Divergent Official Illustrated Movie Companion, Page 2

  Author Veronica Roth with screenwriter Evan Daugherty.

  Daugherty remembers what initially drew him to the project: “Tris starts off in this incredibly sheltered, selfless, peaceful world, and then basically she decides to join the equivalent of the navy SEALs. That’s a big character arc—it’s fun to track that,” he told bloggers at Bookish. Daugherty responded viscerally to the book’s action sequences, but in the screenplay he took great care to balance them with the growing romance between Tris and Four. “It’s important that the chemistry between them doesn’t just feel like it’s thrown in,” he explained, “but that it helps Tris grow as a character.” Skillfully, he showed Tris’s character development within the framework of fast-paced action and ensured that each fear simulation scene drove the story forward.

  When the screenplay was complete, and all involved were pleased with it, the search for a director began.

  A page from the Divergent movie script, nicknamed Catbird.

  . . . WHO WILL DIRECT?

  Summit and the producers had a long list of qualities they’d be looking for in a director. He or she would need to have great visual style and be able to elicit strong performances from young actors. They needed to feel up to the challenge of making an epic movie set in the future. They needed to be able to show the characters’ inner lives through the simulation sequences. And they needed to have great instincts as a writer and a storyteller. Who could possibly meet all of these criteria? One of the first names that came to mind was that of director Neil Burger.

  Lionsgate’s Gillian Bohrer remembers, “The fear sim sequences would be like playing in a sandbox—any director would love the opportunities they offered. But we knew that Neil [Burger] would do more than make them visually striking. He would make audiences feel they were with Tris every step of the way.”

  The director of a wide range of movies, from Interview with the Assassin to The Illusionist and Limitless—as well as a writer himself—Neil Burger was already aware of Divergent, and not sure he was eager to make a science fiction film. His feelings changed completely once he read the screenplay. “I liked that the script didn’t have creatures, or sci-fi artificial things in it, or superheroes,” recalls Burger. “And I loved that it was set in the future, but not about futurism. Instead, it uses a futuristic world to explore human nature. The script asks universal questions about loyalty. Tris asks ‘Who am I loyal to? Myself? My family? Or my faction?’ These questions are not unique to young adults, which I like. And Divergent shows a very different kind of future than we’ve seen in other movies.”

  Neil Burger directs Shailene Woodley (Tris) and Amy Newbold (Molly).

  A VISION FOR DIVERGENT

  A group of enthusiastic readers with Veronica Roth (center) at Anderson’s Bookshop in Chicago.

  Burger, Summit, and Red Wagon all shared a vision for the film version of Divergent. Even though it was set in the future, they all wanted the movie to feel current and relevant, as if it was really about now.

  Once Burger signed on to direct—and began assembling a team that included a director of photography, a production designer, a location manager, a costume designer, and so forth—the whole group needed to articulate what that vision would really mean. Where would they make the movie? What would it look like? Who would the actors be? Preparing to shoot the film would take much longer than the shoot itself, as the team would plan every scene to the smallest detail.

  The story would be told through dialogue, of course, rather than the narration of the novel. Screenwriter Evan Daugherty had already condensed a nearly 500-page novel into the 130-page script that would serve as Burger’s road map. But before Burger could get to the work of directing actors in performing that script, he would need to find ways to expand and extend all the visual detail that Roth had described in her book.

  French editions of Divergent and Insurgent.

  Four of the thirty foreign editions of Divergent: (L to R) Brazil, Spain, Russia, and Italy.

  Early on, soon after the film rights were sold, Roth had met with producer Wick. At that point, she was less than a year out of college and on the verge of a kind of success that most people her age could only imagine. Roth remembers, “I wasn’t sure what to expect, but he was just so nice and so concerned about other areas of my life, like what it felt like to have this happen when I was only twenty-two. It felt like he was concerned about me as a human being, and that went a long way toward making me feel comfortable handing over my work to be interpreted by someone else.”

  When the time came to expand on what she had written, then, Roth “had a little conversation with myself about ownership. When I write the story and it’s just in my computer, I’m the one who owns it. I control everything about it. But then when the book gets released, it suddenly belongs to millions of other people who are reading it. So that transfer of ownership happens from the second other people start reading the book. And it’s the same with the movie. The story now belongs not just to me, not just to the readers, but also to the director and to every actor they cast.”

  On the Divergent set with author Veronica Roth and producers Lucy Fisher and Doug Wick.

  Author Veronica Roth is crushed by her editor’s notes on the massive Allegiant manuscript.

  THE DETAILS EMERGE

  By the time Burger consulted Roth about some of the details, Roth was well into writing Allegiant, the third book in the Divergent trilogy. She knew how Tris’s story would turn out, and she also knew more about what had happened, long ago, to create her dystopian society in the first place. Roth spoke at length with Burger about this backstory and shared information that no one but her editors knew yet. “I spoke with Neil about the surrounding world, and what had led to the city being created. He needed to know if he should depict any kind of destruction, and where it should be, and why it was there. I think Neil probably knows the most secrets of anyone,” Roth says. Still, Burger was curious about details she had never even considered.

