DAVE DAVIES, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. "The Dog Stars," a new film from Ridley Scott starring Jacob Elordi and Josh Brolin, is an apocalyptic drama about two men struggling to survive after a virus has wiped out much of the world's population. Here's a scene from the movie. Elordi is speaking to Brolin's character.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE DOG STARS")
JACOB ELORDI: (As Hig) This world fits you, Bangley. Wake up, defend, survive. I think you were ready for it 10 years before it hit. Huh? You like this [expletive]. I was a [expletive] mechanic. You know, I fixed [expletive]. When I wasn't doing that, I was kissing my wife and playing with my dog, wondering every day how I got so [expletive] lucky.
DAVIES: "The Dog Stars," which opens in theaters next week, is adapted from a novel of the same name by Peter Heller. Heller knows something about survival himself. He's an experienced outdoorsman and adventure writer who's gone to some pretty remote places and done some pretty dangerous things. He wrote "Hell Or High Water" about an expedition to an unfathomably deep river gorge in Tibet. "The Dog Stars" was his first novel and became a best-seller. His other novels include "The River," "Celine," "The Painter" and his latest - "The Orchard." Peter Heller holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in both fiction and poetry. Let's listen to some of the interview I recorded with Heller in 2012 when "The Dog Stars" was first published.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
DAVIES: Well, Peter Heller, welcome to FRESH AIR.
PETER HELLER: Thank you for having me.
DAVIES: Now, this is your first novel. You've written a lot of nonfiction. Why a novel set in a post-apocalyptic world where civilization has collapsed?
HELLER: Yeah, I'm not sure why. I know why I wanted to write a novel. I've been writing nonfiction for many years, and, you know, when you write a nonfiction book, you know, of course, I always know what's going to happen next, and I know what the ending is going to be, and I just didn't want to know what was going to happen next. And so I went to the coffee shop where I write, and I sat down, and I began with the first line. So I didn't even - to tell you the truth - know that it was going to be a post-apocalyptic story when I started.
DAVIES: Wow. The first line is I keep the beast running. The beast refers to an old Cessna aircraft. That's how you started?
HELLER: Yeah. And, I mean, I know that this stuff about the unraveling of the ecosphere and the apocalypse is something that I've been thinking about a lot. I write a lot about environmental issues, and I have a dear friend. He's a paleobotanist. And his - what he does is look at 70 million-year-old fossil leaves. And his specialty is the K-T boundary. That's the geologic layer that represents the time between when there were a lot of dinosaurs and then when there weren't any. So this guy, Kirk, is my - is an officianato of extinction, you might say, and we eat breakfast now and then, and we always talk about, you know, this sixth great mass extinction that we're in the middle of right now that scientists, you know, are talking about a lot. And we always end up imagining what it'll be like when that apocalypse, this unraveling, you know, begins to affect human society and what it'll look like. And - so, you know, those themes have been on my mind. And so when I sat down to write, I think, you know, they had to be central to the book.
DAVIES: Well, you know, I had my own notion about this, which is that, you know, as I read about what you've done, I mean, you've been quite an outdoorsman. You've been, you know, an expedition kayaker. You've gone to some incredibly remote and sometimes dangerous places. And I wondered if you were, at times, in places where it might have felt like you were one of the last people on Earth.
HELLER: Oh, yeah. You know, that's a - I hadn't thought of it that way, but I was thinking this morning about - sometimes I just - the wonderful thing about, you know, traveling to these places and taking these expeditions is you have these memories and these images that sort of, you know, they form your interior landscape and you can come back to them. And this morning, I was thinking about the Tsangpo gorge in Eastern Tibet. And, you know, it's like, the deepest gorge in the world. It's right in the middle of the high Himalayas, and it's so deep that it's subtropical, and there are tigers in there and, you know, four species of leopards and 200 species and counting of rhododendrons. You know, I was on this expedition that went through there, and it did. You know, I felt like the end of the world or maybe, like, some sort of Shangri-La, some sort of, you know, imagined place on Earth that no one had ever been to before. And, you know, on some of these trips, actually, you know, when you get into the kayak, you don't even know - you stretch the spray skirt on over the cockpit, and you don't know if that's the last time you'll ever be doing that. And you sort of pray that it's not. And so I think that might have informed some of it, for sure.
