James Franco and Pamela Romanowsky On What THE ADDERALL DIARIES Means To Them
THE ADDERALL DIARIES is currently available exclusively on DirecTV; it will be released theatrically and available on all other digital and cable VOD platforms starting Friday, April 15, 2016
Film Courage: Pam, when you were taking The Adderall Diaries as the memoir and then adapting it into a screenplay, how much did you embellish the drug use and sex scenes or did you try to tone them down a bit?
Pamela Romanowsky: The drug use and the sex scenes are actually toned down quite a bit. I think that this was something that Stephen (Elliott-The writer of the memoir) was very interested in for the book and I was less interested in for the film because for me this film was about the relationships between these characters and how consequences in those relationships led to a realization in the main character, so his unusual sex life and his pretty moderate drug use are both parts of that and part of who he is. But to me, those are sort of just elements of a character. And I think that S&M is all over the media, all over cinema right now and so to me it wasn’t as shocking as it was in maybe 2008 when he was writing the book (and in 2009 when the book came out). So it seemed pretty easy to me to accept that it’s a part of this guy’s life and the Adderall use is a part of his life and we didn’t really need to talk about it that much, it’s just part of who he is.
