Hello, I am Josh Boone, the director of The Fault in Our Stars.
And I'm sitting here with Mr. John Green,
who wrote the novel that the film is based on.
GREEN: Hello.
-BOONE: Uh, the date is? -May 13th, 2014.
BOONE: And John and Ansel and Shai and Nat and myself
have been in the middle of a press tour.
So, we've been talking about this movie non-stop,
and John especially, for the past two weeks?
GREEN: Yeah, sorry, I have a little bit of a husky voice right now.
-I apologize for it. -Yeah. And there's still more to do.
So, the movie hasn't come out yet, we're still a couple of weeks out.
I woke up this morning and was on my way to the office,
and they'd put up a gigantic Fault billboard at the end of my street...
-GREEN: Oh, cool. -...as a nice thing.
So, thank you, Fox, for that.
GREEN: I love Hazel's hazel eyes in that scene.
I love that you start so close on them.
BOONE: And Ben and I talked about
we wanted to see the stars sparkle in her eyes.
GREEN: Yeah, so, we start here, with this romanticized version
of what might have been the Hollywood version of their love story.
BOONE: And when I went to Fox we talked a lot about the opening montage,
and Jerry Maguire was a reference,
just because it moves quickly and it's funny and sad
and goes through all these emotional ups and downs
and it just moves at a clip.
So, that was the model for the first little bit of this.
GREEN: I love that you kept the font from the book. I appreciate that.
No, it couldn't have been anything else.
We were looking, they brought some to us, they looked like your font.
So, yeah, once they had the trailer out,
we said, "We just want what's at the tail of the trailer, that's what we want."
HAZEL". Depression's not a side effect of cancer.
GREEN: I love that you can see Hazel's social isolation in this beginning bit.
That covered so much of what's in the book.
BOONE: Yeah.
GREEN: You just see it in her eyes when she's looking at those kids in the mall.
-BOONE: You feel her isolation. -Yeah.
Yeah, she's always alone, only her mom,
looking at other people falling in love, I love that.
BOONE: And that's just thinking about what it was like to be a teenager.
A lot of the time, you feel like that whether you have cancer or not.
GREEN: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
I also loved the design ofAn Imperial Affliction.
BOONE: Yeah, a lot of that can be owed to Molly Hughes, our production designer,
who's one of my favorite people on the planet.
-GREEN: Mine, too. -And we gave her...
I think Isaac and I, maybe you as well,
we gave her different book covers that we liked.
And she somehow got this to some art designers
-from the Ham] Potter films. -Yeah.
Yeah, they did a lot of work for the Ham] Potter series,
and they were fans of The Fault in Our Stars.
And they made an amazing, amazing An Imperial Affliction cover.
BOONE: And then, here is the man himself.
GREEN: The greatest casting coup of all. -Yeah.
My editor is always like...
Robb Sullivan, my editor, the great Robb Sullivan, is always like,
"Birbig saves the first act from just being sad."
It's like, he comes in, and just everybody starts laughing.
GREEN: He's just such a funny person.
He was so funny on set
that I kept ruining takes with my laughter from the next room.
BOONE: I did that often.
GREEN: And all these kids are... There's PJ, my friend PJ.
All these kids are real cancer survivors or people living with cancer.
BOONE: Yeah, some of those are kids that I met with,
or Shai and Ansel met with,
and then, there were others who weren't there
that they met with as well for the research.
This is...
-GREEN: I love that it's Mario Kart. -Yeah, Mario Kart is great.
He moved back in with his parents
and went and pulled his Nintendo out of the attic
and was like, "I'm gonna get back into this."
GREEN: And making the Jesus rug.
The Jesus rug was made by a bunch of artisans in Pittsburgh,
and I think they did an amazing job.
In fact, If I could have kept one prop, that's the one I would have chosen.
BOONE: They would not tell me how much it cost, but I was told it was expensive.
-GREEN: It was worth it. -Yeah.
-There's Mr. Nat Wolff. -There's your first picture.
BOONE: That's my buddy.
GREEN: The first moment of Nat and Hazel.
This is where you see this distance between herself, as she expresses herself,
and then herself, as she imagines herself.
BOONE: Now, she has such a specific voice. When you wrote the novel,
was the cadence of her speech and the way she delivered lines...
Was Shai's similar to what you heard in your head?
GREEN: It was so similar. It was eerily similar the way that she...
Even where her spaces were, where her breaths were
was very much like I imagined her speaking.
Almost all the time.
There, by the way, is Josh Potter,
who now has more hair 'cause he's finished going through chemo.
-I just saw him in Cleveland. Yeah. -That's so cool.
GREEN: And they did a nice job.
They made it the real Episcopal church in Indianapolis that I based it on.
BOONE: That's awesome.
And we could talk for a beat about Laura Dem.
So, she was one of the very first people that I met for this movie,
and right after I met her, I said we had to cast her
to Wyck and Isaac, our producers.
I loved her so much in David Lynch's movies,
Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, and Jurassic Park and Rambling Rose.
She was just a fixture when I was younger,
so it was just like having a legend like her,
and a legend like Dafoe, who I felt the same way about.
I just knew that they would bring real credibility to everything.
GREEN: She also did a great job, I think, of being a really loving mother,
which is a different role for her. Usually, she plays...
As does Sam.
Sam doesn't usually play the loving, doting father.
-BOONE: No. -They both did an amazing job.
BOONE: Yeah, they just look right together. And Laura cared very much.
The most important thing to her was that she supported her daughter's dream.
She just wanted it to be like,
the medical stuff was there and it was present,
but at the end of the day,
she just wanted to make sure that her daughter was happy.
-That was a bit of an improvised moment. BOONE: Oh, yes.
She did a couple of things there at the end that were cute.
I think she did one we liked where she put a gun underneath her head
-and blew her brains out? -Yeah.
HAZEL: To make my parents happy.
I really don't understand why I can't just drive myself.
It's not like you're gonna do anything.
GREEN: There's Alex Murph in the background.
BOONE: There's Alex, who's great.
You will see him in the elevator, which actually is a continuity error.
But I won't reveal that Alex came at different times when we shot.
So, sometimes things get jumbled.
GREEN: Right, 'cause he had surgery in the middle of the shoot.
BOONE: Yeah.
GREEN: But, yeah, it's a continuity error that no one would notice,
'cause he's out of focus, so I think we're good.
-Although, I ruined it. Sorry, Josh. -No, I think I ruined it.
GREEN: Here it is.
-BOONE: Yeah, there's Alex. -There he is.
BOONE: And here is the bump, as I like to call it.
The meet cute between our lovely, talented actors.
I love this. This is one of my favorite beats here.
-That's just Ansel being Ansel. -Yup, yup.
BOONE: And then, I love this.
I really love this moment in front of the mirror.
I think Shai did this beautifully.
I love moments in movies when people are alone.
GREEN: Yeah, there's so much quiet in this movie.
You let it be quiet for long beats, which I think was a great decision.
BOONE: It was like, we'll get to it later,
but the shot in the car, driving away from the cemetery,
which we probably would have never used in the movie
if the sun didn't come when it came and hit her just right.
But Ben was like, "Let's just drive with her," and so, we did it.
And it was beautiful.
GREEN: This is one of the moments when I saw the movie
that I just felt like my book was coming to life.
Because I had imagined this moment...
It's one of the first things I imagined when I was writing the book.
-On the first day, I actually made progress. -That's so great.
This was the moment that I talked to Fox the most about
when I went in to pitch.
This was a big deal.
Visioned just the different close ups and everything.
I think we talked a lot about that and about music,
and how they were gonna have to come together perfectly
to recapture that magic that's in your book.
GREEN: Yeah, it's a really wonderful moment for me,
and it's one, like, you watch it being filmed
and you don't know what it's gonna look like.
-And then, it just. .. -It's just their eyes.
When you have the right actors who have eyes like that,
they're just magnetic. There's so much going on there.
GREEN: Yeah, both Shai and Ansel are able to say a lot without speaking.
BOONE: Yes.
(BOONE CHUCKLES)
And here goes probably one of our largest visual effects shots in the movie,
-done by the great Jake Braver. -Jake did such an amazing job.
BOONE: Jake did a wonderful job and he is a sterling young man.
-I like him very much. -Yeah, me, too. He's become a friend.