DAVIES: Right. You know, one of the things that I thought - I just - I really enjoyed reading this. It's told in the first person. Your character, Hig, is this guy who was a pilot, and he's at an airport with another guy who's very different from him. Let's talk about these two characters. First, your character, Hig, the one who tells the story. Tell us about him.
HELLER: Well, he's - he was a contractor. He was married - very happily married to his wife named Melissa. She was seven months pregnant when this super flu hit and hit, you know, across as a pandemic - world pandemic. And so that was their first child. So in this flu pandemic, he lost his wife. He lost his unborn child. He lost everything. And in his previous life before that, he had wanted to be a writer. He had written a bunch of poetry and was kind of a failed poet and, you know, had to go to work. And so, you know, he did this job building houses. And he's a big guy. He's a very tough and formidable dude. But, you know, he still has that sensibility of, you know, he just loves to read poetry more than anything, and he has a sensitivity towards beauty and nature, and he loves to fly fish. That's what he loves to do more than anything. And, you know, in this situation in this post-apocalyptic time that he finds himself in, he'll still, at great risk to himself, he and his dog, Jasper, will head into the mountains just to go fishing.
DAVIES: Right. Now, they end up at this little rural airport called Erie. Is it a real place?
HELLER: Yeah. It's where I keep my plane, the old '56 (laughter).
DAVIES: A '56 Cessna, an old plane. And because of the circumstances, there are fuel tanks that are solar powered so he can - there's enough fuel that he can continue to fly. The other guy at the airport is the one he's destined to perhaps spend eternity with, this character Bangley. Tell us about Bangley.
HELLER: Bangley is an enigma. You know, he shows up a few months after everything hit the fan with a trailer full of guns and ammo. And he's just a really mean gun nut, and you get the sense that he's been waiting for this his whole life, this sort of survival situation. And, you know, throughout the whole beginning of the book - you know, and as I was writing it, I mean, I was - you know, I was discovering these characters as I was writing it just as Hig was. And so it was really fun. You know, Bangley is a tough nut to crack. He doesn't give away much. And his whole deal is about survival. It is about dotting your Is and crossing every T and about redundancy and about never slipping up and never making a mistake and never letting some situation get out of hand or letting the other guy win.
DAVIES: And treating every other human being you may encounter as a threat?
HELLER: Yeah. Oh, definitely. Yep. He's a crusty dude, for sure.
DAVIES: So tell us what's the symbiotic relationship? Why does Bangley accept your character, Hig, into his little world?
HELLER: Well, you know, I think on the surface, you know, explicitly, it's because Hig has this airplane, and he knows how to fly it. And every day, after - you know, there's a lot of action in the book. And in one of these sort of attacks that nearly cleans their clock, you know, Bangley sort of realizes that it's Hig's daily patrols in his old plane - you know, he circles out towards the mountain front which is 8 miles away, and then he circles around, and he does a - out to the south and then the east and to the north, he has a 30-mile radius. And it's sort of a day's walk for an intruder. So after his patrol, he knows that they're safe for probably - for 24 hours. And it's that patrol, that perimeter that Hig maintains that, you know, keeps him alive, you know, in Bangley's book. He's useful then.
DAVIES: And your character, Hig, is not happy just to stay alive, right? He's always kind of reaching for something else.
HELLER: Yeah. I mean, Hig's challenge is to find a reason to stay alive and to stay connected with the things he loves. And I think that's why I named the book "The Dog Stars" 'cause Hig sleeps out every night with his dog Jasper. They huddle up and sleep out under the stars. And every night, Hig names the constellations. And he used to have a book of stars, but now he doesn't. And so he remembers some of the constellations, you know, Orion and the Big Dipper and the Chariot. But a lot of them, he doesn't, so he makes them up, and they're usually animals. And he makes one up for his wife, and for the little angel, he calls it, which was his child. And he makes one up for Jasper, his dog. And it's his way of reinventing the world and also staying connected to the things he loves. So that's his challenge every day is to find a reason to live, to find joy, to find some richness. And I think that's what makes him so interesting. It's not just about, you know, finding the calories to stay alive.
DAVIES: And Bangley's reaction to every move is, that's too risky. Make sure you're protected. Get the right angles on an intruder, that kind of a thing.
