Leslie Daniels’ stories have appeared in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, The Florida Review, Gulf Coast, The Santa Monica Review and New Ohio Review. The Shooting Gallery in New York City produced her one-act play. She has been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize and for the Best of the Associated Writing Programs. From 2005 to 2010, she was the fiction editor for The Green Mountains Review.
Here she shares some ideas for casting a big screen adaptation of her debut novel, Cleaning Nabokov’s House:
AAAhhhh you are asking me to casturbate in public! Yikes. OK, I think that the lead actress must be able to be funny, not in a light amusing way, darkly funny, the kind of woman who would make a joke out of anything; humor is her defense. She must also look plausibly down and out. So many of American movie stars are so polished it is hard to believe their lives as anything but enviable. The relationship between the two women would be very fun to act, like Julie & Julia. I think the pairing is key, and one must be older. I could see Susan Sarandon as the agent and Laura Linney as the protagonist. They are both wildly smart and independent, which is a key trait. The guy could be any number of actors, but I happen to love Sam Rockwell, he’s deadpan and sexy and odd. The ex-husband has to be someone who can play super uptight, maybe Stanley Tucci or Titus Welliver? Both are great. No, save Stan Tucci and Titus Welliver for the lawyers, and the ex-husband could be someone that people love to hate: Greg Kinnear, maybe. There are fun cameos for other parts: the mother, the male sex workers, the women sex clients.
Honestly, I’ve never been able to think of The Autobiography Of Mrs. Tom Thumb in terms of a movie simply because it would be impossible to cast. The kind of dwarfism that General and Mrs. Tom Thumb had is not a kind that is common today; they were miniature people, perfectly formed. Today they would have been given human growth hormones, and while they wouldn’t be quite average-sized, they certainly would be more than three feet tall! However, I admit that sometimes I do allow myself to imagine what Tim Burton could do with this story; his Big Fish, which I love, used CGI to realistically imagine giants and Siamese Twins. I think he could do a wonderful job with Mrs. Tom Thumb.
A bookseller once told me that she found This Burns My Heart to be very cinematic, and I think that’s probably true. When I wrote it, I was inspired not only by literature, but by films based on great novels, like Doctor Zhivago. I try to describe the setting in such a way that the reader can picture the action unfolding in front of her, as if it were all happening right then and there. So if I were to cast a movie version of This Burns My Heart, I’d pick the following actors: 