BOONE: Yeah, he is a good guy. And so, yeah, this as well.
GREEN: The leg belongs to Tanner.
BOONE: Yeah, who was somebody Ansel met with
who had lost his leg in a hunting accident,
and spent a lot of time with him.
And the way that he walked and the gait and all that,
-I think, all came from Tanner. -Yeah, absolutely.
And I think also, he understood Gus' confidence differently
after hanging out with Tanner,
because Tanner had integrated his disability into his life.
BOONE: He was using his disability to pick up girls. It was awesome.
He had turned it into this great, great thing that almost...
it didn't define him, but it gave him an interesting augmentation.
You know what I mean?
GREEN: Yeah, it was definitely not his definitional character trait, which I liked.
BOONE: Yeah, it was like his mutant power in X-Men.
He had this one cool thing. (CHUCKLES)
GREEN: This is the first speech I wrote in the book,
the first long bit I wrote in the book.
BOONE: It's beautiful 'cause it's written very much
as a back and forth between the two of them,
but it was played as if it was talked to the room.
It's all really nice and it's pretty much exactly how you wrote it.
You added a little something here on set.
I remember you came up to Shai and one thing was bothering you about the speech,
where you added something about dinosaurs or...
GREEN: The thing that was bothering me was
that I didn't feel it was frank enough about the ending-ness of forever.
Not just of our death, but of the species itself.
I wanted it to be as mad as possible, I guess.
BOONE: And so, we put back a line from the book.
GREEN: There's Emily Peachey as Monica, working hard with Nat Wolff.
BOONE: Yeah, this was a tough job for her and for him.
GREEN: It was a long, long day, because they had to do it offscreen, too.
They had to do it just there,
so that Shai and Ansel had something to look at.
-They had to keep making out. -Yeah, yeah.
And going back just for a second before I forget,
one of the reasons I put Mulder and Scully in the movie from X-Files
was just the believer versus the non-believer
and I thought that was very Gus and Hazel.
GREEN: Yeah, that was really important to me
that Gus and Hazel have fundamentally different world views about forever.
But they don't let that get in the way of their love.
Like, they're still able to respect each other,
-and they're still able to... -Come to some sort of common place.
GREEN: They find enough common ground without having to 100% agree.
BOONE: What's so great about their relationship, and it's what you did,
you created them,
it's like two people who found someone who spoke the same language as them,
and it was like the first time they'd really had that,
that intimacy that you have with somebody.
-Thanks, Josh. -Yeah, no, of course.
GREEN: So, let's just make this a big love fest.
BOONE: Well, I love this movie and I love everybody who made it.
There we go.
GREEN: I love that Nat has that necklace with the on it for Monica...
BOONE: That's all Nat. -Was that Nat's idea?
BOONE: Nat was like, "Can I wear a necklace?" I was like, "No."
And then, I thought about it and I was like, "He's right."
-GREEN: There it is. Oh, boy. -There it is.
It's been said that I said, "Honk the horn," on set,
but I wanna go on the record and deny that. (CHUCKLES)
GREEN: I'm glad that you're going to deny that. I'm going to not comment.
BOONE: I think we might have proof somewhere.
-GREEN: I'm gonna not comment. -(BOONE CHUCKLES)
So, this was a very hard scene to edit 'cause we shot it over the course of a day.
And the light changed so dramatically over the course of the day.
There's a lot of visual effects shots in here
that you wouldn't know were visual effects shots,
and I would definitely like to stop and just say
I have the greatest editing team on the planet.
They did my first film and they did this one as well,
and the magic that went into the editing of this film was...
it's an invisible, but they are fantastic guys and just talented editors.
God! There's always a hamartia, isn't there?
And yours is even though you had freaking cancer...
you're willing to give money to a corporation...
for the chance to acquire even more cancer?
Let me just tell you that not being able to breathe sucks!
It totally sucks.
"Hamartia"?
It's a fatal flaw.
A fatal--
Hazel Grace, they don't actually hurt you unless you light them.
Hmm?
I've never lit one.
It's a metaphor, see?
You put the thing that does the killing right between your teeth...
GREEN: I love the way he bit the cigarette in that moment.
BOONE: I like his... -Brando-y.
BOONE: Yeah, it's very Brando-y.
GREEN: He had to be so conscious of Gus being this performative, pretentious person
at the beginning of the movie, who's overly strong.
BOONE: Yes.
GREEN: But still charming enough
and I think he really got to that middle place.
BOONE: He did, he had that... It's hard. Not many people have it.
That ability to... I don't know.
He can play aloof, but also, very vulnerable and very intelligent.
He can do it all.
GREEN: Yeah, this pan' required a lot of range
even inside of single scenes and he did a great job with that.
BOONE: And even when he came into audition with Shai,
he was really the only actor that really made her react differently
than anybody else.
He kept her on her toes, which I was surprised,
because they knew each other.
So, I thought they'd maybe have too much familiarity.
This little girl was a wonderful, wonderful addition to the movie.
She is one of the most beautiful faces. She's just great.
GREEN: Yeah, it was a great gift to the movie, and she cut her...
She shaved her head for the movie. This is a real scene.
BOONE: Laura shaved her head onscreen.
She was great, she was excited, she wanted to do it.
We looked a long time for this little girl,
somebody who actually had eyes that reminded us of Shai's
and facial features that felt in the same world.
-GREEN: See Sam's... -Yeah.
Yeah, this is a brutal moment.
This is when I think it gets really emotional for people watching the movie.
I think this little girl really makes you understand
how precarious it was with her parents and all that.
GREEN: Yeah, the distance between her now, and her then, too.
But, yeah, that was the first moment I cried when watching the movie.
-Fourteen minutes and 38 seconds in. -That's right.
BOONE: It's jam-packed.
We packed a lot of content into that first 14 minutes.
GREEN: You did, yeah. It's a roller coaster.
BOONE: Yeah, Scott and Mike did such a beautiful job compressing everything.
GREEN: Yeah, it didn't even feel compressed to me.
-BOONE: It doesn't. -Yeah.
BOONE: I know when I read it, it was longer.
But it's like when you see it, it feels like all the points are hit.
GREEN: I think some of that's down to the performances, too.
There's so much that happens in the text
that Shai and Ansel and the cast capture in their eyes.
BOONE: Yeah, there's so much between the lines of dialogue,
between the bars.
GREEN: And this is our first glimpse of Gus' house
where I played a lot of basketball with Ansel.
-BOONE: Did you win? -No, never. (CHUCKLES)
BOONE: I saw him play basketball and just demolish people.
GREEN: I love these encouragements.
BOONE: That is once again, that's all...
-GREEN: It's all Molly. -Yeah, all Molly.
Here are Gus' parents.
This is maybe one of, I think,
Anse|'s funniest deliveries in the movie, right here.
When he says, "Okay, we're gonna go."
'Cause they're just so embarrassing to him.
GREEN: Yeah, just like, "I gotta get out of here."
BOONE: They needed to be embarrassing,
so you felt as an audience, that uncomfortableness
that you would feel when you bring a girl to your house,
or go over and meet somebody's parents for the first time.
GREEN: A lot of North Central High School gear here.
Thanks to North Central High School for sharing so much of their stuff with us.
BOONE: Yeah.
GREEN: Yeah.
BOONE: And they're the ones who posed in all of Anse|'s pictures, right?
I feel, like, in the basketball pictures?
GREEN: We had local Pittsburgh people dressed up in North Central High School...
But this was another scene that was so weird to see
because I just felt like I was inside of Gus' house.
I would walk around in the basement and just feel like,
"How am I inside of my own brain?"
BOONE: We looked all over for this basement.
We looked at so many basements and none of them were right,
and we found this one, it was just like, "Okay, we think this could work."
GREEN: Didn't the woman open the door
and they said, "We're scouting for The Fault in Our Stars,"
and the first thing the owner of the home said,
-was, "| have Gus' basement." -Yeah, she said, "| have Gus' basement."
Yeah. Her kids were obsessed with the book.
Now, they can go downstairs and say, "Nat Wolff destroyed trophies down here.
"And broke our wall."
GREEN: "And we have the chipped bricks to prove it."
This was a big moment for me
because it's the first moment where you see the distance between...
It's really important to Gus and to Hazel
that they not think of their story as being just about cancer.
