fulfilling enough that you want to keep doing it?
DAVIS: Wow. You know, it's the, the creative part was terrific. The collaboration, developing the relationship with Jeff was great. I don't really enjoy having to promote my own stuff, you know what I mean? And I, and I, understand that writers are responsible for letting the world know.
I mean, you know, there's very few writers who get a budget to in, you know, in the studios promoting a big movie. They do it all for you, at least in the old days, now there's so much out there. You know, when my, when my films would open, everybody knew "The Fugitive" was opening that weekend. You know, you didn't have to wave a flag too much, you know, there weren't that many movies coming out that people wanted to see.
So, today it's a different world. There's so many distractions and everybody's on their cellphones and, and, and watching things on stream and, and so, it's a big job to promote a book, and I'm very grateful that I can talk to someone like you to help get the word out.
