IT WILL be a cultural meeting of minds between a lauded Scottish artist and an American literary master.
Turner Prize-winning artist Douglas Gordon has revealed plans to recreate Point Omega, a novel by the lauded American writer Don DeLillo, as a feature film.
For Glaswegian Mr Gordon, who was the creative force behind the acclaimed feature film ‘Zinedine Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait’, Point Omega marks only his second foray into the world of the big screen.
The artist travelled to Paris to personally request permission from 80-year-old DeLillo to make the film and deliberately stayed at the same hotel.
“I have a note from Don DeLillo which he pushed under my hotel door... a great thing for me,” he said.
Mr Gordon, who now lives in Berlin, first met the giant of of post-war American fiction and creator of the landmark novel Underworld in Paris around seven years ago.
There has long been a connection between the pair.
DeLillo’s novel, published in 2010, prominently features one of Mr Gordon’s most famous artworks 24 Hour Psycho – a slowed down version of Hitchcock’s famous horror film which he unveiled in 1993.
Cosmopolis, directed by David Cronenberg and starring Robert Pattinson, was the only other DeLillo book to have hit the movie screens.
Recently in Paris, the pair drank together and talked about baseball and football.
Then DeLillo interjected.
“He asked: “‘Why do you want to make this film?’” said Mr Gordon. “And I said ‘because it has to be made.’
“I said: ‘you cribbed my installation, and in that I cribbed from Hitchcock, and etc,’ and I said, ‘Don, why don’t you have any films made [of your work?] and he said: ‘I am not a guy that needs anything.’”
Mr Gordon added: “He said: ‘It’s only you and Cronenberg, and that’s what I want, just you and Cronenberg and that’s it.
“So it’s a big responsibility, and I wrote to him and said ‘listen I cannot do this in New Mexico because I have no idea about that wilderness, I want to do it in the Scottish Highlands.
“He wrote back and said: ‘Adapt, adapt adapt’. So it is based on the book, but it is completely adapted.
“I have stuck to the idea that there is three principal players, but it’s entirely different and I’ve only been working on it for six years...it’s a long time, but not that long.
“It took me two minutes to do 24 Hour Psycho, but then I have had to live with that legacy for a long time – whereas Zidane took six years.”
It is understood several scenes from the forthcoming motion picture have already been filmed in the Highlands.
The novel is set in an American desert, but Gordon has relocated the plot to Scotland, and the book has been described as being a meditation on time, extinction, ageing and death.
In a statement, the notoriously interview-shy Don DeLillo said: “Douglas Gordon and I agree that the film version of Point Omega will have a running time of less than 24 hours.”
Meanwhile, Mr Gordon’s latest work for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Black Burns, is due to be unveiled at the end of the month.
He regards Black Burns as one of the most important works of his career thus far.
He said: “The Glaswegian artist said the work, partly because of its reference to Scottish culture, was as important to him as the Zidane film.
“It is something more monumental than I have ever done,” he said. “I resist being part of Scottish culture, but I am part of it.
“I love coming back and I hate it too.”
He added: “Whether this has an impact in Scotland or not, I have made something, and made choices that were critical and important to me.
“For me, Robert Burns and Zidane are not that far apart, people always ask me why I chose Zidane, and now they may ask why I chose Burns – but they both represent something bigger than themselves, more important that their ethnic background, and more critical than their day-to-day lives.
“If I end up making a couple of decent pieces in my life, it will be Zidane and Burns, and that is not a bad way to bow out.”
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