San Jose deacon's novel gets turned into a major motion picture

Published: 2007-09-24

SAN FRANCISCO (CNS) -- Deacon Ron Hansen, who serves in ministry for the Diocese of San Jose, is also a novelist and English professor, and recently received a professional compliment about his writing from actor Brad Pitt. "He said, 'Hey, man, great book,"' Deacon Hansen told Catholic San Francisco, the archdiocesan newspaper. "He was a really nice guy, very generous and gracious," the novelist said, adding: "I was prone to like him." Deacon Hansen met Pitt on the set of "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," a movie starring Pitt as the paranoid post-Civil War outlaw and based on Deacon Hansen's 1983 novel of the same name. What Deacon Hansen appreciates even more than Pitt's compliment is the movie's faithfulness to his story. The director, Andrew Dominik, who spotted the book at a Melbourne, Australia, bookstore and thought it would make a great movie, adapted the novel in a remarkably light-handed way for a Hollywood treatment of literature.

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