Hollywood fiascos of this caliber come once or twice a decade.

After over 15 years of assorted delays, a big-screen adaptation of Martin Amis’s murder-mystery novel London Fields arrived in US theaters at the weekend. David Cronenberg was attached to the earliest phases of the project in 2001, replaced by a series of decreasingly prestigious film-makers that has led to Katy Perry music video veteran Matthew Cullen. Cullen prepared a cut of the film for the Toronto film festival in 2015, but was decidedly displeased to discover that the producers had re-edited the film for exhibition on the festival circuit. He sued over the rights to final cut privileges along with fraud and failure to provide payment, and the production team countersued over his contractually prohibited choice to pursue side jobs while working on London Fields.

As soon as that had been settled, the producers brought new litigation against star Amber Heard for reneging on her voiceover commitments, which she met with a competing lawsuit over a mishandled nudity clause. Everybody reached a settlement this past September, et voilà: London Fields was ready for the world.

The world, however, was not quite ready for London Fields. This weekend, the film received a cavalcade of pans from the press (it boasts a rare 0% on Rotten Tomatoes) and one of the worst box-office debuts in the history of commercial moviegoing. In search of answers as to what could have gone so wrong, the Guardian spoke to Amis (who collaborated on the film’s script) about the divides between literature and cinema, what makes a movie “unfilmable”, and why he finds his own fretful vision of atomic armageddon a tad pessimistic.

So you’ve seen the film then?

Yes, but first, a few principles. It’s wise for an author to withdraw from things like this, and while I’m not saying I’m not going to talk, you should put some distance between the books you write and films made from them. Everyone tries to do this, because it’s futile to hope for a transfer of your work on to the screen in one piece. Film is about exteriors and fiction is about interiors, usually. Having said all that, I found it surprisingly faithful in many ways. It certainly doesn’t go off on a tangent. It’s toilingly faithful, by my standard.

But yes, I saw it last for the third time, having seen the producer’s cut and the director’s cut. I have to say that I was quite moved by it. I thought the central relationship was moving, between Amber Heard and Billy Bob Thornton, both very strong actors. That’s the kernel of the book, and same with the film.

Did you notice any significant differences between the various edits that have been assembled for this film?

I can’t say that I did, though I saw the previous version two or three years ago, so it’s a bit faint in my mind. But everything in the new cut looked familiar, so I can hardly remember what all the argument was over. I think it was the ending? All I know is that the cast was very much against the producer’s cut.

Having completed your contribution to the production itself, did you have a detached perspective during all of the legal troubles that befell the release? Or did you find yourself getting invested anyway?

Apart from wishing that it wasn’t going on, that things had gone more smoothly for the film, I didn’t have much of an opinion on the course of events. I’m glad that they’ve sorted it out enough that they can show it to the public instead of just trotting it out at festivals.

As London Fields has entered public release this weekend, the notices have been largely negative and box-office receipts are looking dismal. Do you have any ideas as to what this could be ascribed?

Not really. The film is rather confusing as it opens, and it could’ve done with a lot more clarity in its first half or so. That’s all I can say. I mean, I never thought it would be a popular film.

London Fields has a reputation as one of those “unfilmable” novels. What does that word mean to you? What makes a book impossible to adapt?

Given enough imagination, I don’t think any novel is really unfilmable. I mentioned Cronenberg before, and he’s got a reputation for adapting supposedly unadaptable books like Crash and Naked Lunch, because he found a way in both cases. I don’t think there’s anything particularly unfilmable about London Fields.

I had been thinking that this particular novel is both a story in the noir tradition and deconstructive of that same genre, which could be difficult to represent in a visual medium. Do you see a challenge in distinguishing between the two without a guiding authorial voice?

