'Everything Must Go' director Dan Rush on adapting Raymond Carver

For his feature debut, director-screenwriter Dan Rush built Everything Must Go around the central concept of Raymond Carver’s 1977 story “Why Don’t You Dance.” But Carver’s story, as Rush puts it, is “pretty dang short,” so he had to make some bold creative choices to beef up the narrative. (Some other notable Carver adaptations: Robert Altman’s Shortcuts and Ray Lawrence’s Jindabyne). It’s a bold choice, generally, for any filmmaker to adapt Carver’s work. His stories typically center on disaffected, working class individuals in a gray-skied America; he writes with economical prose (kept even snappier with the help of editor Gordon Lish), and his characters rarely say what they mean. Rush spoke to me about the tall task of creating a cinematic arc out of a very short Carver story, and his decision to cast Will Ferrell in the main role of Nick Halsey.

SEE: EW.com