Last week, in my review of Chris Weitz’s first novel, The Young World, I mentioned that I would be moderating a Q&A with the author in Houston over the weekend.
The weekend has come and gone, and so has the event—at which I had a fantastic time. Chris is intelligent and funny and made our Q&A much more of an actual conversation than something formulaic and stiff. We laughed, we snarked—we even shared a moment of nerdiness over our mutual love of Star Wars. (The original trilogy, natch.)
If you’d like to listen to the entire interview, you can do so via the widget. I’ve also highlighted a few of my favorite answers below the widget, in case you don’t have a half-hour (nearabouts) to spare at the moment.
Q&A Highlights
The Young World is your first novel. You have had a career in film. What made you interested in writing a book?
Well, arrogance, I think—thinking that I could actually do it. Which, I often regretted in the course of writing the novel, because that’s a lot more words than screenplays, it turns out. They’re much harder to do. I’ve adapted three books into movies. And I studied English in college. I really would have thought I was going to be writing books rather than making movies when I was growing up. So it felt kind of natural to me to do that.
And I was being sent loads and loads of YA novels after doing New Moon and Golden Compass, and I thought, “Oh, I could do this.”
Did you ever regret that decision?
Every day. All day. As I was trying to write this book.
How long did it take you? Did you sit down and say “I’m writing this book now”? Did you do other projects while you were writing it?
It was about a year, and I was always—in fact, I was also writing Cinderella for Disney at the same time. … And so I would spend about a week on Cinderella, princess, dress, nice shoes. And then a week on rats eating bodies, laying on the ground.
Was there ever any accidental crossover?
Fortunately not.
You mentioned that you worked on The Golden Compass and Twilight. What appeals to you about the Young Adult genre? Or did it appeal to you before those films?
The reason I worked on Golden Compass is because I loved those books. I always say the movie didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to. I don’t think it was doing justice to the book because of any of any number of reasons including the fact that it was recut by the studio. Twilight, actually, I didn’t even know it was going to be such a big phenomenon when I was offered the movie.
The cool thing about the YA audience is that they’re incredibly voracious readers. They are ready to love something, they want to, whereas a lot of other groups of fans are much more likely to be, you’re sort of guilty until proven innocent. With YA fans, you’re innocent until proven guilty.
I also think, especially with YA books, but in general, the movies that come from them, there’s less of an obsession with literary style and with stylistics and more of a willingness to address big questions and big themes and deal unashamedly with really romantic elements and with certain things that in, what are considered more serious genres, would be sort of downplayed.
We know YA can be very white. It can be very white, middle-class. There weren’t just white kids in The Young World. There were black kids, there were Asian kids. Can you talk about why you chose to address issues like that?
Well, I think that there have been enough movies and books about white people. I mean, I am one, it’s great, but let’s move on. I think that the audience is ready for that, our society is ready for that. It’s fine to put multi-ethnic cast of characters in a book or movie and not make it all about that. That is to say, it should just be ordinary.
That being said, once you do that, it can’t just be United Colors of Benetton, where everyone’s always happy and smiley and kind of hanging around. There are, especially if you make a book or movie about an apocalypse that only happened two years ago, people are still going to have beefs and resentments based off centuries of history. So class and gender and race did come into the book.
There are a lot of film references in the book. You probably did that on purpose, but can you talk a little bit about why you brought that aspect of your other career into the book?
I think that people, and many young people especially, see their lives in the light of popular culture. Films and other bits of popular culture. But certainly, I think about movies all the time. Whether or not I’m going to them. Star Wars is an important movie to the kids in the book, just as it was to me. And I think there’s something almost oppressive about that, in a way, which is that we’ve got so much culture coming at us—culture, kind of a small c—that is to say music and books and TV and the Internet, that sometimes you feel like there’s actually nothing original. Everything is a mashup or everything is a version of something that happened before. One of the great things about movies is that it gives you sort of a pattern in which to view things. But also, they’re very difficult to escape as well.
You said that you have an English background. What led you to film?
It was the only thing that my brother and I could think to do at the time. I was working as a journalist, but not very successfully. These were in the days, you know, way before the Internet happened, when we wrote things for printed publications. My brother was working as a playwright—also not the most lucrative career in history. So we decided to write a screenplay together. And we were just really doing it for fun, so we just kind of fell into it. My specialization in college was 17th Century poetry. And there weren’t many jobs going.
I just consider myself incredibly lucky that I started at a time when there was a lot of money around for random ideas. My brother and I started writing our first script for a contract when I was 21, and it wasn’t for another 7 years that Antz was made, which was the first thing that ever actually became a movie for me.
We’re so in sync.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Murder by the Book and the Houston Alamo Drafthouse for putting this event on—and for inviting me to take part—and to Chris Weitz for being a great interview and an even better sport.
And major pants to my husband, who served as both my chauffeur and photographer.