Turning a book into a Hollywood film can be a tortuous business, from securing author rights and getting directors and screenwriters on board to pitching to studios. But for Remain, a supernatural love story set on Cape Cod, the usual conventions went out the window.
Conceived simultaneously as a book and a movie, Remain is a one-of-a-kind collaboration between Nicholas Sparks, author of 25 romance novels including The Notebook and Message in a Bottle, and seller of 150 million books, and M. Night Shyamalan, director of hit movies The Sixth Sense and Signs. While the novel is published this week, the film, which stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Phoebe Dynevor and is currently in post-production, is due for release in October 2026.
When Sparks’s team first floated the idea in 2022, he said: “Oh, that might be fun,” and thought nothing more of it. “I’ve heard ‘You should work with this person or that person [a lot]. It’s the kind of Hollywood discussion that goes in one ear and out the other,” Sparks says.
But the following year, a plan was hatched. Sparks and Shyamalan – who had never previously met – would each sketch out a premise for a story that could work as a novel and a film, after which they would get together to see if either story had legs. “We decided in that first meeting to do Night’s idea, and together we hammered out the [plot] of what would become Remain,” he explains.
The project tells the story of Tate Donovan, a New York architect who travels to Cape Cod to design a summer house for his best friend. It is Tate’s first project since his breakdown, triggered by the death of his sister, which culminated in him spending time in a psychiatric ward. In Cape Cod, Tate checks into a B&B where he is told he is the only guest. But then a young woman named Wren appears with whom he feels an instant connection. But an obstacle stands in the way of their burgeoning love: Wren is, in fact, a ghost.
This may be a co-production but those familiar with Sparks’ oeuvre will recognise his distinctive style in the novel: propulsively plotted, frequently schmaltzy, unapologetically lowbrow.
Smiley and affable, Sparks, 59, is talking over video call from his publicist’s office in New York. When he’s not on the promotional trail, he lives in a house on the river in New Bern, North Carolina, where he has resided since the 90s. On paper, Sparks and Shyamalan may not seem like obvious collaborators: one specialises in heart-tugging romance, the other in supernatural thrillers. But Sparks maintains they have much in common as storytellers. “We both concentrate on character and emotional movement throughout a story. And we’re both fond of unexpected twists.”
With an outline of Remain nailed down, Shyamalan got to work on the script. In the early months, the pair “spoke three times a week, brainstorming and testing out how things were working. The plan was always that we should think of the story as a coin. I get one side, and he gets the other.” Once the first draft of the screenplay was done, Sparks began work on the novel.
While the plots in the book and movie are identical, the two mediums dictated that they were told differently. “For instance, I can hop into characters’ heads and tell you exactly what they’re thinking. Meanwhile Night is doing a haiku version of a love story, because in a film you have much less of a runway.”
Though writing a novel has its challenges, Sparks concedes his job has been easier than Shyamalan’s, not least because the writing and editing took him six months whereas Shyamalan “started in August 2024 and he’s still working on it. His is a two-year process. But it was a thrill for me to watch someone who is a creative genius do everything associated with their craft, from storyboarding to writing the manuscript to working with actors, reviewing dailies and adjusting scenes on the fly.”
Sparks has decades of experience seeing his novels turned into films. The first was Message in a Bottle, the 1999 adaptation of his second novel, starring Kevin Costner, Robin Wright and Paul Newman; this was followed by 2002’s A Walk to Remember, featuring Mandy Moore and Daryl Hannah. Then came The Notebook, Sparks’ 1996 bestseller which was brought to the screen in 2004 by Nick Cassavetes, and made a megastar of 24-year-old Ryan Gosling.
Sparks says he long ago learned to yield to other people’s vision of his stories “even though I tend to work closely with screenwriters and producers”. Any surprise he might have felt at the differing visions was superseded by “a sense of wonder and awe that a film was actually being made”. He remains keenly aware of the challenges thrown up by each medium, noting “a novel is 100,000 words and a screenplay is 20,000 so, as a writer, you have to accept that some things are going to go.”
Born in Nebraska but raised from the age of eight in Sacramento, California, Sparks wrote his first novel at 19 and his second aged 22. Neither of those manuscripts saw the light of day, though they were good training exercises for the fledgling writer. “I think the most valuable lesson was that I had it in me to finish a novel,” he reflects.
In his early twenties, Sparks worked in pharmaceutical sales, driving around delivering medication and vaccine samples to doctors’ offices. By this time, he had two young children. He recalls his then-wife, exhausted from a long day of childcare, going to bed early in the evenings. “I could have stayed up and watched TV, or I could chase a dream [as a writer]. I opted for the latter, writing from 8pm to 11pm every night.”
Sparks was 28 when he wrote The Notebook, the romantic drama about a pre-war couple from opposite sides of the tracks, that would become his debut and shoot to the top of the bestseller lists. Though Sparks had confidence in the story, he notes: “You can have all the confidence in the world, but it doesn’t mean that it’s all going to work out the way you hope it will. I was an unknown writer and so it really came down to: would people be willing to give the story a chance? And it turned out they were.”
He sent the manuscript to 25 agents simultaneously: 12 turned it down, another 12 didn’t reply. But one, Theresa Park, responded with enthusiasm. She later said she could feel in her bones that it would be a bestseller; she is still his agent today. Just four months after The Notebook was published, Sparks – who was already deep into his second novel – gave up the day job and devoted himself to writing full time.
Now, over 30 years into his career, Sparks still loves writing though he can relate to the famous Winston Churchill quote about how a book starts out as an adventure and “then it becomes a mistress and then a tyrant. By the end you’re just sick and tired of it and you want to fling it out to the world.”
As for inspiration for his stories, it can come from anywhere. “It can be something that happened in my family. It could be a theme or a single character that I want to explore. It can be an old man who lives in a cabin who is covered in burns. That idea begat Counting Miracles, which was my last book.”
When a story comes together in this mind, he adds, it arrives less like a bolt of lightning than a gradual realisation of how the strands will fit together. “For me,” Sparks says, “a novel is not one idea. It’s thousands of ideas that work together just right.”
‘Remain’ (Sphere, £22) is published on 14 October