That cancer is something they're living with, but it's not...
BOONE: Defining their lives.
GREEN: Right. It's not the defining feature of their lives.
They're still gonna live their life regardless of the disease that they're living with.
...it's amazing.
The author, his name is Peter Van Houten.
He's the only person I've ever come across in my life...
who, A, understands what it's like to be dying...
but, B, hasn't actually died.
Okay.
I will read this horrible book with this very boring title...
that does not include zombies or Stormtroopers.
And in exchange...
...you will read this.
GREEN: And he makes her read Counterinsurgence.
BOONE: So, Christina was... She was our graphic designer, right?
I'm gonna get this messed up, but she did the cover for this book...
-GREEN: I think it's pretty awesome. -...which we thought was hysterical.
-I think Isaac has the copy. Yeah. -Does he?
-I didn't get any props out of this movie. -No?
-GREEN: No. -They didn't send you anything?
GREEN: None. Zero.
I didn't even get Gus' basketball jersey.
BOONE: Well, Ansel didn't get his jacket
and I thought he really should have had that jacket.
GREEN: He made a big to-do about it.
In fact, half of our press tour was Ansel
complaining that he didn't have the jacket.
BOONE: It is one of those great jackets, though.
Mary Claire Hannan is the great costume designer who did this film.
She has worked with Tarantino,
did Jackie Brown, worked on Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs,
she did Into the Wild with Sean Penn,
and all the color and all the life in this movie.
She just chose great clothing for them
and I like movies where characters have costumes,
like Shai has her green jacket and Gus has his Marlon Brando jacket.
It's just that distinct thing that hopefully makes them iconic.
GREEN: Also, there's nothing fancy or Hollywoodified about their outfits,
which was very important to me.
It's another way of getting at the realness of these people.
BOONE: And talk about Ben for a second,
I love the lighting in that shot so much, it made me think of Ben.
So, the interesting story about how I met Ben
was when I went to Fox, I brought them...
GREEN: Ben Richardson's the cinematographer.
Yes, he is.
He is the cinematographer and he did Beasts of the Southern Wild before this.
And I brought Fox a bunch of photographs by Ryan McGinley,
who is a brilliant New York City photographer.
And when I went to go meet Ben,
he brought a copy of the Ryan McGinley book,
and we just were like, "All right. I guess we're doing this."
(BOTH LAUGH)
So, we gave Ryan McGinley's photos to Molly
and Molly then took the color schemes used in his photography
-and put that into the production design. -Coo|.
BOONE: And Ben made a tone board,
utilizing all those colors we liked in the McGinley books,
and that's what you're seeing now.
Mary Claire looked at a lot of that as well.
So, that's a big part of, I guess, prepping a movie,
just trying to figure out visually how you're gonna tell the story,
and tonally, how you're gonna convey John's book
in the way that it felt like when we read it for the first time.
GUS". Hazel Grace.
Welcome to the sweet torture of reading An Imperial Affliction.
GREEN: There is something really challenging
about capturing a text tone visually.
-BOONE: Absolutely. -It's very rare that it's done effectively,
but I think that that's one of the things I like most about this movie.
BOONE: Yeah, Ben and I watched episodes of House of Games and Sherlock,
and they were doing that on the shows a lot.
So, we just decided to do that,
and then, just make it look a little teenager-y, a little Tumblr.
GREEN: Yeah, /like that. Yeah.
BOONE: And then, Jake Braver went and made it happen.
GREEN: Yeah, nice and Tumblr-y.
BOONE: I do love that they're playing video games, and I love that Nat is crying.
GREEN: Yeah.
Yeah, and he's got the Tostitos by him.
It reminds me of every high school breakup I ever had.
A lot of Tostitos and crying and video games.
BOONE: He pulled that little flirtation there off nicely.
GREEN: Enough of a touch.
BOONE: "I'm really worried about Isaac, but, dude, you're also really hot."
GREEN: Yeah, yeah.
BOONE: And this was the scene Nat and I were the most worried about in the movie.
I was terrified of this trophy scene.
I just didn't know if the balance would work,
if it would be too big, if you'd really be able to focus
on the conversation that Shai and Ansel are having
while Nat's having this freak-out.
GREEN: Yeah, sometimes, that stuff can be really visually shtick-y.
BOONE: I just knew I wanted to let Nat go nuts and do his thing.
'Cause when you let Nat do his thing, it can be amazing.
So, we shot a run with just Nat running around.
Then we also shot a run between Shai and Ansel
where Nat wasn't actually doing anything in the background,
and you intercut between those things.
And we also did one where he does run around while they're talking.
We still had to ADR most of the scene
when he was running around screaming just because it was...
Yeah, but it did work out.
GREEN: Didn't seem ADR'd to me.
BOONE: That's good. Well, no, none of it should seem ADR'd to anybody.
GREEN: Mission accomplished. -That's the magic.
I think Nat here is beautiful,
that he's able to make something be funny, but also be just incredibly real.
He just brings that pain to life and you feel bad for him,
but he's also self-aware enough to not take himself that seriously.
GREEN: The great thing about the character of Isaac
is that character could have been played as the butt of a joke.
As a bunch of jokes about his disability,
and his obsession over being dumped,
and instead, Nat made Isaac a funny person
who's going through a very difficult period in his life.
And that was the absolute key to that character.
That's why it works.
BOONE: And to have so much levity and bring so much levity to the movie,
but to have that levity as a character when you're gonna lose your eyesight
is a testament to his strength.
And Nat is the reason, in some ways, that I made this movie.
He gave me the script and said,
"Boone, we have to do this movie together,"
and we would talk about it all the time.
And, yeah, it all magically worked out.
GREEN: Yeah, Nat always says that you gave him the role as a thank you.
BOONE: As a thank you?
GREEN: That's what he said when were on tour together.
He would do an impression of you where you would say,
"| love that."
BOONE: Now, this I want you to know. I said, "Nat, do not hit the wood."
GREEN: Yeah, you could see it chip as he's doing it.
So, we wanna apologize to the homeowners.
BOONE: Yeah, we're sorry about that.
-GREEN: But it is a great moment. -It is. It's fantastic...
GREEN: It wouldn't be as good if he hadn't hit the...
BOONE: And this is my favorite Nat improvised moment in the movie,
other than the eggs.
This right here where he picks up the really big one.
And he goes...
-Cool? -Sure.
BOONE: That's just Nat Wolff.
GREEN: Yeah, Nat brings so much improvisational
energy to every scene that he's in.
BOONE: He really does and that's his strength as an actor.
-It's his looseness. -Right.
BOONE: He can roll with whatever happens.
GREEN: Yeah, and you did such a great job of letting them play to their strengths,
each of the actors,
letting them find what they're best at and encouraging that.
BOONE: It's like I'm not a micromanager and there's directors who are,
and I'm not,
and I feel like my job is to hire the best possible people for the roles,
the best possible people for all the jobs on set
and let them do their jobs.
Unless they're doing something that's so off point,
but if everybody's tonally on the same page,
everybody just usually excels and does great work.
And we definitely had that here. Everybody did beautiful, beautiful work.
GREEN: Yeah.
BOONE: I can't hear it here, but I'll talk for a moment about...
This is one of my favorite little score cues.
Nate Walcott and Mike Mogis of Bright Eyes scored the film.
They did my first film as well.
I was a big Bright Eyes fan for years
and was lucky enough to have them come on this journey.
And they just captured the emotion and the feeling of the book,
I thought, beautifully.
This and the music we put in, it really tonally made it sound for me.
They built beautiful themes that they ran throughout
the movie for each of the characters
and I think a huge part of the emotion that you feel when you watch it is their score.
Do you like the score?
GREEN: I did like the score very much.
I still haven't seen the finished version of the movie.
I saw it very, very close to finished when I was with you the last time...
BOONE: So, we changed a lot, John.
We're sorry to tell you that we changed everything.
-GREEN: Yeah, now, I gotta be nervous. -Yeah.
GREEN: But, no, I did. I really liked the score.
Music matters so much to a movie
because when I first saw it, it had very little, it had placeholder music.
And it was a very different movie.
BOONE". Of course, yeah. Absolutely.
And part of the pitching process to get this job
was bringing a USB stick to Fox
that had the M83 song at the end of the film,
and The Radio Dept. song when they're on the tram in Amsterdam
and some other ones.