I think you’re right, and I’m surprised by how much of that made it into the film. Same with Money, which was made into a two-hour TV thing, and they got rid of most of the postmodern aspects. Postmodernism has started to look a bit antique, in my view. The movement had great predictive power, as we’ve seen life becoming increasingly postmodern in many aspects, but it hasn’t always transferred as literature. Though Harold Pinter wrote the film adaptation of The French Lieutenant’s Woman and found a way of doing it where you could see the cast both as actors and in their roles, which seemed to be a clever equivalent to postmodernism. Whether that made the film more watchable – well, I don’t think it is.

If postmodernism is in decline, by what has it been supplanted?

It’s been put aside, as an interesting digression. Social realism has come barging back in, certainly with the novel. Most of the innovations of the 20th century, stream-of-consciousness in particular, have petered out in fiction. Fiction’s a social form, a coherent form, a rational form. These experiments of the past haven’t had much stamina.

Nuclear anxiety figures prominently into London Fields, something that’s only grown more urgent in the years since the novel’s publication, even since the film’s completion in 2015. With the States now hurtling toward the apocalypse, have you reappraised the story at all?

Yes, I have, though I’m surprised to hear you say it’s grown more urgent. I wrote the novel at the end of the 80s, during the Reagan buildup that won the cold war. We went from the era of mutually assured destruction to the era of nuclear proliferation, and I think we’ve now entered another era. Despite Trump messing around with the treaties and having a soft spot for nuclear weaponry, the gravest threat is now the rogue nuclear weapon – this idea that a terrorist operating independent of a state apparatus could take control of a warhead. That’s not quite as urgent as mutually assured destruction, which promised the end of everything. That was to be the end of civilization, and I don’t think anyone’s worried about that at the moment.

Really? I feel as if I’ve always got enough time to worry about the end of civilization.

Civilization is in better shape than people think. More than optimism, that’s just the rational response. Availability bias means that what you see in the media tends to point one way, but it’s actually an illusion. Things have, in a grand sense, gotten better. People look at you incredulously when you say it, but it’s all data-driven. Political people tend to live on restless extremes, and don’t see the finer lines that undergird progress.

I had a talk about this with Ian McEwan many years ago, and we agreed that it’s easy to be dark. They say happiness writes light and darkness writes dark; the words just show up on the page. In fact, it’s a great challenge to write a novel with characters that are good people. Dickens never wrote a good character, he wrote about eccentrics and villains and contemptibles.

One of the most popular criticisms I’ve seen levelled against the adaptation of London Fields concerns the Nicola Six character, that she’s nothing more than the male fetish object Billy Bob Thornton’s character described her as.

It’s a criticism I’m very familiar with. All it really means, I think, is that she’s pretty. Since the question is met head-on in the film and in the book, I tend to sort of shrug it off. The question of sexual attractiveness is invidious, you know? It’s likely to cause resentment, and if you write about sexually charismatic figures, you’re going to run into trouble. But we all know they exist, and that they account for much human motive and action.

I suppose that this is part of the hazard of adaptation, that you’ve got no control over how the camera treats her, whether the cinematography makes an object of her. Do you feel that your work gets away from you when someone else adapts it? If so, does that cause any consternation?

I think that, by definition, it does. But my work isn’t adapted often enough for serious consternation. When it’s suggested that a book of mine be made into a film, I always say, ‘Take it away, I don’t want to have any control over it. It’s yours now, do what you will with it.’ Life really is too short to worry about the secondary may-offends, you just focus on your end of it.

There’s been a pattern of troubles in past treatments of your work – adaptations of Dead Babies and The Rachel Papers were critically lambasted, and the film version of Money couldn’t even come together. Is there something intrinsically tricky to translate in your writing?

Hm, I suppose there must be, on empirical evidence alone. But I don’t really see it myself. There’s a way of doing anything, nothing’s intractable. Maybe there just hasn’t been a successful one yet. I thought The Rachel Papers was actually pretty palatable. But, uh, we’ll see.

• London Fields is out now in the US with a UK date yet to be announced