HELLER: Exactly. Yeah, they're working, you know, they have two different tracks they're working on every day. So their relationship is very interesting. And Hig doesn't like to kill. And, you know, in a lot of ways, I'm like Hig in that way. I mean, I love to fly fish almost more than anything, and I hunt elk. And I just can't stand killing things. I mean, I'll - if I see a spider, you know, flailing on the surface of the water, I'll go to great effort to save him sometimes. Don't tell my buddies (laughter). But Hig is like that, too. You know, he's just - he's in this situation where they do get attacked, and he does sometimes have to step up, and he just can't stand it. Whereas Bangley, you know, he relishes that. And, you know, he thinks Hig lives in the past too much. You know, a lot of the book is Hig's interior monologue, his memories of the past. There's a lot - there's layering of his memories of his marriage, of, you know, things he used to love to do and his impressions. And so he's in his head a lot. And to Bangley, you know, this is just cross purposes to what they want to do. You know, he's always telling Hig to wake up, you know, stop, you know, he's going to be trying to think about the past and get blindsided by some (laughter)...
DAVIES: Writer Peter Heller, recorded in 2012. We'll hear more after this short break. This is FRESH AIR.
This is FRESH AIR, and we're listening to the interview I recorded with Peter Heller in 2012 when his first novel, "The Dog Stars," was published. It's now been adapted into a film by director Ridley Scott, opening in theaters next week.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
DAVIES: Now, you grew up in New York. What kind of neighborhood were you in? What kind of kid were you?
HELLER: So I grew up in Brooklyn Heights, which is - you know, it's a genteel neighborhood above the piers, right across from the Financial District in Brooklyn. And it was a quiet neighborhood. I spent all my time, like, in the bushes when I was really little around the playground. My friends were in the playground. I was, like, in the bushes. I don't know. Just as a kid, I just wanted to be out of the city so bad. I couldn't stand the city. You know, I went to school. And I like school a lot. I liked reading. But I couldn't wait until I got out of there.
And so I begged my parents when I was 15 to send me to a school in southern Vermont. I have a lot of cousins and uncle and aunt in Putney, Vermont. And so I went to a school there for high school, and, you know, it was just like, oh, my God - hills and rivers. And it was great. And I loved it so much. I built a tipi, and I lived in it, you know, through the Vermont winter when I was a teenager and cut my firewood and all that stuff. I was just - I was so happy in the country. So I went to college in New England in the country.
DAVIES: Right. And you became an expedition kayaker, right? I mean, you would take groups of people into these remote settings with tough rapids and...
HELLER: Yeah. I was a kayaking...
DAVIES: ...Bring everybody back alive, huh?
HELLER: (Laughter) Most of the time on the big expeditions, I was on assignment. So I was like the - I was the writer in the kayak, and I didn't lead the trip. But I did a lot of guiding, and I did a lot of kayak instruction along the way.
DAVIES: Well, I mean, I guess the best known is the trip that led to your book "Hell Or High Water." And that's this remarkable river gorge in eastern Tibet. You want to describe the setting here and what this expedition was about?
HELLER: Oh, gosh. I mean, this thing is, like, mythic. This - the Tsangpo River runs west to east across Tibet. It drains the entire north slope of the Himalayas. So it's a big river. And then in eastern Tibet, at about 10,000-foot elevation, it just drops off the edge of the earth and flows between two mountains, a 25,000-footer and a 23,000-foot peak. The peaks are very close together, and the river just drops off between them. And then 150 river miles later, it flows out into the hills of Assam, India, at an altitude of 500 feet. So if you think it drops off the edge of 10,000 feet and 150 river miles later, it comes out at 500 foot elevation, think of the relief in there, the steepness of this river. And it's a big river.
So these guys, an expedition led by Scott Lindgren and a few of his kayak buddies, decided that they wanted to try and kayak this river. And these are the best expedition kayakers in the world. They decided they wanted to kayak it in the middle of the winter when the river was at its lowest level, which was a good idea. And...
DAVIES: But when it's very, very cold, right?
HELLER: It's cold. And at some point, you know - how many river miles? - it's something like 20 river miles in, the river gets to a precipitous waterfall that hadn't been described, that was, you know, sort of imagined, but hadn't been described until 1998 by National Geographic. I mean, that's how remote this place was. So you get to a place where you can't paddle anymore, and then you have to climb up over a high snow pass. But the thing about it is, is that those passes aren't even, you know - the locals don't go anywhere near them after November.