Then we hired Season Kent, who's one of the great music supervisors,
and I gave her my iTunes library, and I said, "| like all this.
"As long as it's in this world, I'll be happy."
And we just started working and she started bringing us wonderful stuff
and gave us access to artists who wrote wonderful, original songs for us.
GREEN: Yeah, I love the music. I love the soundtrack.
Of course, I don't ever listen to bands other than The Mountain Goats.
I love that we went back to the same place and now,
instead of seeing Hazel by herself...
BOONE: Yeah, there's Gus.
And the cigarette tradeoff is really funny.
GREEN: And that wasn't in the script, was it? They just did that.
BOONE: I suggested that they would do it and they did,
and we just were trying to think of cute things.
Like, Ben came up with that little move going up there.
We holed up in a hotel room for three or four days
or five days leading up to shooting.
I maybe had a shot list for the movie done
and vague ideas about some of these montages,
but bringing all these moving camera moments to life
and these montage moments... I owe so much to Ben.
He knew what I wanted,
but he really made them different from stuff we've seen before.
And he really kept a movie that's just a lot of talking alive visually.
GREEN: Yeah.
BOONE: And we talked a lot about that, we watched a lot of movies...
In preparation to make this movie,
we watched Apocalypse Now for the introduction of Brando at the end.
We were watching it and we were like...
And then they go right past these drapes that are hanging
and you get this glimpse of him as you go by.
Or watching Jerry Maguire or movies like that.
Say Anything..., John Hughes films.
Cameron Crowe is a big influence in my first film
and this film with how he uses music in movies.
Particularly Say Anything... and Almost Famous.
Almost Famous, we looked at the scene
where Penny Lane leaves the room for Patrick Fugit to lose his virginity,
and the camera's dancing around his eyes, and you see the girls dancing in his eyes.
And we talked about that for the staring contest and for the opening.
GREEN: This is it, this is it.
It's one of my favorite moments in the whole movie.
I love the way it's shot. I love the light.
BOONE: I remember we were shooting this on set
and Wyck coming to me and saying, "My God, it's so romantic.
"This is gonna work."
That was a very charged moment on set when Ansel was...
GREEN: Yeah, it definitely was.
BOONE: On his side, especially,
because he was just with his arm back like that
and he just looked like every girl's dream.
GREEN: He is a handsome lad. -Yes, he is a stud.
GREEN: I love the wallpaper, the paint, whatever that is in her room.
And there's the Hectic Glow poster. I love that there's a Hectic Glow poster.
BOONE: They did such a beautiful job on this room.
My only contribution, other than the color scheme,
is my sister had all these stars on her ceiling when she was younger,
like these glow-in-dark stars.
And Ben grabbed onto that idea
and was like, "Let's do that all over the ceiling,
"and I'll shoot lights into it and make them glow."
Yeah. This is a beautiful room
and I did hide some Stephen King up there on the shelf.
You'll see it later in one shot.
GREEN: Such a massive King fan, you can't not have...
BOONE: I see Tommyknockers up there and Dark Ha“ behind it.
GREEN: Yeah, yeah.
-I can see Hazel reading some King. -I think so.
I can see her reading some Came and all that.
I buy it.
I love the progression we went through
to get to these final e-mail images on the wall.
We just didn't wanna spend a lot of time
shooting into phones or shooting into computers.
We were worried that it just wouldn't feel very modern.
GREEN: Yeah.
-BOONE: That's about the extent of it. -Right.
BOONE: They're so wonderful together. Shai and Laura became such good friends.
They had a little vacation together in Hawaii prior to shooting, right?
GREEN: Yeah, and then Shai is now such good friends not just with Laura,
but cooks for the kids.
BOONE: And checks on them when Laura's out of town.
GREEN: We all got pretty close to the kids actually.
Laura's daughter started an Instagram series for me,
called Instagramming with an 8-year-old.
So, that's what I did while you were working, Josh.
I was Instagramming with an 8-year-old.
It was great fun, though.
BOONE: I love her there.
This is one of my favorite Laura moments in the movie.
Her sadness when she walks away.
She makes a little sound and she says...
Uh...
GREEN: Yeah. It's such a difficult thing
when all you want is to give your kid what she wants and you can't.
BOONE: And you can't, yeah.
Because usually I can give my daughter anything she needs at any time,
but if something was wrong with her, how would you feel?
GREEN: Right. And if you didn't have the resources
to provide for her dreams, it's just difficult.
BOONE: Yeah.
-There's Beth back there. Beth is fantastic. -Yeah. There's Beth.
BOONE: I can't tell who's walking beside her.
GREEN: Everybody in the support group was so great.
I thought it was so useful to have them on set.
Because it was a constant reminder that these people are people.
And that our responsibility was to try to tell a story that was about people,
complex people.
BOONE: You could've followed any single one of those kids at a support group
and been with them instead of Hazel,
and I'm sure there was some fascinating story.
And the fascinating story wasn't primarily about cancer.
BOONE: About cancer, yeah.
Even here we added this bit of voiceover at the suggestion of my editor.
With just a little butterflies in the stomach, waiting for...
She's about to go see Ansel, I'm like, "She's just nervous."
And you just wanted that fluttery Wonder Years feeling.
GREEN: Yeah.
I mean, I'll tell you what.
My friends in Indianapolis, the thing that they like most about the movie
is that I got a Rik Smits jersey into a Hollywood movie.
-BOONE: There it is. -A real Rik Smits jersey.
-BOONE: It's right there. -Hazel's dad is as impressed as I am.
BOONE: This was our very first day of shooting.
GREEN: Yeah.
BOONE: The line, "Do you want to come with me to a picnic?"
I think was also part of the key to getting Gus right was the way he asked her that.
Ansel and I worked on that for a while.
And after he had said that, he was off to the races.
'Cause he got the level of confidence that he needed to be.
GREEN: Yeah, and the cadence was right, everything.
BOONE: She's such a strong, powerful actor.
You've got to come in strong just to keep her engaged.
GREEN: The first time I saw Shai and Ansel, even when I saw their audition tape,
I really felt like it was...
There's a really great line in a Philip Roth novel,
"The thing isn't owning the person,
"the thing is having a contender in the room with you."
And I felt like Shai had a contender in the room with her.
That's what the movie needed to really work.
BOONE: Yeah. I mean, his comic timing just even there, with Sam is...
We were very lucky to have everybody we had in this film.
That's mostly just feeling lucky. I just can't believe we all got to make this
and we had such wonderful people come and do it.
GREEN: Yeah.
BOONE: It's just a testament to the strength of the story.
You could go do it as a musical, as a puppet show,
and people would like it because the story is there.
-GREEN: I'd love to see it as a puppet show. -As a puppet show, we shot puppets.
GREEN: If you wanna make a sequel, I think I've got an idea for you.
BOONE: I love this moment between them just to reinforce that Hazel is not well.
GREEN: Yeah. This is another scene that's taken pretty much directly from the book.
I mean, almost every scene is. Really is.
BOONE: Almost every scene in the movie is taken directly from the book.
GREEN: Yeah.
BOONE: And here we go, off to Funky Bones.
This was a long process,
just to get permission to build a scale model of Funky Bones in Pittsburgh.
It was a long, involved process that had to be destroyed afterwards
-because there's only supposed to be one. -Right.
BOONE: But, yeah, we took it out to this park in Pittsburgh
and tried to make it as close as we could to Indianapolis.
GREEN: I mean, they recreated it so perfectly.
My wife actually curated the Funky Bones.
And I put in the book partly as sort of a...
-BOONE: A little wink to the wife. -A little wink to her.
And we certainly... Neither of us ever imagined that it would be in a movie.
But they did such a good job of recreating it.
Sarah was on set that day,
and she looked at it from 3 feet away and said, "| can't tell the difference."
BOONE: It's incredible.
GREEN: I thought the props team did an amazing job of Funky Bones.
-BOONE: They did. -One of the weirdest things is
we're about to see the best shot of Funky Bones that will ever exist, right here.
And it's not of the actual Funky Bones.
-BOONE: No. -But you would hardly know it.
There's Wyatt. Do you see Wyatt?
BOONE: There's Wyatt, he's not in the movie.
GREEN: In the orange sweater.
-BOONE: He's sort of in the movie. -He's sort of in the movie.
