Tell me what we're doing — what we are trying to achieve here.
My name is Colm Tóibín, I'm a novelist and I wrote the novel of Brooklyn.
The spaghetti thing is nix, I think. But mine was the idea of being with him,
but also the whole way he deals with his brothers and the family.
It just gives her a sense that she's walked into a world,
because she's having trouble reading him;
she's seeing him alone, she doesn't see him with his friends,
but this is a crucial scene because she's seen his innate decency
in some social setting with other people.
"So, just Irish stew?"
"Not just, we —"
"So, first of all, I should say that we don't like Irish people."
I got the Italian thing from oral history of Brooklyn in the '40s and '50s
where one guy said that every Italian guy wanted an Irish girlfriend.
The project after the Second World War
was to become more American and to make your kids American kids,
and so the Irish, of course, would be very useful in this context because Catholic, white, English-speaking —
this is actually something that happens quite a lot in these years,
where the Irish girl goes into the Italian family.
"All I can say in his defense is he's the only of us who'll get a college education."
"If he can keep his mouth shut."
The sense of them as being really good people and also the way in
which the things he hasn't told her — the things he hasn't told her are so innocent. They're about sport.
Because he's been trying to just talk to her about things she's interested in,
and so you get a sense of him withholding something from her,
but it's the most sweet thing to withhold.
"So has Tony offered to take you to Ebbets Field when the season starts?"
"You like baseball?"
"He never mentioned the Dodgers?!
Not even once?"
"Tony, what's the matter with you?"
"Wanna know why? Too much of this (kissing sound)."
"Anyway, you'll have to go to Ebbets Field if you want to see him in the summer."
"They're that important to you?"
"Put it this way: if our our kids end up supporting the Yankees or the Giants, it'll break my heart."
He just is saying it too quickly to her: "I want our kids to be Dodgers supporters."
Our kids?! Hold on...
So when he walks her home — he's just moved one step too fast,
he's almost proposed marriage to her in front of his family,
and she isn't ready for that.
So there are a number of things happening here, one that he just — he's too enthusiastic...
she's slower, and the other one is that America is coming into shape;
this is the way America is going to be in the next generation,
where people are going to try and stop being just Italians or just Irish.
"I love you."
"I thank you for the evening, it was lovely."
There's a different contract between the author of a novel and the makers of a film,
and it is as follows: in a novel, you're asking the reader to imagine so much
because the reader cannot see,
and so the reader is constantly imagining, filling in gaps, and this means when you
come to the end of a novel, you can leave quite a lot to the reader's imagination.
The contract in the film is different, where you're showing so much that you can't do that.
So what Nick did was — he knew that, and he added a scene at the very end of the film,
which I didn't write, which he wrote, which is not in the book —
in the film, he has her on the train, then he has her on the boat —
this time she's a a different person.
This time she's utterly transformed herself,
and then it has the scene, which I love so much, which is that she's standing up against the wall,
and Emory Cohen, or Tony and his brother, come out and they've been obviously working somewhere,
and the brother sees her first, and he looks at her and he understands,
and then Tony sees her.
And he just hands the tool bucket to his brother and just goes across to her.
I'm an absolute sucker for that scene.
Of all the scenes, that's the one that gets me.
And I wrote the book, you know,
I'm sitting there with that bit I didn't write, thinking —
I'm in tears, and I think this is so great.
This part was filled for me, that I had left empty.