For Alex North, The Whisper Man is personal.
“Everything I’ve written has been autobiographical to some extent,” the author of the bestselling 2019 novel tells Tudum. “Not obviously, in terms of the details on the page and the characters and everything, but the ideas behind them.”
Now, The Whisper Man has been adapted into a chilling new film starring Robert De Niro, Michelle Monaghan, and Adam Scott. The thriller marks the first time one of North’s novels has found its way to the screen. “The common wisdom amongst myself and other writers is you only really believe it when you see it on the screen,” North says. “I have finally seen it on the screen, and I love it, so I’m extremely happy.”
The titular Whisper Man is a notorious serial killer who targets children, but there’s more lurking beneath the surface. Chasing down the Whisper Man is an unlikely duo: retired detective Pete Willis (De Niro) and his estranged son, Tom (Scott), who’s searching for his own abducted child, Jake (Acston Luca Porto). It’s this central trio that gives the film — and North’s novel — its emotional edge.
“Despite the genre and the trappings of a crime serial killer thriller, it was the characters and that father and son relationship that's mirrored throughout the story that really made me sink down into both novel and script,” director James Ashcroft tells Tudum.
Those themes stemmed directly from North’s evolving personal life as he wrote the novel. “If you went back to my previous books, you would see my life developing as a young man,” North says. “The kind of things I’m writing about [go from] being in relationships to eventually becoming a parent and the concerns around that. When I was writing The Whisper Man, my son was a little bit younger than Jake in the book, but not much.”
Ashcroft read the book and the screenplay for the film nearly simultaneously. “I got the script, and I had the book at the same time,” he says. “And so I read them side by side. It was really great to get a sense immediately of the source material that Alex had written, and where [writers Ben Jacoby and Chase Palmer] had chosen to take the adaptation.”
The film adaptation of North’s novel follows a slightly different trajectory. “I always understood that the film was going to be different from my book,” North says. “James Ashcroft and all the actors and everybody involved with the film did an amazing job of making their version of the story. I think it really works, and I’m incredibly excited to see what people make of it.”
In the book, Jake is kidnapped late in the third act; the film moves that moment forward, allowing Pete and Tom to spend time together investigating the case. “It made sense to me that they would move that,” North says. “It’s the kind of story you can approach in different ways, I think, and that was the way that they chose to do it.”
The film also moves the story’s action from the United Kingdom to the northeastern United States. “When I write everything I write, I don't really think about it being set anywhere in particular,” North says. “I’m far more interested in just the characters and the relationship between the characters. It's a book about fathers and sons, so you hope that that’s fairly universal in some of the themes and the ideas that it touches upon.”
The father and son in question are played by De Niro and Scott, respectively, a pairing North was thrilled to discover. “The email kind of came out of the blue, with my film agents saying, ‘Oh, Robert De Niro has signed on to play Pete. This is going to happen,’” North says. “I was just over the moon. I actually didn’t really believe the email was real.”
Ashcroft was careful to keep Jake and Tom at the heart of the story. “This story looks at the dynamic between fathers and sons and healing wounds of the past in a very empathetic, nuanced way,” he says. “That all comes back to Alex’s book and the work that Chase and Ben did on the script.”
Of course, one of the biggest moments in The Whisper Man came directly off the page. The centerpiece sequence, depicted on the film’s poster, sees the Whisper Man reach a gloved hand through the Kennedy family’s letterbox in an attempt to entice young Jake to join him.
It’s chilling — but not for North. “I had it in mind when I was writing it, and I’ve experienced it ever since,” he says. “I’m so close to the material that it’s very, very difficult for me to figure out whether that was scary or not.” The untold peril of being a horror writer: nothing is as scary as it is in your own mind.
The Whisper Man is now streaming on Netflix.