I just saw him.
BOONE: And that was no fault of Wyatt's.
It was really just we never really got that button to work.
GREEN: No. I mean, I actually thought that Wyatt's performance was fantastic.
There was a kid who came in
and interrupted them as they were about to kiss.
But it felt kind of Hollywood to me.
BOONE: It did. It felt Hollywood. And we out it so much further back,
so we had a near-kiss during this scene just because we weren't sure that
maybe you'd need some romantic heat
at this point in the movie to even stay engaged.
But we found that you didn't, and we just ended on the hug.
And it worked really well.
GREEN: Yeah, I think it's much faster to get you where you need to go.
BOONE: And there was originally a Dr. Maria scene that came after this.
A scene where Hazel's with her mom in the laundry room, we'll talk about later,
and instead we just go straight to that night of the emergency.
GREEN: Right.
BOONE: So, it was all getting them to Amsterdam as quickly as we could.
'Cause once you know the promise of Amsterdam is there,
it's like all the audience wants to do is get there.
So, it's just trying to get them there as quickly as possible
and hit all those beats that you need to hit.
GREEN: Yeah.
Yeah. So, when I originally wrote the story, I imagined this happening on the ground.
Which is much less realistic.
It'd be much harder for Gus to get up and down.
And then also it's just much more visually interesting to have it actually on the bones.
BOONE: It wasn't scripted, them sitting there,
but I had said that it would be nice if they were sitting on it,
so when they go back in Funky Bones, they'd be able to kind of sadly look out on...
GREEN: They can't get there.
BOONE: We were just worried about the two scenes feeling too close visually.
So, we were just trying to think of ways to make them different enough
that they would really have a different feel.
Thank you!
HAZEL". And then this happened.
BOONE: And that's one my very favorite camera moves in the movie.
Ben Richardson was his own camera operator on this.
He moved that camera during the sequence beautifully.
And that is a heavy camera to have to wear around all day.
It's very physically draining.
So, this was a shot, no sound and in slow mo.
GREEN: This was very difficult to watch being filmed.
BOONE: Was it? -I cried a lot. I just thought it was so...
Sam and Laura and Shai, they were so authentic to that experience.
-BOONE: Yeah. -It's difficult to watch.
BOONE: So, that shot of Sam sitting down was a split-screen.
Because we needed Sam to sit down faster in the take that we had, and he didn't.
So, we split the screen and used another take
to have him sit down whenever we wanted to.
There's about 50 split-screen shots in the movie that all achieve things like that.
Cutting between takes within takes
where you didn't have one thing on one side and one thing on the other.
So, as my editor always says, "Every trick in the book,"
and it's seamless, you would never know.
GREEN: No, I certainly didn't see it.
Yeah, this is more dialogue directly from the book.
It was so weird to hear the dialogue,
to hear Laura or Shai or Sam say dialogue directly from the book,
just like I imagined.
BOONE: Yeah. Well, this here, I was going to ask you about.
'Cause this, for me, when I read it and when I watched the movie,
I feel really emotional when he tries to see her and she tries to see him.
And I wondered what your opinion was about situations like this.
Did you encounter things where kids who clearly loved each other
were kind of kept out of hospital rooms
and what does that mean to you?
GREEN: I did encounter that.
And a lot of times families imagine narrowly...
Especially sometimes because of hospital rules,
sometimes because parents don't think
that the boyfriend or girlfriend should be there
for these critical moments in a kid's life.
That's fair. I think that's fair.
And then later, Hazel's in the same situation with Gus.
It's just very difficult because you love this person,
you want to be there with them in this very important moment,
but it's complicated.
BOONE: Yeah, it reminded me the most, surprisingly,
of homosexual couples who can't see each other in the hospital.
For some reason it reminded me of that.
This is one of my favorite moments in the movie.
This I talked about when I came in and pitched Fox.
This kind of moment, where she goes into flashback.
-Yeah. -This is the hardest.
BOONE: This is the one that's tough.
Laura came in, we did maybe two takes and that was it.
And it was the first take that's in the film.
She was so powerful that day and so on point.
We were in and out because she came in ready to go.
GREEN: I was glad you didn't have to film that again. It was brutal.
BOONE". Well, it was like Shai crying in bed, we tried to keep it to a minimum.
'Cause it's so emotionally taxing for them. It just is.
GREEN: That was something that someone really
said to me when I worked at the hospital.
BOONE: Was it? -Yeah.
And it always stuck with me and really...
BOONE: Such a real thing to say. Such an honest thing to say.
GREEN: Yeah, such an exposed thing to say and then such a difficult thing to imagine.
BOONE: Well, people think uncomfortable things all the time.
And I think it's like being okay with the fact that people have thoughts like that.
And that's actually what makes fiction more credible and makes it more real
is when those moments are in there, 'cause everybody is so terribly flawed.
-GREEN: Right. -No matter who they are.
GREEN: It's exactly like Hazel's mom says at the end of the movie.
"| was wrong. I may have thought that, but I was wrong."
"Even when you die, I'll still be your mother. I'll always be your mother."
-BOONE: Yeah. -It's a beautiful line.
I'm saying that because it's not in the book.
I don't want you guys to think that I'm that pleased with myself.
As Scott and Mike and Laura.
(WHISPERS) Hi. Gus... again.
Sorry, she's asleep.
Yeah. Uh, okay.
All right. Bye-bye.
I know what you're thinking.
It's not fair to him.
BOONE: In this very next scene outside, I'll tell you about the first day of shooting
just so people listening could have an idea of how many things we shot in a day.
So, in the first day of shooting, we shot the limo arrival, which is coming up soon.
That was how we started, I believe, was Ansel popping out of the limo.
Then we did the car arriving from this scene you just saw,
where it comes off the tree and we're on her in the back seat.
Then we shot Ansel there with flowers.
-GREEN: With tulips. -With tulips.
And then after we shot Ansel with tulips,
we came out here to the backyard and we shot this scene,
which was the most problematic scene in the movie to color after the fact
because we were there at night shooting the end of this scene.
GREEN: It was fun shooting nighttime and there were 500 million cicadas.
That's my memory is that it was 10:00 at night and there were a lot of cicadas.
BOONE: There was a point where I think we heard a train.
The sound guy was like, "If you can hear the train over the cicadas for the sound..."
I was like, "ls the sound going to get ruined?"
And, yes, we shot this very quickly. This was a 35-day shoot.
My first movie, Stuck in Love, was a 19-day shoot.
And even at 35 days, this is such dense material,
and there are so many montages and insert shots.
And there's just a lot. So, we shot a lot every day.
Every day was no downtime.
(STAMMERING)
You had to have a lot of energy to get through a shoot like this.
We had to visit craft services often for sugar.
GREEN: Yeah, fortunately we had amazing food.
I have to say, I did no work at all.
But it sounds like everyone else was working very hard.
BOONE: No, the work you did was the work...
You didn't have to work to do the work.
It was like giving us the confidence that we were getting it right,
I think, was the biggest part of it.
GREEN: I think most directors wouldn't have let me on the set.
That's how they would've solved that problem.
BOONE: I don't know. You were so nice. I mean, I have yet to meet an author...
Out of the two that I know that are successful authors
that aren't amazing human beings.
-GREEN: That's kind of you. -So, I've been very lucky.
GREEN: Thanks for putting me on par with King.
BOONE: But if I ever have to throw one off...
GREEN: If you had to throw one off the boat, it would be me.
BOONE: No. If I ever have to throw an author off the set, I'll call and tell you.
GREEN: Yeah, I'd appreciate that.
I can even come in and be like, "If Boone doesn't think that you should be here..."
BOONE: To have him to be removed.
GREEN: "If Boone doesn't think you should be here, you definitely shouldn't be here."
I remember this being the end of that first day
and just thinking, "ls every day going to be like this?"
Because Shailene had to work so hard.
BOONE: To get to this place emotionally.
This was, I think, the hardest scene for her in the movie.
You'd be surprised to think it wasn't some of the other ones.
It took her a while to get here, it was a long day.
But when she got there, I mean, she delivered the goods.
GREEN: Yeah. And this was the second or third day. I mean, this was very early.
BOONE: Very early. Everything at the house was shot in the first two weeks.
I believe we did Hazel's house and Gus' house in the first two weeks.
