The Hollywood Reporter Interviews Stephenie Meyer
Posted on 28. Nov, 2012 by amydod in Movie Related, News, Stephenie Meyer, The Host
The Hollywood Reporter: What do you think it is about your writing that resonates with Hollywood and attracts the attention of filmmakers?
Stephenie Meyer: You know, I have no idea why it resonates with anyone except for myself. I know it makes me happy. I feel like a lot of the appeal for Hollywood now is the crazy fan base who have made this so successful. Obviously Hollywood is always trying to tap into whatever they think is gonna be lucrative, but with the first one, someone just responded to the story they saw potential there, which was cool. We got lucky where with Catherine Hardwicke, she really wanted to make it like the book. There was an original script before we were with Summit that was so completely bizarrely different.
THR: What was different about it?
SM: FBI, boat chases, night vision goggles, Bella with a gun. Yeah, it was crazy. At the time — once you give away your rights you can’t object to the changes. It was just kind of like, ‘ahh!’ And then they didn’t make it and they let the rights come back, and it was like, ‘OK, I’m taking this home and no one’s ever touching it again.’ Then Erik Feig (former president of worldwide production and acquisitions at Summit, now president of production at Lionsgate) called and said, ‘Please we’ll do anything. We really want to make your story.’ It’s like, ‘Yeah, I’ve heard that before.’ And he’s like, ‘No, no,’ and he let me come up with a rider where I wrote all these things that couldn’t change. They were like, ‘Yes, we’ll do it’ and I was like, ‘Oh, OK, well then I guess you really do want to make it as it is. That’s cool.’
THR: What were the things you said they couldn’t change?
SM: Well I mean, I was in the middle of writing the series at that point in time so one of the big things is in that original script, Charlie got killed at the end. So, they couldn’t kill anyone that dies in the books unless you create a character to kill — which if you look back through the movies, you’ll see where they’ve created new people so that they can off somebody. Then there were things like, Bella cannot be a vampire until she does in the novels — cause that also happened [in the first script] — and just all these things that I felt like if they really wanted to go and do something completely different, they would look at it and say, ‘OK, nevermind.’ If they looked at this long list of things and said, ‘OK, we can do this,’ then I would figure, ‘OK, they’re not messing with me.’
The above is just a small portion of the interview. Be sure to visit THR to read the entire story.
Click on the image below to see more pictures of Stephenie with Jake Abel and Diane Kruger of The Host.