  She continues, “Neil asked me a lot of ‘detail’ questions, ones that Tris was unlikely to answer in the narrative—how does commerce work in each faction? Do the factions ever work together? What does that look like? Would there be any Amity present on Visiting Day? What kind of physical destruction is present in the city? Like that. In a movie, more so than in a book, you can show the world of a story in brief but significant ways—a shot of people walking down the street, for example, can contain a wealth of information. Neil wanted to make sure that the world surrounding the narrative made sense, that there weren’t any inconsistencies in the world-building, and that the world was rich. I’m not a big ‘describer,’ so seeing someone take my sparse settings and make them beautiful and detailed was . . . inspiring. Incredible.”

  With Roth’s help, Neil Burger came to a basic understanding of the kind of society he would be showing on film. It would be about 150 years in the future, but a hundred years after an event that caused all technological advances to stop. Burger and his production team would need to imagine fifty years from now, and then decide what might be left over a century after that. What kinds of structures could withstand that test of time? What could be created from the few remaining raw materials the people had? None of these details were spelled out in Roth’s novel, but the filmmakers would use them as background as they began to make decisions about design.

  The story is set in Chicago, a city of millions of people, but in Roth’s future city there are only about thirty thousand people. “They’re occupying this grand, slightly abandoned place,” says director Burger. “They keep up the areas that they use, but then there’s a vast area of the city which is kind of crumbling and falling apart. When we see the city, we just see people walking in the middle of the streets, because they don’t have cars. There are a few trucks around, but mostly their transportation is on foot or on train.” He and Roth even discussed what people in this city might use for power. If they had it, how did they get it? Eventually, he came to the idea th
at there could be wind turbines on the sides of some buildings and power cables swooping between them.

  Roth smiles when she remembers some of her discussions with the filmmakers. “When I wrote the book, I was mostly concerned with Tris’s internal life, and she doesn’t notice all the details. She’s not a big describer of settings so, you know, I wasn’t thinking about what the chairs looked like or the needles looked like. I would never have been able to imagine all of that. Neil Burger has been one of the most detail-oriented and thoughtful people I have met through this whole experience. Talking to him, I’m sometimes like ‘I wish you had been here while I was building this world, because I think it would have been a little more fully realized if you had been around.’ He’s just so concerned with every little piece of the society and with representing it properly, even in the background.”

  On location in Chicago, author Veronica Roth talks with director Neil Burger.

  A CITY BECOMES A STAGE

  At Chicago’s Navy Pier: the Ferris wheel, as imagined concept art in the film.

  As his vision of this future Chicago began to come together, Burger came to an important conclusion: The real Chicago would be the only place to make this movie. Veronica Roth, in fact, had come to a similar conclusion as she was writing. “In the rough draft, the story wasn’t set in a real place—the world of Divergent was just a nameless urban environment,” she recalls. “And when I revised it, I realized that I wanted a greater sense of place to make the story feel more real. When I was trying to figure out the real environment it could take place in, I looked at what I already had, and I realized I had already set it in Chicago without meaning to, probably because it’s the city that I know and love the best.”

  Just as Roth knew her story would resonate with readers if it were set in a recognizable place, Burger felt that the best way to make his film seem relevant and relatable was to plant it someplace real. Once he’d made up his mind, he didn’t even consider other possibilities.

  Making a movie in Chicago would create certain complications: Transportation could be difficult in a major city at rush hour, for instance, and renting urban space could strain his budget. But with a real city as his stage, Neil Burger knew he could create a certain look. He remembers, “Even though it’s set a hundred and fifty years in the future, we’re on the streets in the real sunlight against the real buildings, and that just gives the film a completely different kind of energy than we see in other films set in the future. I knew I wanted to use Chicago as Chicago and shoot scenes like street photography, almost. I wanted it to look fresh and unusual.”

  To create this effect, Burger sent location manager James McAllister on a mission to identify as many Chicago locations as he could. Before the rest of the film crew arrived, McAllister was visiting every notable spot in town.

  And at the same time, Burger was beginning to assemble a cast.

  Chicago’s famous skyline.

  Concept art for Chicago of the future, including the El train tracks.

  WHO WILL PLAY TRIS?

  Tris (Shailene Woodley).

  Divergent would feature an ensemble of young actors, training and growing together. At the same time, though, Burger’s group would need to find an outstanding group of adult actors to anchor the young cast. With the proper combination of new and familiar faces, the film would appeal to as wide an audience as possible.

  Doug Wick’s philosophy on casting was this: “The actors we cast are like magnets at important moments in the story. Four had to have a powerful pull or the story wouldn’t work. We have to have actors who can deliver meaningful performances at these critical moments.” Across the board, then, director Neil Burger’s team would be looking for actors of the highest caliber.

