‘Don DeLillo gave me his blessing’: film director Ben Rivers on how fan mail from the Underworld author led to his latest work

When Rivers received a surprise letter from DeLillo, it encouraged him to set the author’s one-act play in an adult-free, postapocalyptic world

Nine-year-old girls reciting the gnomic prose of Don DeLillo – it sounds like an extreme English detention, but for film-maker Ben Rivers this was the foundation of his new movie, and the culmination of an unlikely friendship with the literary titan. DeLillo is an almost mythical figure of contemporary literature. His prose is precisely hewn, his narratives sophisticated and his preoccupations uncannily prophetic: conspiracy, terrorism, nuclear power, hypercapitalism – the 89-year-old New Yorker has been ahead of the curve for much of the late 20th and early 21st century. Rivers, a 53-year-old independent film-maker based in London, has been a lifelong fan, he says. So he was stunned to receive a letter from DeLillo himself one day in 2017.

A mutual friend had sent DeLillo a DVD of Rivers’ 2015 film The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers, a hallucinatory parable set in a semi-abstract Morocco, and the writer responded with a hand-typed letter. “He thought that the film was really powerful and he was looking forward to watching it again,” says Rivers. “It was a beautiful thing to receive and very meaningful for me, being such a big admirer of his.” Rivers later sent DeLillo another of his films: 2019’s Krabi, 2562, co-directed with Anocha Suwichakornpong, “and he also wrote back about that, saying that he enjoyed it”.
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