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 that 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.”
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