And by the end of week two we were getting into trophies and all that.
And we kind of worked our way out of the suburban neighborhood in Pittsburgh
and then cast our nets a little wider.
This is a scene we talked about a lot.
I guess it's kind of slightly different from what's in the book,
but only to kind of give them a real feeling of a disconnect and a breakup.
And how did you feel about that? I felt like you were pretty supportive of it.
And felt like, from the structure of a film, it kind of needed to be that way.
Yeah, I think they needed to physically be in the same place.
-BOONE: Yeah. -Yeah. It didn't feel different to me.
BOONE: Yeah. Emotionally it feels the same, which, I guess, is the key to all of it,
to protect the tone and the way it made you feel when you read it.
GREEN: Right. I mean, these are very, very small changes.
And so, they didn't make me anxious.
The important thing to me was
the preservation of the themes, the ideas, the tone.
BOONE: Yeah.
GREEN: And I knew from a fan perspective, it would be important to them
to preserve some of the lines and the basic story structure.
But I was much more concerned of, "Can you make a Hollywood movie..."
BOONE: About what this is actually about and what this is saying.
GREEN: Yeah. Without making it sentimentalized.
BOONE: Yeah.
GREEN". So, that was my only worry.
And I think you did a very good job.
BOONE: Everybody, we all worked really hard on it.
Now you've been working for the movie 'cause you're out there talking all the time.
-GREEN: I've done my pan' now. -You've done your pan' now.
-This is great. I love all these texts. -Yeah.
BOONE". And you just look at Shai performing against a blank screen.
This is all done after the fact.
Yeah, even by herself she can command the frame.
GREEN: Yeah. She is truly extraordinary.
BOONE". She's an extraordinary actress and an extraordinary human being.
The funny thing about Shai is when I met her for the first time.
I was like, "No, this can't be real. This is an act."
Getting to know her, what you realize is, "It's not. It's me. I'm cynical."
And I forgot how idealistic you can be when you're that age.
She is the real deal.
The girl that you see interviewed is the girl you get.
-She is as authentic as it gets. -Yeah.
This is a great scene between them.
BOONE: I just wanted to get Laura in a towel.
We joked about that often.
Did you email the Genies to tell them that the trip was off?
Because Van Houten's assistantjust emailed me...
and she said that she thinks we're still coming.
What?
I was supposed to tell you with your dad.
Mom.
We're going to Amsterdam.
You're se-... We're going to Amsterdam?
(LAUGHING) We're going to Amsterdam.
We figured the whole thing out. We're going.
Doctor Maria, everybody knows.
-BOONE: This is a great hug. -Yeah.
BOONE: Laura's other arm is holding her towel up.
GREEN: I'm sure that looked weird in the edit.
BOONE: It did look a little weird for us.
GREEN: Yeah. But that's an important arm, from a PG-13 perspective.
BOONE: Yes, it is. It's important.
Well, this is, for me, the culmination
of Laura really helping create happiness in her daughter's life for her.
This song cue coming up, this was the most difficult spot to find a song for
because we needed it to hit three different things.
It's Hazel here in the room, then you cut to them coming out the door,
then you cut again on Gus in the limo.
And you want the limo cut to be like the song explodes
and everything's charging along.
We tried so many songs here.
Half of us might have loved one, some of us liked others.
But we ended up having Grouplove do this song originally for us.
And they did a great job giving us those hits when we needed them editorially.
We just needed help here to get past these cuts.
GREEN: In that situation, did they watch the scene and then write a song?
BOONE: They will write it to the scene
and then they did a full version of it for the soundtrack.
So, it's two different versions almost
which is the same with the Birdy song.
The song near the end, where she's in the car,
Birdy rushed home from seeing the movie
and went and recorded the demo immediately.
And that's what we used. It's a beautiful song.
GREEN: This is the very first thing that was ever filmed.
BOONE: The very first thing that was shot, yeah. This was the first shot.
GREEN: It's the first thing I saw. I remember bursting into tears
when I saw them walk out of that house for the first time.
BOONE: And then you must've loved Ansel popped up out of the hood.
GREEN: Yeah. You see a little bit of midriff.
BOONE". A little midriff. That was my wink, like a little...
GREEN: I love that it's not a fancy limo. It's an older limo.
-BOONE: It feels like what he could afford. -It's an Indianapolis limo.
BOONE: Or what they would've got him. -Yeah.
BOONE: And this, this originally went on quite a bit longer.
There's an extension of this where
we get all the way up to Sam being left out on the lawn.
I want to point out here, this is Jake Braver sitting behind Ansel and Shai.
-GREEN: Yeah. The visual effects supervisor. -He's our visual effects supervisor.
When I was asked to give him his motivation for this scene,
I told him he was a drug mule,
which he was delighted to have some backstory.
(GREEN STAMMERING)
BOONE: It's actually Jake Braver sitting in a plane
with his visual effect shot outside the window beside him.
GREEN: Right. He did a great job.
He sent me this visual effect shot,
he included the Indianapolis airport in the background, just for me.
BOONE: Yeah, just for you.
GREEN: He said, "This isn't necessary. But I thought that you'd want to know."
So, let's all appreciate Jake's work here for a moment,
that he was kind enough to take shots
of what you actually see when you're taking off in Indianapolis.
BOONE: Yes, he pays attention to details.
And this is actually one of my favorite moments
when I read the book for the first time, was this.
-I thought was... -Vulnerability.
BOONE: Yeah, like, it was just a very special thing.
And finding an actor to pull this off and not feel forced is really tough.
He really captured the purity of that moment of flying for the first time.
GREEN: Jake is really sleeping through his drug mule-ing.
BOONE: He's probably asleep. That's why nobody would suspect him.
-GREEN: He's not stressed out at all. -No.
GREEN: Given the fact that he's trying to sneak drugs into Amsterdam.
Which, by the way, doesn't seem like a good business model.
BOONE: Doesn't seem, yeah. I think there's plenty there.
GREEN". I love that smile from Shai.
BOONE: Yeah. Yeah.
GREEN: The way that she looks at Gus in this movie is just so sweet.
BOONE: So, I put this in just 'cause I love Aliens,
and I felt like Gus would love Aliens.
And I wanted this exact moment.
-GREEN: In the book it's 300. -It's 300.
GREEN: Which is a major American film.
So, I was a little offended that you didn't include 300.
BOONE: It's not my cup of tea.
GREEN: I'm going to tell myself that it was because you couldn't clear the rights
because they're so valuable, because it's such an important movie.
BOONE: It's why. Well, you know, it wasn't a Fox movie, so it was really tough.
GREEN: There you go. Thank you, Josh.
BOONE: But, no, Aliens is one of my faves.
GREEN'. And this is weird
because I can't tell what's filmed in Pittsburgh
and what's filmed in Amsterdam.
BOONE: This was shot in Pittsburgh. This is a green screen behind Shai,
and Jake put a window in front of Shai's face.
And here Laura does not get out of the car. It is a body double.
GREEN: Yup.
BOONE: Laura did not come to Amsterdam for us.
This was the only shot we needed her for.
So, we spent a bit of time shooting to get the angle right
so that it would blow right past you.
And then when you cut to inside, we're in Pittsburgh,
inside a beautiful, beautiful hotel there.
Bed and breakfast or whatever.
GREEN: This place looks so much like Amsterdam.
I mean, that was great location scouting.
BOONE: Great location scouting. John Adkins was our location scout.
He worked tirelessly to get us the locations that we needed.
He, like everybody else on this movie,
went above and beyond the call of duty to try to help bring this story to life.
GREEN: And the amazing thing, when I think about the crew,
is how much they seemed to be making this movie from a place of passion
and genuinely caring about the story.
BOONE: They all had a deeply personal connection to it.
I could tell you many stories people told me,
who worked on set, just why it was important to them.
This meant a lot more to them than...
-It wasn't just a job. -Right. Yeah. It was really special.
Everybody in Pittsburgh was so generous with their skill and talent and time.
BOONE: This is a nice moment. This is all Laura Dem.
GREEN: Yeah, the blue dress.
BOONE: Yeah. And, you know, this next scene
is probably one of my very favorite scenes in the movie.
GREEN: To be fair though, we 're 52 minutes in...
BOONE: I know. I've got some favorite scenes.
