Ben Sherwood authored The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud, on which the film Charlie St. Cloud is based. He also served as Executive Producer of the film. He has also been Executive Producer for ABC's Good Morning America, and produced news programs at both ABC and NBC. His latest book is The Survivors Club, a nonfiction book. I interviewed him by phone.

Let's start with you wearing your executive producer's hat. You've been a journalist and a producer for TV new programs. Is this your first time into film and how was that experience?

You know, in truth my role in the movie was very limited. I wrote the book 8 years ago, it was published about 6 years ago. The movie went through eight different stages of development in which the producer Mark Platt and a variety of writers developed the project. And then when Burr Steers and Zac Efron came on board it really accelerated. I was consulted frequently and kept apprised of what was happening but unlike my role as an executive producer say at Good Morning America and ABC News where that's a role—day to day one is responsible for the direction of program—every choice in the program or many of the choices that the program makes and the content of the show on a daily basis. My role as executive producer in the movie business was very different. I was kept informed. I was invited up to Vancouver a couple of times to see what they were doing but I was not day to day responsible for anything at all, not even close.

Let's switch to your writer's hat here. What was it like to have your book adapted?

It's been a surreal and a thrilling experience. I wrote the book and it was published in 2004 and this is the life of a book; it floats around there in the world. But the experience of the adaptation—of going to Woodland Hills a few weeks ago, which is a neighborhood in California, to see an early screening of the film—was thrilling. It was very emotional because the book itself is quite a journey with ups and downs and challenges and setbacks along the way as I was writing it, and so this is a very unreal moment in which my wife and I sat there in the dark watching an interpretation of the book on the screen and we were very moved by it and very excited, and as a life moment it was really exhilarating.

There are always changes that happen between a book and a film. Was it hard to let go of parts of the story?

The answer to that question is: no, it was not hard to let go because I understand what the process involves. A bunch of very talented moviemakers come together and I knew from the start that this would never be a literal translation of the book onto the screen and instead it would be an interpretation or an adaptation and so I was okay with that.

The hardest thing that happened, and I think it's no secret, was that the book is set in a wonderful town in New England called Marblehead, Massachusetts, which is a place that I love and where I have a bunch of friends and where I spent a lot of time doing research. And Marblehead is very much a character in the book. It's sort of the people, the settings, the scenery, the history—very much a character in the story—and the moviemakers were very much in love with Marblehead too. They went to Marblehead and looked around, they scouted, they investigated different ways of making the movie there. But in the midst of this very difficult economic recession they budgeted the film and discovered there were significant financial differences in making the movie in Vancouver, British Columbia. And so for financial reasons they chose to go to Canada and they set the movie in a fictional town that they called Quincy in a tribute to New England. Quincy, Mass. Isn't too far from Marblehead, Mass. And they've kept many of the touches of Marblehead including a bar called Maddie's, and the boys are Red Sox fans which is very important in the book itself—to any New Englander—and so they made that decision. And that was a tough one which I understand, and I think they made the Pacific Northwest come alive. It's gorgeous and made me want to go sailing in the Pacific Northwest and discover the forests and the towns of the Pacific Northwest—it's beautiful—but I felt that was the one change that was tough.

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