Saturday Night Fever

EW One person who reads your novels is Laura Bush.

MCEWAN I think she said in an interview that [Atonement] was by her bedside. And so I was invited to be part of a ladies' lunch at 10 Downing Street with [playwright] Tom Stoppard and a couple of children's book writers. While the grown-ups — President Bush, Colin Powell, Condi Rice, and [Tony] Blair — were in [another]. As we were leaving, the Masters of the Universe came out of their conference. There was 10 minutes of careful, fairly bland conversation, and it was very interesting to watch President Bush up close. He's not a complete idiot. When someone ceases to be simply a set of policies with which you may disagree, he becomes this oddly, surprisingly humorous and charming character. Right afterwards I joined a friend at a huge peace demonstration where people were holding ''Bush: Murderer'' signs and I thought, Christ, if you knew where I'd just been!

EW So what do you read?

MCEWAN Novels make massive demands on time, and they have to be really good. So like Perowne, I sometimes find myself in the position of thinking of the novels I might read, then realizing I don't want to read anything imagined. I want someone to explain another aspect of the world — tectonic plates or the life cycle of a bug. But of course I do read fiction. Alice Munro — is a sort of household god. Philip Roth — I've been amazed at what he's done in the last 12 years. I've liked Zadie Smith.

EW You've written several screenplays [including The Good Son]. Do you enjoy that process?

MCEWAN Film, I think, is a lumbering and grotesquely unsophisticated medium. The thing it can't do is consciousness — the insiderly, unfolding sense of life lived in the subjective. So what you get is what people say and do, and that's about all.

EW Four of your novels have been turned into movies, and Atonement is in the works [with Iris' Richard Eyre directing]. What did you think of the most recent, Enduring Love?

MCEWAN [Director] Roger Michell did well. It's not what I would have done, but he was utterly consistent with what he wanted from the beginning. If you've decided not to do the screenplay [of your novel], the process requires a degree of generosity and detachment. What you make available is a kind of quarry, and they can come and take what they want. Criticizing a movie for not being faithful to the book is, I think, to get the whole thing wrong.

EW What's next?

MCEWAN I've no idea. Sometimes when I finish a novel I feel I can't write another because everything I ever knew was in it. I go through months after — I'm going through it now — feeling incredibly stupid. I read book reviews and think, God, everyone knows so much and I don't know anything!

EW How do you look back on your work?

MCEWAN I don't look back much — I'm not very interested. The only book that interests me is the one I've just written. It doesn't bother me if someone tells me they've read The Cement Garden and think it's a pile of s---. Why should I care? But it would bother me if someone told me Saturday was a pile of s--- [laughs]. Should that happen, an S500 Mercedes might help soften the blow.