...and you've defined the vast majority of the movie as your favorite scene.
BOONE: All right, but there's more. Well, this isn't my favorite scene.
But the scene where they look at each other right here.
It's one of my favorite musical moments in the movie
and it's one of my favorite performance moments in the movie.
When they look at each other here across the hotel
and their boat ride to dinner that night I just think is...
In the script they don't go on a boat ride,
they sit on a park bench together with an arm around each other.
My editor was, "They're in Amsterdam! Why aren't they on a boat?"
And so I was like, "We got to be on a boat."
GREEN: Yeah, I'm so glad they got on that boat.
BOONE: It opens the movie up so much.
This is what I love right here.
It's her little "thank you" right here is maybe the cutest thing ever,
coming up at the very tail of this, right before the cut.
GREEN: Yeah.
You look gorgeous.
Thanks.
BOONE: So, this is a song by a band called Indians.
Season Kent brought them to my attention.
They had a song called Bird that we loved that we couldn't fit in the film.
And we had a song that we wanted in this spot
that we weren't able to clear the rights to.
And we had Indians write an original piece for us.
I love this song so much.
And they went so above and beyond, I think, what was even there before.
So, I love this a lot.
As you can see, it was dark and dreary when we shot in Amsterdam.
(GREEN STAMMERING)
BOONE: But doesn't the impending doom that's to come...
GREEN: Shailene has said that she found it romantic.
And I think it's just a different vibe than what we expected.
But that's the nature of making a movie, maybe,
is that you have to work with the reality as you find it.
BOONE: This is another one of my...
I'll say favorite shots since I can't say favorite scenes,
that down the hallway and up into this was wonderful.
GREEN: This is another...
Molly did an amazing job making this restaurant happen very, very quickly.
BOONE: Yeah. Yes, she did. This was above a bar. It was an empty space.
Molly went to Amsterdam to look at the exteriors of restaurants
that we could potentially shoot outside at at night.
And we found, just from a lighting standpoint,
for Ben it was a black hole at night.
There was just not enough lighting. To light a canal or an entire street
was incredibly problematic from a monetary standpoint.
So, we asked Molly if she could bring the magic of Amsterdam inside.
GREEN: And she really did.
I love that she brought the trees, and the lights as sort of stars.
BOONE: Yes.
The twinkly lights on the trees really did it. I love twinkly lights.
This is one of the first scenes that I saw when I came back from shooting
and sat down in the editing room, this scene.
I would say, other than some minor tightening
just to have it move faster, it hasn't changed a bit.
My editor already had the approval of his 14-year-old daughter, who loved the book,
who burst into tears when he showed her this scene,
when Ansel tells her that he loves her.
We got to point out the waiter here.
-Jean Brassard? -Yeah.
BOONE: He came in and I feel like he kind of steals
every moment that he shows up in.
GREEN: He's so great. He is a French-language musician.
He was sort of in the middle of being on the road with his show,
and came and did the movie, and he was great!
BOONE: Wonderful. And the casting process to find this man was...
To find the right waiter was a challenge.
We also had a great...
I'll point him out because he did good work and he was only on set two days.
A Steadicam operator who assisted Ben.
All the moving shots in this scene and in the Funky Bones scene he did.
And he also worked on my first film.
I think they're wonderful here.
How many teenage movies do you cut to
where they're having a conversation about God and the afterlife...
GREEN: Yeah.
-...and oblivion and all that? -Yeah.
I think that, for me, that's what makes the movie special
is that it doesn't shy away from that stuff in the book.
BOONE: Well, I think it's what makes your writing special.
I mean, you take what teens think about seriously,
and have them have conversations that I feel like I had when I was younger.
GREEN: Yeah, that's the thing.
I wasn't a particularly good student or particularly impressive or anything,
but I was very intellectually curious and had lots of conversations with my friends
that were engaged and thoughtful and deep.
And I wasn't particularly smart.
But I think all teenagers are thinking about that stuff.
They're thinking about it as sort of sovereign beings for the first time,
so there's an excitement about those conversations.
BOONE: It's like you're trying to take control
of your life in a house where nothing is yours.
GREEN: Right.
BOONE: Nothing belongs to you. It's all your parents'.
And you're trying to figure out who you are as a human being,
and you capture that so well.
When I pitched this to Fox, I pitched it as Titanic and cancer was the iceberg.
And we'd hit the iceberg eventually, but it had to be about the love story and the boat.
And that, for me, was what the book felt like.
Like an intimate epic about these interior lives of these people.
Yeah. I'm very interested in the star-crossed lovers genre,
but I wanted to write it, like you said, like an intimate epic
so that the obstacle wasn't war or poverty or disease.
It's usually about, like, family strife or war. I wanted it to be disease
because disease is what actually circumscribes almost all human lives.
BOONE: Yes.
I thought, too, Isaac mentioned...
The other night we were at a Q&A
and they were asking us what our favorite books were.
And Isaac mentioned The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
And that's a film I like a lot and I've read the book.
I mean, still, it follows human beings.
It's not so much plot-driven as it is driven by the desires of the characters,
which I think is the most...
It's like when you're writing or when you're making a movie
that's what you always want it to feel like is the characters are driving it
and there's not someone else driving it.
GREEN: Yeah, there's not a secret hand that's moving these pieces around
so that it can serve the story.
BOONE: You want it to feel seamless and feel like it's not under control.
And you certainly did a beautiful job.
I mean, they're so vibrant and so alive and that's why it all works so beautifully.
GREEN: But you still need plot and structure, which I actually don't do well.
And that's all down to Weber and Neustadter.
They brought in structure to this story and that's what allowed it to become a movie.
BOONE: And took out things, that just for the movie,
I know people will ask about and I've thought about it some.
Because one of the bigger differences between the book and the movie
was Gus' girlfriend previous to Hazel, which I felt like...
GREEN: Couldn't have her in the movie.
BOONE: For the movie, it just felt like...
GREEN: It would be all backstory.
BOONE: It made their love story less vibrant during a two-hour time span,
where you'd really start to wonder about his motivations.
You know, "Is he just into sick girls?" And there just wasn't enough time.
GREEN: I think it would also all be flashback.
I mean, would Gus just to sit there and tell Hazel about it?
BOONE: Or she finds a picture and she's like, "Who's this girl?"
GREEN: Yeah, it was important to me in the book
because I wanted to de-romanticize their love story as much as possible,
to make it not that sort of heightened, gauzy thing.
Ben did that with light and they did it with their performances.
-BOONE: Absolutely. -I felt like it was there.
-BOONE: Yeah. And I'll mention I love... -This shot.
BOONE: Things you want the most in movies are happy accidents.
We were out location scouting one night and came across that street band
and I immediately had them hire them and get them to be there
so we could shoot Shai and Ansel coming in and watching them play.
And they were basically like minstrels traveling in a van.
So, getting a hold of them, we had no guarantee that they were gonna show up.
We had paid them some money
and just were kind of hoping that they would arrive and play that day.
GREEN: Yeah. And there's the "Ceci n'est pas une pipe."
Another thing I'm thrilled to have gotten in a movie.
There is a lot of distance between the way that people with...
BOONE: I love that.
GREEN: A lot of distance between the way that people
living with illness or disability are portrayed
and the way that they experience their own lives.
Which is what I was trying to get at
with the difference between an image of a pipe and the pipe itself.
The way we imagine things is often very different
from the way the way they actually are.
BOONE: It's like a person sitting on this bus who looks at them is going to think
something very different than they are feeling inside.
GREEN: Their own experience is not as defined by their illness and disability
-as maybe... Right, your view of them is. -It is to us. Yeah.
GREEN: It's your gaze that is making it weird.
BOONE: So, we are about to get to the great Willem Dafoe.
When I was a kid, I remember recording the audio
on a pay-per-view channel of the Platoon trailer
off of that and I was obsessed with Last Temptation of Christ,
and Light Sleeper and all these movies that he had made.
And it was a great thrill to get to work with him.
He's played such scary parts.
In Wild at Heart, he traumatized Laura Dem.
And when he came to set, she still called him Bobby Peru,
who is the character he played in Wild at Heart.
But he is a gentle,
really kind human being. It was a privilege to work with him.
We shot this entire conversation between
him and the kids in one day.
And he knew that dialogue backwards and forwards,
there were no flubbed takes, he was a consummate professional.
