As much as the place where I ended up finding my voice as a novelist was in contemporary commercial lit-fiction, I had also grown up as a huge fan of action movies, in the golden age in the eighties and nineties when everyone from Chuck Norris to Sylvester Stallone to Schwarzenegger to Bruce Willis were kind of reinventing the genre, which led to a huge secondary market of B-movies, straight-to-video and late night cable action films, all of which I devoured. After trying numerous times to sell TV shows in the same vein as my books and failing, I decided to take this idea I’d had since high school, put it together and see if they bought that and they did. So that kind of put me in that business whether I wanted to be or not.

A couple of years ago saw the release of the film adaptation of your book This is Where I Leave You. Are there any more plans to adapt any of your works for screen?

I’m actively working on the adaptations of two of my books now; my most recent one, One Last Thing Before I Go, which is at Paramount, I’ve written the script for and am trying to get that to go ahead now, then I also have a deal to adapt a book I wrote called How To Talk To A Widower, which is some countries is called After Hailey. So those two are still moving forward, and I would hope at least one of them gets made.

After years as a novelist, was shifting into a more collaborative medium a challenge?

It was actually a welcome challenge. When you write a book you basically sit alone in a room for a year writing and you deal a bit with your editor but essentially it’s a solitary process and when you suddenly have this whole team of people who are united in bringing your vision to life it’s actually very heady, and a really nice antidote to the loneliness of book writing. Working with all these people whether it’s other writers, producers, directors, actors, you suddenly have this family that are working with you and I actually found it to be very welcome. I mean certainly you’re not always happy with everyone else’s interpretation of your stuff, you tend to exert a lot more control over a book than a TV show or a movie, but at the same time it’s really a thrilling collaboration and as long as you’re working with good people, which I’ve been lucky enough to mostly do, it’s just a really nice break from the loneliness of novel writing.