Last October, in the oldest gothic abbey of Italy, Fossanova, John Huston completed filming A Walk with Love and Death, a novel of mine published in 1961…. I was present from the beginning and worked with the director, which is not standard practice; and Huston is not a standard director….

[It] was my good fortune as a writer that Huston is a man who believes in books. Real books are seldom seen circulating in the movie world; its dealings are with story outlines, as if what mattered in literature was really and only what the personages ended up doing to each other, and the rest just decoration—a parallel to saying, never mind whether this painting is a Vermeer or a Picasso or a Smith; just tell me its subject.

Huston, then, wanted to film (as he has always done) a novel: not the movements of the people in...