D.A. Well, I started to write another Dirk Gently book, and I just lost it. For some reason I couldn’t get it going, so I had to put it aside. I didn’t know what to do with it. I looked at the material again about a year later, and suddenly thought, “Actually, the reason is that the ideas and the character don’t match. I’ve tried to go for the wrong kind of ideas, and these ideas would actually fit much better in a Hitchhiker book, but I don’t want to write another Hitchhiker book at the moment.” So I sort of put them on one side. And maybe one day I will write another Hitchhiker book, because there’s an awful lot of material sitting around waiting to go in it. But going back to Dirk Gently, I sort of put Dirk aside, really. There was a student production of Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective in Oxford two or three months ago, so I went along to see it. And it’s an enormously complicated plot . . . Part of the complexity is there to disguise the fact that the plot doesn’t really quite work . . . It was funny watching it on stage, because I suddenly began to think about it again, and think, “Well, they did this well, but what they should have done was this, and they should’ve done that.” You know, it starts the whole ball rolling in your head. What was also interesting to me was that while I was sitting there being quite critical of the production, I was astonished by how much the audience was enjoying it. It was rather sort of a peculiar situation. I suddenly thought, “I would love to see this happen as a film, because I can now see, having thought about it freshly in this context, what kind of a movie it could be, and it could be great.” So maybe, once the Hitchhiker movie has gotten to the stage where I can turn my attention to other things as well, that’s what I’d like to do next. And with that movie under way, I hope more doors will open as far as filmmaking is concerned. I would love to do movies, but this is a man saying this innocently who’s never done one.

Interview conducted
with Keith Phipps, 1998

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Douglas Adams
48 Bloomsbury Terrace
London N1-6TS

April 14, 1999

David Vogel
Walt Disney Pictures

Dear David,

I’ve tried to reach you by phone a couple of times. Perhaps it would have helped if I’d explained why I was calling: I was in the States for a few days and thought it might be helpful if I came across to L.A. so that you and I could have a meeting. I didn’t hear from you, so I’m on a plane back to England, where I’m typing this.