True to his words

Cupertino, Calif.

He's just off a plane from the New York premiere of "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," adapted from his novel of the same name, and the reviews have been decidedly mixed, but Ron Hansen seems unperturbed.

With his shock of white hair, short-sleeved blue sports shirt and casual slacks, Hansen looks more like a mid-level Silicon Valley executive than a stereotypically macho literary poseur as he greets a visitor to the well-appointed but unassuming suburban two-story California ranch house he shares with his wife, writer Bo Caldwell, as their English Labrador, Maggie, moseys around the kitchen.

Although there was a protracted struggle between director Andrew Dominik and the studio over edits of the movie, which clocks in at a challenging 2 hours and 40 minutes, "I think he [Dominik] is pretty comfortable in his skin" about the ultimate product, Hansen said.

So is the author. "I like the movie a lot. He had such reverence -- or fidelity, at least -- to my words that I couldn't help but love it."

Almost all the film is taken verbatim from Hansen's treatment of the complex relationship between James, played by Brad Pitt, who also produced the film, and his assassin, portrayed by Casey Affleck.

"When Bob Ford first goes to see Frank James (Sam Shepard), they cut away to the other three outlaws doing an improv, but that's the only part not as it was written," said Hansen, who previously adapted one of his other novels, "Mariette in Ecstasy" for the screen (it was released only in DVD because of financial problems at the studio). "Even the action sequences were taken right out of the book."

A Nebraska native, Hansen wrote his first novel, "Desperadoes," about the Dalton Gang, who "set out to imitate everything the James-Younger gang had done, including getting wiped out trying to rob two banks at the same time," he said. "While researching that, I learned a lot about Jesse James and Robert Ford and realized that no one had really told their story. In almost every movie, Ford shows up, he's kind of a weasel and shoots Jesse for the reward money. But it wasn't just betrayal. Jesse really did force Ford's hand in some ways. Ford really admired Jesse James for a long time, and was an expert who'd read everything about him.

"About the time I was writing this, there were also a number of assassination attempts . . . Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley. Then John Lennon. I was thinking about the extent to which assassins really admire, even emulate, the people they shoot."