The second film even went on to make over $100 million, which was sadly ironic, because I had always jokingly referred to that script as my "$100 million dollar screenplay." Those episodes really kind of took the wind out of my sails, and so I thought I the next time, maybe I need to to write a novel, and that hopefully it would be easier to find an agent, who could then represent my 5 other screenplays. My first, well, I hate to call it an inspiration, but what spurred me on, believe it or not, was an episode of South Park--"All About Mormons." Like a lot of people, I had never really given the religion much thought and had always just kind of thought of it as one of the lesser know Protestant branches of Christianity. After having my interest sparked, I then went on to read Jon Krakauer's Under The Banner of Heaven. With all the sordid history, and some, what I found to be, rather odd beliefs and practices, I knew, there was a lot of potential there for a novel.
I found the history behind the story fascinating. Is the prophecy mentioned in the novel true?
I did, well, I won't say "tons," but literally, pounds of research, from all the books I went through, notes that I took, and reams that I printed off from my internet research. While I had some idea in the beginning of what my story would be--which at the time, started out having to do with a rogue FBI agent who was investigating the murder of his Mormon girlfriend who had broken away from one of the LDS's radical fundamentalist offshoots. As you can see after reading it, it's changed quite a bit from that. I then probably took close to a year of doing nothing but researching and taking notes, mostly of what seemed like fascinating items to further explore and perhaps later work into the story. As far as "The White Horse Prophecy" goes, I wish I could take credit, but Joseph Smith supposedly first came up with that in the 1840's. There's actually a pretty good Wikipedia entry on the prophecy that gives a basic explanation. Mr. Romney has mostly dodged the question when asked about it, but I think back when he was running the first time, he said something along the lines that he considered the Prophecy to be a matter of "speculation and discussion by church members" and "not official church doctrine."
The novel deals with a negative aspect of religion, especially the Mormon religion. Was it difficult to deal with this aspect of the novel while working on it?
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