Stephenie Meyer is currently at the Sundance film festival for her new movie, ‘Austeland’. Meyer is producing ‘Austenland’, which is based on a YA novel, and which will be the first movie that she hasn’t written that she is a producer on.
While at Sundance, Meyer spoke to Crave Online and talked about her other upcoming film, ‘The Host’. She spoke about the differences in adapting ‘The Host’ versus ‘Twilight’, saying, “The Host was a huge challenge because Twilight, you can stop and look at the plot and just say A causes B causes C. It’s fairly straightforward. There are some supernatural things you have to figure out how to film but that’s some special effects person’s job. It’s not the screenwriter’s job. With The Host, it’s a 200,000 word novel. To fit it into two hours is a real challenge and there’s so much we had to cut. So we really had to boil it down to the real essence of the story and also we had the issue of one person who was two characters, and that was something that threw a lot of studios when they were trying to figure out how we were going to sell it, how it was going to come across right. But the director and I and the producer, from the very beginning we thought that was really simple. You just have the best actress in the world, and we’d be fine. Just have an actress that can do it, that can just sell the two characters and we don’t have to worry about it. And so we got the best actress in the world and it worked out exactly right…”
The poster for 'Twilight'
She also speaks about the changes from the book to the movie for ‘The Host’, saying, “ou know, there were little visual things. I don’t know that they had to sell me exactly. When I was writing the novel, to me the world looked very much the same as our world looks. Not that much has changed, but Andrew [Niccol] has subtle shifts and he glossed up the human world and made it a little shinier, and the way the people dress and the cars they drive. He just had this vision for the look and particularly for the Seekers. They have a very distinct look that I hadn’t envisioned. It works beautifully. It just makes the world just that much off kilter. We can tell it’s not our world even though it looks like it. He’s a genius. It was fun to have someone like that coming up with ideas. It’s easy to go, “Yes, yes, absolutely.”
‘Austenland’ is nearing distribution, whereas ‘The Host’ comes out on March 29th, 2013.
Stephenie Meyer and Andrew Niccol speak about 'The Host'
