After more than a decade in the film industry, he was ready for a new challenge. Sitting in Penguin Random House’s imposing building on the Strand, Mastai has an air of confidence that suggests nothing would intimidate him for very long. But in 2013, when he started thinking about a story where a man strands himself in an alternate reality, Mastai realised that it wouldn’t be a screenplay, but a novel – a revelation he describes as “a little bit intimidating”. Over the next decade, Mastai built a successful Hollywood career, with writing credits including Alone in the Dark, The Samaritan (released as Fury in the UK) and the Daniel Radcliffe-Zoe Kazan romcom What If. It’s very easy to convince yourself that if you don’t try you won’t fail. It’s very easy to create a lot of obstacles that keep you from going after the things you want to do. When you’re young, it’s very easy to be your own worst enemy. The last gift my mother gave me was the awareness that I don’t have unlimited time. I started going from wanting to be a writer to actually writing.
“I think about where I am right now in my life, and it’s hard to imagine it the way it is had my mother not died,” says the Canadian screenwriter, now 43.
W hen Elan Mastai was 26, his mother died.
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