The request came through Sara Osei, which was the right channel.
A documentary filmmaker named James Okafor had been following the response to The Choosing for six months, reading the letters it received, following the conversation it had generated, and he wanted to make a short film. Not an adaptation, not a dramatisation, a documentary, filmed at the estate and the coast and the Portland building and the places the story lived in.
He had references. Sara vouched for him. His previous work was careful and unhurried and gave its subjects the dignity of complexity.
We discussed it over three evenings.
Damien’s first response was the expected one, the controlled consideration of someone for whom a camera was a fundamentally different thing from a page.
“The book is the record,” he said.
