Andrew O'Hagan reveals exciting new Hollywood deal

Andrew O'Hagan speaking at the St Andrews Book Festival

Transcript

00:00Andrew, can you tell us about your latest deal?

00:03It's been a good week because not only is my novel Caledonian Road slated to become

00:10a returning series, a big television series, directed by the man who was responsible for

00:17Chernobyl on HBO and written by the wonderful Will Smith, who's the showrunner on Slow Horses.

00:26But the news just came in today also that a long-form piece that I wrote about the inventor

00:32of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, who I worked with over the course of a year and wrote a 35,000-word

00:38big story about, that's been optioned in Hollywood and is due to become a movie with somebody,

00:43God help them, playing me, I think.

00:49Can you give us any more details about that deal?

00:52Well, the news is literally fresh as cakes, but what I think is going to happen with this is that

01:01what started out as a very strange journalistic experience for me, following this man around the

01:07world who was the great mystery figure who invented cryptocurrency, this guy was being

01:14pursued by all sorts of dark figures on the internet and in the tax authorities in Australia

01:19and elsewhere, and I sort of stuck to him like glue for a whole year. So it's a kind of modern

01:25sort of spy story, really, and I inadvertently found myself involved with all these shady

01:31figures around the world who all wanted to sort of end the public's obsession with banks and take

01:36up cryptocurrency. So we'll see what happens with it, but it was quite fun to work on.

01:42And how about the Caledonian Road deal?

01:46Caledonian Road was a book that took me 10 years to write, so to see it land with such talented

01:50people for the adaptation to television is just really, really satisfying. You know, Will Smith

01:57just won an Emmy the other day for his work on Slow Horses, and he's in charge of this returning

02:03series, and the director, Johan Renck, is just one of the best in the world at the moment. So it's

02:07like a super group who have taken on Caledonian Road, you know, which is a book that I lived with

02:13on my own for so many years. I mean, it's been a great year seeing how it's been out in the world

02:18and meeting readers all over the place, but it was my little secret for quite a long time.

02:23And now that it's becoming a big television show, you know, it's a sort of, it's a hard thing to

02:29get your head around in some ways, because it's going to belong to everybody else now.

02:32It's no longer mine.