“Initially, I didn’t want to do the screenplay [for Midnight's Children],” Salman Rushdie said recently, about his decision to adapt his Booker-winning novel into a film. “But if I had said no,” he told The Globe and Mail, “we wouldn’t have been able to raise the money.”

Set to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, the highly anticipated film, directed by Academy Award-nominated Deepa Mehta, tells the story of two children born at midnight and switched at birth on the day of India's independence. Rushdie admits that paring down his canonical novel into a screenplay required him to show reckless abandon to his original work. “I knew you had to adapt it by not being overly respectful of the text,” he said, “and the person who can be most disrespectful of the book is me.”

Rushdie seems to be enjoying his temporary departure from novel-writing. He has also signed on to write the pilot for Showtime's proposed new show Next People. And with the launch of his new memoir, Joseph Anton, September will be a busy month for him. But fiction fans, don’t fret! As he tells the Globe, he “has a novel in his head” and is looking forward to getting to it sometime in the near future.