Jeremy Leven

Jeremy Leven was born in South Bend, Indiana and grew up in Chicago; Yuba City, California; Olympia, Washington; and Rye, New York. He was educated at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, Harvard University, the University of Connecticut and Yale University Medical School, where he was a fellow at the Department of Psychiatry's Child Studies Center.

[on adapting Nicholas Sparks' novel for The Notebook (2004)] The biggest challenge is to make it real, not to make it saccharine. There's a sleight of hand while you're pulling the audience's strings not to let them know, so they don't feel like you're pulling their strings. It's a very difficult thing to do and it's a very delicate line between it, to make sure that it's real. You still get them to cry at the end, but they're crying over something that's real. It's not hard to get an audience to cry, but to get them to cry because it resonates with them - that's hard.