"Annie Proulx, the 70-year-old author of the story 'Brokeback Mountain,' confessed to being blown away by Ang Lee's film. But the film made Ennis and Jack, the two ranch hands who fall in love, return to the forefront of her consciousness, a fact that doesn’t necessarily make her happy.
"'Put yourself in my place,' she says, 'an elderly, white, straight female, trying to write about two 19-year-old gay kids in 1963. What kind of imaginative leap do you think was necessary? Profound, extreme, large. To get into those guys' heads and actions took a lot of 16-hour days, and never thinking about anything else and living a zombie life. That's what I had to do. I really needed an
xorcist to get rid of those characters. And they roared back when I saw the film.'"