  The first priority, they decided, was to find their Tris. Shailene Woodley, of Simi Valley, California, was an up-and-coming actress with critical acclaim for her performance in the 2011 film The Descendants and starring role in the television series The Secret Life of the American Teenager. She was filming another novel-to-screen adaptation, The Spectacular Now, when Burger’s team approached her for the part. Woodley had the right look for Tris, as well as the wide range that an actress would need for the part. What they didn’t know was that Woodley was also a down-to-earth young woman who would be more than able to handle the action and stunts involved in the role.

  Shailene Woodley in The Descendants (2011) with George Clooney.

  Producer Lucy Fisher says, “I think it was probably the easiest bit of casting that we ever did. We thought we were going to have a long search, meet every cool young actress. Then we met Shailene and it was like . . . game over. Obviously we loved her in The Descendants. But she also likes to go and get dropped off in Maine for two weeks, then live on her own with a hatchet and a few other things. Her Dauntless side was just hanging out there.”

  Woodley could see the dramatic possibilities for the character at once. On one hand, she found Tris’s situation terrifying. Woodley says, “Once you leave the nest in the Divergent world, there is no going back. And that’s incredibly frightening. I can’t imagine never speaking to my mom again because I decided to go travel the world, or go off to college.”

  At the same time, though, she understood the appeal of Dauntless for Tris. Woodley continues, “To wonder what it would be like to do something, and never do it . . . I can’t imagine doing that, and Tris doesn’t want to be that person either. She can’t imagine staying in one place to please someone else, and that means she’s not really selfless enough to stay with her family. Also, joining Dauntless is an adventure. She has a new freedom she couldn’t picture in her previous life, and that’s very exciting to her.”

  Veronica Roth embraced Woodley as the movie Tris. She explains, “Tris is kind of a complicated character. She’s not always very nice—she’s like an impetuous teenager. She’s not always so mature or developed in her thinking. So I think Shailene’s kind of gotten all the shades of Tris, and it feels very real every time that she says something or does something. It’s like a revelation, a whole new way of seeing this person that I created.”

  The Spectacular Now (2013) with Divergent costar Miles Teller.

  LOOKING FOR FOUR

  Finding Woodley’s costar, the actor who would play Four, was not as simple. Neil Burger and the producers auditioned dozens of actors for the part, testing them with Woodley, but none of them seemed quite right for Four. Lucy Fisher remembers, “The search for Four was like one of those old-fashioned movie searches that you hear about in the 1940s, where you sort of go to every country, you look at everybody. We knew this part would be complicated, because Four had to be manly and rugged, yet he also had to be soulful, and he had to be a good match for Shailene Woodley, who is a tough girl.”

  Casting offices in five cities around the world were busy looking for the right actor, and Lionsgate’s Gillian Bohrer estimates that they considered almost four hundred actors for the part. “We needed to find someone that you’d believe had been through a lot before this story began,” she explains. “We needed to find someone who was a physical fit for Shailene Woodley, who is quite tall. And we needed to find someone who could convincingly dominate her, at least at the beginning, but it seemed like most of the guys were following her lead.”

  As they tested for Four, the team discovered many other actors they liked for different parts, and several of them came to form the core of the Dauntless faction. Miles Teller, for instance, had just finished filming The Spectacular Now with Woodley, a film in which their characters fell in love. In Divergent, though, he was cast as Dauntless initiate Peter, one of her greatest foes.

  Shailene Woodley as Aimee and Miles Teller as Sutter in The Spectacular Now.

  This was a very different kind of movie from the last one the pair had made together. “In this world there are no boundaries,” says Teller. “Men fight women and vice versa. So there were some things I had to sort of justify in my own head before we started.” With Neil Bu
rger’s help, he came to realize that Peter would feel threatened by Tris. “Anyone who might be ahead of Peter—jeopardizing his staying in Dauntless and fulfilling his dream—that’s a problem,” says Teller. That explained why Peter was able to fight so viciously, and why he was so eager to turn one of Tris’s friends, Al, against her.

  Actor Christian Madsen, son of actor Michael Madsen, was just getting his career off the ground. As he was in the process of moving out of his apartment—because he couldn’t pay the rent—he got a call from his agent. He wasn’t cast as Four, but he’d been offered the role of Al, the transfer from Candor. Before the news even sank in, Madsen was calling his landlord to ask for a second chance.

  Madsen related to Al’s quiet, watchful character, and even his physical size. “Al is an interesting case,” says Madsen. “He’s very shy—a searcher—and he takes this leap of faith to join this faction.” Once he’s in Dauntless, he can see the many ways it will be hard for him to fit in—until Tris reaches out. “Tris helps him to open up,” explains Madsen. “She says hey, you’re a big guy—use that. You’re very shy out here—don’t be that way. She kind of shows him who he can become.” Madsen imagined that Al was pressured by his parents to take on a new identity, while Tris encourages him to accept himself as he is.

  Miles Teller (Peter) and Shailene Woodley (Tris).