Jill, a film based on my short story “Blood”, is now streaming in the US for free (with ads) on Tubi and the Roku Channel after more than a year on the festival circuit and a theatrical release in Europe. It was written and directed by Steven Michael Hayes and stars Tom Pelphrey, Juliet Rylance, Garrett Wareing, Zackary Arthur, and Dree Hemingway.
It’s a beautiful film. When Steven first contacted me almost 10 years ago, saying he’d been haunted by my story and inspired to write a script from it, I told him to do whatever he needed to do to make the movie his. In general, I prefer less faithful adaptations to more, because prose and film are massively different media. Or, rather, I might say I prefer faithfulness in spirit rather than detail. That’s what we get with Jill — only the last 30 minutes or so is close to my story, since the film provides a lot of the backstory I deliberate left out of what I wrote, but the film still feels in league with the original story, as vastly different as they are in incident, setting, style, and even in tone. It feels faithful, and that matters far more than the closeness of the adaptation.
The test for me was the scene where the mother goes away. For all the violence of the story, that’s the most heartbreaking and terrifying moment for me, and I could bear any other details being changed as long as that scene was portrayed well, if it was included. When it came, I held my breath. It really was just right. They could have done anything else — added clowns singing Christmas carols, set the film on the moon, anything — as long as they got that one moment right. They got more than that moment right.
The ending is more redemptive than I would or could have written. In fact, that’s what feel most different from the story to me. But I really understand why they did it, and I can’t say it’s a wrong choice for the kind of movie they made. A movie works with emotions and time differently than a short story, and what makes a short story resonate at its end may not be what a film needs after a movie’s length of accumulated time and narrative.
It’s a lovely movie. I’m proud to have provided the original inspiration.
