Bill Bryson: A Walk in the Woods is ‘not my movie’

What’s it like to be portrayed in a film by Robert Redford? ‘Very strange,’ according to bestselling writer Bill Bryson.

Bill Bryson, author, whose book A Walk in The Woods has been adapted into a film. Photographed at the Langham Hotel during his stay in Sydney. Pic - Britta Campion

Bill Bryson’s now famous walk in the woods almost didn’t happen — twice. Bryson’s adventure walk with an old school friend on the 3500km Appalachian Trail through America’s northeast in the late 1990s felt interminable to begin with, the author tells Review.

Consequently, the memoir that propelled Bryson from a gigging travel writer to a bestselling author, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail, almost wasn’t written.

And that would have deprived the world of his subsequent self-deprecating, entertaining travelogues, comic memoirs and observational books including Down Under, Notes from a Small Island and A Really Short History of Nearly Everything.

FILM REVIEW: Read David Stratton’s verdict on A Walk in the Woods

His walking partner, the pseudonymous Stephen Katz, was an unfit, grating, recovering alcoholic and, Bryson admits, “the first few weeks we were together, I just wished he’d go home”.

“He was driving me crazy,” he says.” I wasn’t thinking this is great material; during the whole first three weeks I was thinking, I’m never going to get a book out of this, we might as well quit now.”

Bryson didn’t realise until later that the conflict, sparring and the “very fact he was driving me crazy and was such a challenge is what actually gives you the material for a book”.

The relationship is at the heart of the new film, A Walk in the Woods, starring Robert Redford as Bryson and Nick Nolte as Katz. And as with the walk itself, Bryson had moments when he thought the movie adaptation would not make it to the screen.

Redford was the last among a number of producers to option the book and even he took some time to bring it to screen, initially hoping it could be a reunion movie with his Butch Cassidy, Paul Newman.

“Mostly I had no connection to it [the film], but I’ve been doing this long enough to know the general run of things is that somebody somewhere takes out an option on a book you’ve written and that’s the last you ever hear of it,” Bryson says. “It was astounding to me that this didn’t die in a way, it kept ticking over, but I didn’t expect it to come to anything.”

Redford’s involvement tickled his fancy, though: “So there wasn’t any sense of dread of what might happen to it but there was also no sense of confidence that it would ever happen.”

The result has pleased many, including Bryson, even though he says he had “nothing, absolutely zero to do with the making of it”. That has been liberating, he adds: “I feel like I can talk about it candidly, without modesty, because it’s not my movie.”

Redford and Nolte’s performances, and the relationship between their characters, are charming. Redford, who appeared to have forgotten the sly, sexy persona he brought to late 1960s-early 70s films such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting and All the President’s Men, rediscovers the grin and dry lines. He is as one expects the author to be: pragmatic, wry and slightly dishevelled. And Nolte fits the irascible, shambolic Katz like a glove.

Bryson, 63, found watching the film “a very strange experience, as you might expect”. “From my perspective he’s not playing me,” he says. “I watched the movie thinking I was going to watch him playing me, but you realise within 90 seconds that’s not me any more, it’s Robert Redford.

“Obviously it’s going to stop being me physically as soon as Robert Redford pretends to be Bill Bryson,” he adds. “It’s a story that overlaps in an interestingly curious way with my own story, but it’s no longer my story.”

Ken Kwapis’s film diverges from the book in random ways. For instance, Bill’s wife, played by Emma Thompson, is named Catherine, not Cynthia. And the opening television interview introducing Bryson’s lovable indifference to the business of life is a construction.

“I think it’s very faithful in spirit to the book, but it begins to deviate right away,” Bryson says. The film coincides with his life keenly, but he could watch it “mostly as a story”.

“And only occasionally did I think, ‘I wrote that line, it’s literally taken from the book’ … I feel a connectedness for a moment and [then] I drift away and become a member of the audience like anybody else.”

I venture the tone of his character, as played by Redford, feels like Bryson, the ambivalent yet amused watcher of life. The author agrees to a point, noting Kwapis (the director of He’s Just Not That Into You and numerous TV shows including The Office and Parks and Recreation) and screenwriters Rick Kerb and Bill Holderman tried hard to recapture the characters and experiences from the book, and they are “true to what I wrote”.

Even better, the film has portrayed something he could “never truly do in the book”, the beauty of the landscape, “which most of the time as a walker you’re completely unaware of, because you’re in this enclosed space and it’s leafy and very verdant”.

“I was constantly astounded watching the movie,” he says, “thinking, ‘That really is beautiful and I didn’t know!’ ”

The author considers the trip, book and the movie endearing as they represent the sliding-doors ­moment in his career in which he not only acquired bestseller status, particularly in his homeland, but was elevated from columnist and journalist to a narrative writer.

And it all came down to one fateful phone call from an old acquaintance from their time growing up in Des Moines — Matthew Angerer, who eventually outed himself as Katz.

“When I look back, obviously the book wouldn’t be the book that it is if Katz didn’t come,” Bryson says.

Angerer has subsequently said some of Bryson’s scenarios were exaggerated, but he has no beef with author or book. And Bryson admits — “of course” — that his authorial persona is a different character to his actual self.

“The person who is narrating these books is much more of an alter-ego of me,” he says. “No, in real life I’m nothing like the person you see in the books. I might be [that person] inside my head, but I don’t express it.”