Annie Proulx figured no magazine would touch her short story "Brokeback Mountain," the tale of two Wyoming cowboys whose romance is so intense it sometimes leaves them black and blue.

But The New Yorker published it in 1997, and it went on to win an O. Henry prize and a National Magazine Award.

Now, the movie version is a leading Oscar contender, with starring performances from Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal. A book about its origins is pending, written with screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana.

The 70-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner answered questions in a telephone conversation from her home in Wyoming.

Q. You've said this story took twice as long to write as a novel. Why?

A. Because I had to imagine my way into the minds of two uneducated, rough-spoken, uninformed young men, and that takes some doing if you happen to be an elderly female person. I spent a great deal of time thinking about each character and the balance of the story, working it out, trying to do it in a fair kind of way.

Q. How did you feel about seeing it on the big screen?

A. When I saw it in September, I was astonished. ... From thinking so much about the characters and putting so much time into them, they became embedded in my consciousness. They became as real to me as real, walk-around, breathe-oxygen people. It took a long time to get these characters out of my head so I could get on with work. Then when I saw the film, they came rushing back. It was extraordinary.

Q. What did you think of the performances by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal?

A. I thought they were magnificent, both of them. Jake Gyllenhaal's Jack Twist ... wasn't the Jack Twist that I had in mind when I wrote this story. The Jack that I saw was jumpier, homely. But Gyllenhaal's sensitivity and subtleness in this role is just huge. The scenes he's in have a kind of quicksilver feel to them.

Heath Ledger is just almost really beyond description as far as I'm concerned. He got inside the story more deeply than I did. All that thinking about the character of Ennis that was so hard for me to get, Ledger just was there. He did indeed move inside the skin of the character, not just in the shirt, but inside the person.

Q. Would you characterize the story as groundbreaking?

A. I hope that it is going to start conversations and discussions, that it's going to awaken in people an empathy for diversity, for each other and the larger world. ...

People tend to walk out of the theater with a sense of compassion, which I think is very fine. It is a love story. It has been called both universal and specific, and I think that's true. It's an old, old story. We've heard this story a million times; we just haven't heard it quite with this cast. ...

I think this country is hungry for this story.

Q. Why?

A. Because it's a love story, and there's hardly much love around these days. I think people are sick of divisiveness, hate-mongering, disasters, war, loss and need, and want a reminder that sometimes love comes along that is strong and permanent, and that it can happen to anyone.