Stephenie Meyer is defensive of ‘The Host’ because of the perceived backlash the film is getting due to the negative attention surrounding ‘The Host’. Because of all the vitriol and hatred Twilight gets, some of that attention has carried over towards the Host because it’s being promoted as ‘from the author of the Twilight Saga’. This immediately causes a lot of moviegoers who were not Twilight fans to immediately be turned off.
Stephenie Meyer with Taylor Lautner and Robert Pattinson at the premiere of 'Eclipse'
However, Meyer is now opening up at the negative perceptions, and asking people to give ‘The Host’ a chance. She says, “[The Host] is my favorite book. Twilight has a passionate following & also a passionate hatred attached to it. You know it was very double sided. For all the good there was equal negative. And I feel like the negative is coming into play a lot here & it makes me really angry- like when someone picks on your kid at school. Because this kid hasn’t done anything wrong. This kid is TOTALLY innocent.” It’s an interesting comparison for sure, and also accurate; ‘The Host’ is a very different book to ‘Twilight’, and most of the backlash so far seems to come from the fact that Meyer wrote Twilight, and thus anything else she has written would be on the same level.
However, Meyer tells us that that’s not the case, adding, “These performances these actors gave us– the caliber that we have going on here. William freakin’ Hurt comes in & owns this movie, and then you got Andrew Niccol and his amazing, beautiful vision. And it is so not fair to judge this movie. And then on the other side of it– would it have gotten made if Twilight hadn’t been a big deal? Probably not so I just have to take the good with the bad. But I totally get defensive of this one & very mother hen on it!”
Diane Kruger as 'The Seeker' in 'The Host'
Again, very valid points – Saoirse Ronan and William Hurt alone are enough to raise the caliber of the movie by a significant amount, but it’s also Andrew Niccol [acclaimed sci-fi director] who’s adapting the source material and making the film. Of course, all these people have occasional misses [Andrew Niccol with ‘In Time’ and Saoirse Ronan with ‘City of Ember’], but they are usually good more than they are bad. Right now, the only thing that’s causing the backlash is Meyer’s name attached to the project, and like she says, it’s a bit of an undeserved judgment because most people are comparing ‘The Host’ to ‘Twilight’ without knowing anything about it.
Stephenie Meyer and Andrew Niccol speak about 'The Host'
