RICHARD PRICE

On researching characters ... 380k WAV audio file 1.3Mb QuickTime movie

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(CNN) -- Author and screenwriter Richard Price is probably best known for "Clockers", which Spike Lee made into a film. He's back now with "Freedomland", a novel drawn from the headlines about an infamous carjacking hoax.

Richard Price spoke with CNN's Bobbie Battista on CNN's Sunday Morning.

BOBBIE BATTISTA: All right. Here's the scene: A woman stumbles into a inner city emergency room claiming that she's been carjacked by a black man, her 4-year-old son, still in the back seat of the car. Although I think it's wholly different in many respects, it is drawn from the headlines. So, how did this evolve?

RICHARD PRICE: Well, when the Susan Smith incident came about, I went down to South Carolina after she was arrested sort of as a writer without portfolio, just to see what the town was going through. And I fell in with the press and when I came back from South Carolina, I continued hanging out with the press and hanging out with various people in the Northeast, the law enforcement people, housing projects people. And what I came back with is, she had blamed this fictional black carjacker and nothing happened. But I was wondering if she had done that in Crown Heights or Newark, a more high-density, anonymous, politically sensitive, racially tender area, what would have happened after it was revealed that it was a hoax?

BATTISTA: I want to talk to you more about this "hanging out" thing because one of the things you were known for in your writing is your authenticity, and I assume that you were familiar with the 'hood, so to speak, after writing "Clockers".

Did you return to revisit this arena?

PRICE: Yes, I've sort of created a fictional city in "Clockers", which is an amalgam of Jersey City, Newark, Brooklyn, Bronx, and I went back to that city to place this story and one of the other things that I was interested in, which I can't quote-unquote research, is 'who is this woman?' Who are these people such as Susan Smith, or Rodney King, who are basically powerless people, but because of circumstances all of a sudden, within a matter of hours, have power of life and death over a city?

BATTISTA: One of the things I find fascinating too -- because I'm curious as to how you do it -- is how a writer gets into the mind of an inner city project or the people who live in a inner city project, when you're always perpetually an observer.

PRICE: Well, it's about empathy. It's just about being there and hang time. I don't go in there asking any particular questions. I'm not a journalist. Basically, there's epiphanies everywhere. Just putting in the hours. (Journalist) Jimmy Breslin once said about Damon Runyon, he did what all good journalists do, he hung out. Like I said, I'm not a journalist, I get to go home and make stuff up, but it's important to me to -- if I am going to write about a place which is not second nature to me -- to at least know the parameters of truth so I start lying responsibly.

BATTISTA: The two main characters in the book have an interesting dynamic. Can you kind of describe how they were perceived?

PRICE: Well, the situation is, the woman in my book, Brenda Martin -- who's not a sociopath, who's not cold and calculating, who some disaster has struck -- makes up this story to cover herself. A black detective is assigned to this alleged carjacking. Because of what she says, the housing project that the black detective lives in is surrounded by police. They're trying to flush out the carjacker.

For days, the projects are going through the roof. He would very much like to throttle this woman at first glance, however if he does that, if he gets confrontational with her, she says "lawyer" and he can't speak to her. So he's forced to become sort of a big brother, a father, confessor.

And he finds out over a period of time, the more time he spends with this woman, the more human she becomes and in a way, the more human he becomes, because he feels for her. There's a white reporter that gets hooked up with this woman too, and this reporter's a human camera. She barely writes, she just dumps stories into a phone to her editor. She gets inside with this woman and for the first time in her life, she too starts feeling a connection to this woman, who's basically like a Helen of Troy.

And no matter what she did, which nobody really knows until the end, whoever gets near her starts feeling pity and sympathy and a little bit of terror for what's to become of this woman. And it is basically a humanizing process.

BATTISTA: And as we understand it, this is already been optioned. It was optioned before you wrote it as a screenplay?

PRICE: Yes. I sold my soul and everything else I had for about three years writing time.

BATTISTA: Well, I think it will make a good movie. I'm really enjoying the book so far.

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