Ellen Block is the award-winning, internationally published author of five books, and she is also the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as the Michener-Copernicus Fellowship. Block lives in Los Angeles, where she is currently at work on a new novel.
Here she shares some ideas for casting a big-screen adaptation of her latest novel, The Definition of Wind:
As an author living in LA, I’m no stranger to playing the “who would you cast” game. In fact, I often find myself describing the characters via actors in order to bring them to life for people unfamiliar with my past books. The Hollywood-style pitch for my latest novel goes something like this…
Imagine Sandra Bullock…she’s a grieving widow, haunted by the loss of her beloved husband and son in a tragic house fire, so she retreats to a quaintly quirky little island in North Carolina’s Outer Banks to become the caretaker of an old lighthouse and recuperate. But she quickly discovers that the lighthouse may be as haunted as she is.
Having already had a movie made out of one of my books, this one makes me wince. They’re were several candidates for the role of Davy in my first novel Jumper, but we ended up with Young Darth Vader.The character in 7th Sigma, Kimble, starts out at 12 and ends up at eighteen so it would have to be either an actor with incredible range or a couple of actors. However, this would be so far out in the future that really we’re talking about actors who aren’t on the scene yet or are child actors now. My dream would be a young Justin Long but he’s really too old for the part now.
Love this question. I am a bookworm, 100 percent geek, and I rarely have a character in my head pinned to a movie star, but oddly enough, as I was writing Game of Secrets, I did. 
