life. These are universal themes: You leave home, and your parents become a sort of blank to you. Then you begin to realize that they’re more than you thought they were. At the same time, you move from familial love to romantic love. Later, you integrate romantic and familial love. And then you lose your parents . . . so much of this arc appears in Divergent, and we’re only with Tris for a few months of her life.”
Wick felt an immediate connection to the story and saw many opportunities to make a film version of Divergent that was narratively and visually stunning. Divergent could deliver action and suspense, but at its core would be a character very different from the kind of character you’d usually find in an action film. Like Veronica Roth, Wick was captivated by Tris’s strength and determination. “With a female protagonist, we’d breathe new life into a genre,” he says. “Male clichés have become tiresome in action films. But credible, strong female protagonists . . . that was a huge untapped opportunity.”
In addition, he loved that the novel gave readers unique access to Tris’s inner life in the fear simulations, and he was eager to take on the challenge of dramatizing them on film. In these sequences, filmmakers would be able to access Tris’s thoughts and feelings in a way that movies normally don’t allow.
FINDING A SCREENWRITER
Producers Wick and Fisher, in cooperation with the team at Summit, began to explore how they would translate Roth’s story into a different medium. The first step would be to develop a screenplay; from that, everything else would follow. Summit and the producers asked screenwriter Evan Daugherty, who had recently written Snow White and the Huntsman, to adapt Roth’s novel.
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
