"When you set out to option the rights to your book, the most important decision is the one you make upstream -- who are you handing your book to and if you are handing it to somebody that has a track record," he says. And he felt safe in the hands of his two talented producers -- William Horberg (Cold Mountain, The Talented Mr. Ripley) and Rebecca Yeldham (The Motorcycle Diaries).

Originally Sam Mendes (American Beauty) was set to direct the film, but then the project came to scriptwriter David Benioff (Troy) and Forster. Hosseini recalls when he sat and read Benioff's novel The 25th Hour, which was later made into a film by Spike Lee. He was impressed by Benioff's story telling technique.

"David would email me at two or three in morning, asking questions about the characters or about Afghanistan or the dialogues," he adds. "I would help if I could or point him in the right direction. So we had a good collaborative relationship."

Along the way Hosseini also got used to the idea that Benioff's script would have to miss out certain threads of the author's story, including a key character's suicide bid at the end of the book.

"As a novelist these are your characters, your dialogs, your story, you feel very proprietary with it and in an ideal world everything you wrote should be on the screen," he says. "But film is a very different medium. It has its own rhythm and its own pacing and I accept it."

"There are things in the novel that are not in the film," he adds. "I made my peace with that early on and I understood that. There are writers who can never get to that point, but I am not one of them. I do not come to film from a place of suspicion. I have always loved films and I understand the two mediums to be different."

In the picture: (From Left to right) Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada as 'young Hassan' and Zekiria Ebrahimi as 'young Amir'.

Also Read: A promising Golden Compass

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