So here we are in February, and these guys are carrying their kayaks up, you know, these 60-degree slopes. A guy's cutting steps with an ice ax and these guys are (laughter) carrying their kayaks up these, you know, just open snow slopes way up over a high pass. It was epic, and I was just - I was on the ground team, and, you know, we were 37 days in the gorge.
DAVIES: So did you have a kayak yourself, or you were...
HELLER: No, no, no, no, no, no. I was way - I was 40-something. These guys were all, like, in their 20s, you know, nobody really older than 30. They kayaked, you know, 350 days a year, top of their form. And so I was on assignment. I just was on the ground team, and I wrote about the story. But, you know, it was challenging enough just trying to get through there. Only two expeditions in history had ever done it.
DAVIES: So what does it mean to be on the ground team?
HELLER: It means that you're with five Nepali sherpas, like, Everest sherpas, who are there for mountaineering and stuff, and 60 porters and then this international team of, like, mountaineers, and you are trying to keep pace with the kayakers, you know, along the side of this precipitous gorge. And so, yeah, it's just - it's a lot of walking, a lot of scrambling, and some praying (laughter).
DAVIES: Your character in "The Dog Stars," Hig, is a pilot, and his Cessna aircraft is an important part of the story. And, you know, there's some really evocative scenes where he writes about flying. You're a pilot yourself, right?
HELLER: Yeah. I came to it in a funny way. I was doing a kayak trip in northern Montana. We had to fly into the river to do it. This is a few years ago. And I found that my favorite part of the whole trip was the flight in. You know, it was just so cool to be flying through these mountains close enough where the wing tips were close enough to the mountain slope that you could see, you know, the tracks of elk, you know, going up along a ridge, and I - and the landing in this little grass strip surrounded by mountains. It was - I just thought it was cool.
So I asked them - I got an assignment from Men's Journal. It was sort of like, how to be a bush pilot in three weeks kind of thing. And I - you know, they gave me the assignment. I went up there to Kalispell, Montana, and I got my license in 20 days with these incredible backcountry pilots.
DAVIES: The assignment was to learn to fly and write a story about it?
HELLER: Yeah. It was like, could you, like, in three weeks, like, learn to fly, get your license and then land on a backcountry strip? And so the guy I learned from, Dave Horner, is one of the truly great backcountry pilots in the world. He has 30,000 hours flying in the mountains of Glacier National Park and around there, tracking wolves and grizzly bears, radio collar tracking. So he's always flying low and slow with, you know, the mountain peaks all around him and above him. It's very dangerous flying, and he's still alive after 30,000 hours. He's extraordinary. It was sort of like learning to play tennis from, you know, Roger Federer. It should never happen.
And he was so fun to learn from because he was - he had been a logger. And, you know, I was not a natural arm (ph). I think it was like day three. We were landing at, like, Polson on the southern end of Flathead Lake. And we came in. He goes, you drive a truck? I'm like, yes - yes, sir. And he's like, you drive a motorcycle? I'm like, yeah. He goes, this isn't either one. It's a bird, damn it, and, you know, little adjustments, little adjustments.
DAVIES: (Laughter).
HELLER: And then when we landed, he turned to me and he goes, That was atrocious. He said, you landed, that looked like a sick goose. And, you know, for a logger to pull out the word atrocious, I mean, it was a special circumstance. I felt very honored (laughter).
Anyway, I fell in love with flying, and Dave actually emailed me, you know, a couple years ago, a little bit after the assignment, said, hey, buddy of mine who used this plane to track wolves, this '56 Cessna - it's a beautiful plane. He's selling a cheap. You should buy it, and I did.
DAVIES: Peter Heller it's been great. Thanks so much for speaking with this.
HELLER: Thanks for having me. It was fun.
DAVIES: Writer Peter Heller, recorded in 2012. His first novel, "The Dog Stars," has been adapted into a film by director Ridley Scott. It opens in theaters next week. Heller's latest novel is "The Orchard." After a break, we remember rock critic Dave Marsh, who died a week ago. And Justin Chang reviews the new film "Dreams In Nightmares." I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.
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