A Master Class with David Grann

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 8 September 2023

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

David Grann is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of two nonfiction books that topped the best-seller list this summer: “The Wager” and “Killers of the Flower Moon,” from 2017, which Martin Scorsese has adapted into a film opening in October. Grann is among the most lauded nonfiction writers at The New Yorker; David Remnick says that “his urge to find unique stories and tell them with rigor and style is rare to the vanishing point.” Grann talks with Remnick about his beginnings as a writer, and about his almost obsessive research and writing process. “The trick is how can you tell a true story using these literary techniques and remain completely factually based,” Grann says. “What I realized as I did this more is that you are an excavator. You aren’t imagining the story—you are excavating the story.” Grann recounts travelling in rough seas to the desolate site of the eighteenth-century shipwreck at the heart of “The Wager,” his most recent book, so that he could convey the sailors’ despair more accurately. That book is also being made into a film by Scorcese. “It’s a learning curve because I’ve never been in the world of Hollywood,” Grann says. “You’re a historical resource. … Once they asked me, ‘What was the lighting in the room?’ I thought about it for a long time. That’s something I would not need to know, writing a book.” But Grann is glad to be in the hands of an expert, and keep his distance from the process. “I’m not actually interested in making a film,” he admits. “I’m really interested in these stories, and so I love that somebody else with their own vision and intellect is going to draw on these stories and add to our understanding of whatever this work is.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.4	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:13.3	Here's my man.
0:14.1	Hey, how are you?
0:15.6	That's good.
0:17.0	Good to see it.
0:17.7	The New Yorker, over 99 years, has been privileged to publish a lot of astonishing writers of nonfiction.
0:25.7	And David Grant is certainly among the best.
0:28.4	And yet David's work lately has become as popular as it is great.
0:33.2	Killers of the Flower Moon has held a spot on the bestseller list for almost two years running,
0:38.4	and a film version directed by Martin Scorsese opens in theaters next month.
0:43.6	David's latest book, The Wager, also hit number one this summer,
0:47.9	and it's been sold to the very same Martin Scorsese for a movie as well.
0:52.8	And at the same time, I can report from long years together as friends and colleagues that
0:57.9	success has not spoiled David Grant.
1:00.4	No one I know is less complacent about his work, and no one I know is less self-satisfied.
1:07.0	His urge to find unique stories and tell them with rigor and style is rare to the vanishing point.
1:15.0	And David has worked like crazy to get where he is today.
1:19.6	I had been wanting to write for the New Yorker for a long time to write these kind of unusual narratives that I like to do, eccentric topics. And in my
1:28.6	usual style, I was terrified to do so. So it took me about 10 years to work up the courage to pitch a
1:34.2	story. And I wanted to find a story that I couldn't fall on my face on. And so I kept looking. I kept
1:40.7	looking. And eventually I found the story, Old Man and the Gun, which was about a serial bank robber who was also probably the greatest. Well, he robbed Banks into his 70s. And then he was also probably the greatest prison escape artist in American history. He broke out of St. Quentin in a kayak in which you painted on the side, rub it up, dub. And I thought, you know, and he used a hearing aid when he robbed Banks into his 70s. I was like, nobody can mess this story up. That story, the old man in the gun, was David Grant's first for the New Yorker, and it later became a film with Robert Redford. We'll talk about the movies a little later, but the foundation of David's success is his deep, almost obsessive writing process. So if you've ever wanted to write anything in nonfiction,
	...

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