Time & Perspective Quote by Thomas Perry

It lands as a sly confession and a quiet dare: if you want to adapt my work, you have to solve problems cinema usually hides with chatter, chemistry, and “likable” transparency. Perry boils the issue down to two anti-movie ingredients: solitude and dishonesty. A character alone “most of the time” means no convenient dialogue to externalize motive, no bouncing off a sidekick, no crowd to tell us who to root for. Film can do interiority, but it has to earn it with image, rhythm, and restraint. That’s expensive in attention, not budget.

Then he twists the knife: when the characters do speak, “what they say is mostly lies.” In prose, lies are delicious because the author can lace in cues - a thought that contradicts the line, a detail the narrator notices, an aside that exposes the con. On film, a lie often reads as either melodrama or plotty “gotcha” unless the director calibrates performance, framing, and what the camera withholds. Perry’s “pretty confusing” isn’t a complaint; it’s a warning about the medium’s default honesty. Movies tend to treat dialogue as information delivery. Perry’s world treats dialogue as camouflage.

The subtext is artistic control: he’s not defending complexity for its own sake, he’s pointing out that adaptation can accidentally flatten his signature tension. If you translate loners and liars into quippy ensemble scenes and explanatory exchanges, you get something watchable - and fundamentally not Perry. The best adaptation would embrace the confusion, letting silence and misdirection be the point rather than a problem to solve.