Richard Ford: Shooting for the stars

Interview with the American writer Richard Ford, who many have compared to William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. In this video he talks about his novel 'Canada' published in 2012 as well as about his authorship in general.

According to the The Washington Post Richard Ford (b. 1944) is "one of the finest curators of the great American living museum." In 1995 his novel Independence Day was the first to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award. In this conversation with the Danish journalist and publicist Synne Rifbjerg, Ford speaks about his novel Canada, in which he explores the mysterious and consoling bonds of family in a tale about a young man forced by catastrophic circumstance to reconcile himself to a world that has been rendered unrecognizable. Ford himself grew up in Mississippi and lost his father at an early age. Later on in the interview, he reflects upon the differences between the United States and Canada, which to Ford is a much more liberal country. Furthermore Ford talks about his own path towards writing and literature, which he defines as "the lively negotiation with the ongoing."

Richard Ford was interviewed by Synne Rifbjerg.

Camera: Jakob Solbakken

Produced by: Jakob Solbakken and Marc-Christoph Wagner, 2012

Recorded at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, December, 2012.

Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.

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Supported by Nordea-fonden.

First I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed, then about the murders which happened later.

The robbery is the more important part since it served to set my and my sisters lives on the

courses they eventually followed, nothing would make complete sense without that being told first.

Our parents were the least likely two people in the world to rob a bank, they weren't strange people,

not obviously criminals, no-one would have thought they were destined to end up the way they did.

They were just regular, although, of course, that kind of thinking became null and void

the moment they did rob a bank.

I always have liked beginnings that were grabbers, I always liked beginnings that would, you know,

throw down the gauntlet for the reader. The only problem with a beginning like that is that

then you've got to have a second act, and sometimes if you don't have a second act,

if you can't follow up a really good beginning like that with something equally gripping then you might as

well not have it, because you've just basically created a trap for yourself and sprung it so,

no I just um, I always, I think when I wrote it I knew it was OK.

I thought it was just a sort of typical old fashioned narrative hook, and, you know,

you're going to have a murder down the line here, you're gonna have a bank being robbed

by my parents, so I thought it was good.

It's an American family of 4 people, 2 children, twin boy/girl, mother/father, and the father has been

in the air force since World War II, and the book takes place in 1960.

Eventually after staying in the air force, he gets out of the air force, and then doesn't really

know what to do with himself, he's been in the military his whole life, and they live in a little town in

Great Falls Montana, where none of them have ever lived before, and he just happened to be stationed

there in the air force.

And he hatches upon a scheme to sell stolen beef to the railroad, to sell to the dining cart customers on the railroad.

And he very quickly runs amiss and runs afoul of the Indians who he basically goes into business with to

kill the beef and deliver it to him, and he finds that he owes them $2,000, which is in 1960

a considerable sum of money, for half a beef that is somehow or other gone rancid before they can sell it.

And so in a fit of sort of chaotic lunacy rather than just leaving town in the middle of the night, or

borrowing the money, because he had no contacts in the town, no collateral, he didn't own anything,

he determines he will rob a bank and get the money that way.

And that sets in motion, the book actually.

And what happens to him and his wife, who is his colleague in this bank robbery, is that they

are immediately caught, and once they are immediately caught, then the children are left alone,

and the children fend for themselves.

I mean I invented that, so I don't really know what relation it bears to most peoples normal thinking.

I did discover when I was trying to make plausible to myself the idea that 2 people who didn't

have to rob a bank would rob a bank, that anybody who robs a bank who's not already a hardened,

criminal, who's not John Dillenger or Pretty Boy Floyd, anybody who's a normal person who robs a bank

is crazy because they're going to get caught immediately, so all manner of assumptions about

how you do it and how you get away with it and what happens to you afterwards, are complete lunacy