By Anna Pasternak

Both of my biographies—Lara: The Untold Love Story and The Real Wallis Simpson—are being turned into films. Both are at the script stage, an unbelievably torturous and slow process that I have lived through for five years. It’s fascinating as they run neck and neck—one with a Hollywood production company and one with a U.S./U.K. production company—but both have faced the same conundrum. You need to get a powerful name to write the script, of whom top broadcasters approve, but without talent attached this is challenging (and talent won’t attach without a script to read!). Also, as both my books are real stories, they have suffered from not being woke enough. . . .

You can only send the treatment to one top writer/director/actor at a time, so it’s normal to wait anywhere from six weeks to four months for a response!  I finally have two named writers attached for the scripts—a process that took 18 months for Lara and six months for Wallis.

The pandemic definitely set us back a year, as all pitch finance meetings had to be on Zoom, which wasn’t effective! A year ago, no one wanted to finance a sweeping epic set in Russia, but this has changed in the last few months, as we now have the script financed for Lara. . . . I’ve repositioned all my expectations and do not expect to be on the red carpet for at least a decade! I now completely understand why The Queen’s Gambit took 26 years to bring to the screen.