Ultimately Carroll, who died in 2009 of a heart attack at 60, thought the cast was excellent, but he lamented the “drugs are bad” moralizing in the film—a blatant message that is not present in his journals.
“The original ending [of Jim gazing out the window, high again at 16 after being temporarily clean in jail] was shot in New York but then they flew Leo and people out to LA for that whole poetry reading and he read a different piece. It just became too much of the drug cautionary tale thing and they assured it wouldn’t be like that, just neutral like the book. But I didn’t have any power at that point,” he told Graham Reid.
More explicitly, he told Margo Tiffen, “I thought the performances were great, but the director just blew it. I even liked the screenplay on paper. Even Harmony [Korine, his good friend] liked the screenplay on paper and he hates everything! He wanted to break the director’s knees out at Sundance when he finally saw it.” (According to the LA Times, Carroll decided at the last minute not to go to the Sundance Film Festival for the premiere, thought it wasn’t because he thought the movie wasn’t good.)
He continued with Reid, “But as far as the heroin thing, when I was writing I was so young I couldn’t make any moral conclusions. I was just writing down what happened and I think that’s the appeal of the book…but it’s not unusual a film adaptation takes on some moral aspect.”
Wahlberg, who had spent some time selling weed before his music career took off, said he was drawn to the movie’s anti-drug message. In the production notes, DiCaprio said, “This film shows the destruction and consequences of taking that first hit.”
Screenwriter Bryan Goluboff, whom producer Liz Heller had commissioned to adapt Carroll’s book for the screen, told the LA Times, “We took some liberties…not everything that’s great in the book happens in the movie—we had to make it a film.”
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