GREEN: I will also add that he wanted to add in a couple of lines
-from the book. -Yeah, he did.
-GREEN: He read the book and was... -He did.
...very careful in his reading of it. He's just an amazing Van Houten.
BOONE: Yeah, the script was very much close to...
There were some odds and ends that we added and little things,
but the script is very close to what I first read when I signed on.
Except for the second Van Houten scene, I traveled to New York
to meet with him about the role and we actually sat there
with a pen and paper
and he and I rewrote the scene with Shai and him in the car at the end.
Scott and Mike then went and just cleaned it up
and got it presentable.
He was a big help.
Dafoe had a lot of interesting insights into this character
and had a very strong point of view
about how he wanted to play it and I thought his choices were
really, really great.
Did he feel like the character, for you, that you wrote?
-If not physically how you described... -Yeah. There's physical differences,
because he is described as being
-big and balding. -Potbellied. Yeah.
GREEN: But you can see here that
even the way that Dafoe carries himself is the way I imagined him.
I imagined him bigger, but he makes himself big.
BOONE: He does. GREEN: Um, and, you know...
It's very much in the beard,
the sort of ragged, unkemptness of him.
-Um, yeah. It was very weird. -Yeah.
GREEN: And you know Dafoe's parents, lived 10 doors down from me
-when I was growing up. -Wow, that's awesome.
GREEN: So, I would see him at Thanksgiving when I was walking the dog or whatever.
BOONE: Wow. Did you tell him? You told him all this, right?
GREEN: Yeah, I did. I did.
So, for him to be in the movie adaptation of my book...
BOONE: ls special. Yeah. GREEN". ...30 years later
-is just crazy. -So crazy.
And we were very lucky to get him.
This is a tough role, because the audience is not going to like you. (LAUGHS)
-GREEN: Right. -But he came in and he chewed it up.
-He is great. GREEN". I think he did a nice job...
-BOONE: He did. -...of finding a way into Van Houten,
a human way into Van Houten.
BOONE: Yeah, I think so, too, and I think this character is
the gatekeeper to the darkness that is to come in the movie.
I mean, he kind of lifts it up and says, "Walk on through, kids."
-GREEN: Right. -And that's when things
really take a turn for the serious. So, I always imagined him
as like a very drunk, River Styx driver.
-(LAUGHS) Or something like that. -GREEN: And this is,
I don't want to brag, but...
BOONE: (SOFTLY) Bomfalleralla.
...in my opinion, my major contribution to the movie.
(BOONE LAUGHS)
Getting Afasi och Filthy, the greatest
duo in the history of Swedish hip-hop,
the exposure that they deserve in the United States.
Exactly, I expect them to be here touring soon,
-just based off the popularity of the movie. -(GREEN LAUGHS)
GREEN: Man, I do genuinely love that song.
One of the weirder things that happened to me
when I was writing about Van Houten is that I listened to a lot of Swedish hip-hop
and I agreed with him about so much.
I agree with him that characters don't exist outside of the book.
I agree with him that the author's voice shouldn't be privileged when it
comes to talking about what happens "after" a book.
-Yeah. -And I found myself thinking,
"Am I this horrible person?" (LAUGHING)
BOONE: "Who the hell speaks Swedish?"
I think for this scene there were close to 30 camera setups.
Uh...
-GREEN: And in one day. -And in one day.
So, we used two cameras, which a DP never likes to do,
because it makes balancing the light between two cameras
very difficult and problematic,
but when you have to shoot this many setups in one day
you shoot with as many cameras as you can get in there.
So, this was on a very intensive day.
But the kids, I think, relished working with him
so much and he was so committed to it that he just brought
the best out in them.
GREEN: Yeah.
So, Josh, going into the filming of this movie, I did not know
that you shoot with one camera at a time and you light every shot.
I thought that when this was happening
this was always shot with two cameras
-at the same time. -Yeah.
GREEN: And that was a total revelation. -Demystifying.
GREEN: Yeah, it did. It was a moment where movies became...
You know, I could see the strings on the puppets.
BOONE: Yeah. I grew up listening to audio commentaries,
like the one we are recording now, and spent a lot of time
doing that, so I was demystified early.
Did you lose it all? When you go see a movie now,
do you lose any of the magic for you of being...
GREEN: No. I lose something a little, structurally, in big action movies
where you can just say,
-"End of Act 2." -BOONE: "End of Act 2." guxusws,»
GREEN: But in interesting movies, I still get completely immersed.
BOONE: Yeah.
GREEN: Look atAnsel. Ansel is ready to fight.
BOONE: Yeah.
He's like, "What did you say to me?"
-And in this, we love this. GREEN". Her eyes.
BOONE: And you know there is a mix, like this push here
I don't believe was in the original version. You can add a lot of pushes in post.
So, sometimes it is preplanned and other times in editing you find,
"Ah, it would be really nice to push in here." And you can push in
and give it a kind of a gentle move.
-GREEN: Yeah. -And that face,
is just the greatest face.
I love Dafoe so much.
She just toe-to-toe matches him.
GREEN: Well, it is the ultimate for me...
Wow, that sounds braggy but it's a character
-who conflates honesty and cruelty. -Yeah.
GREEN: He thinks that to be cruel is a way of being honest.
BOONE: Yeah, and he does give her the key to the movie that she solves for herself
by thinking about what he said a little bit longer
until she gets to the eulogy.
But he does give her the truth, he just does it in a way
that he's such an attacker that she can't hear him.
It's like maybe if he was a different person. Did you think about...
Any specific authors did you model him after?
I know I told Dafoe, when he showed up in the white-looking suit
at the funeral that I wanted him to look like Tom Wolfe.
Like The Bonfire of the Vanities Tom Wolfe.
GREEN: I think Tom Wolfe is probably a much nicer guy,
-to be fair. -BOONE: Yeah. Of course.
Yeah, you know, I was...
I guess I was thinking about sort of a dark version of myself.
I was thinking about all the times I feel like I have disappointed readers
and what if we took that to an extreme, the difference between...
There is always a canyon between
-the artist and the art. -Yeah.
GREEN: There is always a canyon between the thing that you make,
which can be very useful to people and the person you are,
which is a screwed-up person, just like everyone else.
BOONE: Yes, exactly. And would you say that, it is your family more than anything
-that keeps you grounded? -Yeah.
BOONE: Keeps you from becoming Van Houten.
GREEN: I feel like
-I could descend into serious depression... -This?
-...very, very quickly. -Yeah.
GREEN: But I have my family, I have close friends,
I have this net, this web of connection.
And I think for anyone, if you lose that web of connection,
it is absolutely devastating and a lot of times,
that can begin with a huge disruptive loss, like the loss of a child.
-BOONE: Yeah. -And then his marriage falls apart.
Then he withdraws more and more and more.
And it just becomes impossible for him to have that web.
It becomes impossible to rebuild those connections.
BOONE: Yeah. You just become so shut off from real human interaction.
-GREEN: Lotte did a good job. -Yeah. She is great.
Loved her on The Tudors.
Hired her immediately when we knew she was available.
I said, "Get... We need her now."
Yeah, she did a great job.
A lot of her interaction with Dafoe I find interesting
and it suggests a backstory that is not
necessarily explored, but I think there is some stuff there that is interesting.
GREEN: Yeah, absolutely.
I think it is true, we are the first feature film to ever be shot
inside the Anne Frank House.
We should talk a little bit about this. So, all the interior stuff
in the Anne Frank House where Shai is actually climbing the stairs
is a set in Pittsburgh, built by our great production designer, Molly Hughes,
and a lot of other people were involved in the building and construction of this.
And it was a very long process, working with the Anne Frank,
to get the plans, to get the measurements.
-GREEN: But it was precise. Down to... -It was precise.
-...the width of the stairs. -Yeah.
Ben and I went and walked through the real Anne Frank House
when we arrived in Amsterdam and we had already shot the interior.
This here is the real Anne Frank House, what you are looking at here.
But once they go up the stairs it becomes a set,
all the way up to the attic and through the kiss.
GREEN: In fact you cannot visit the attic
-at the Anne Frank House. -You cannot visit anymore. Yeah.
GREEN: It is structurally unsound.
BOONE: Wow. And Ben and I went through the real Anne Frank House
-and we were so overcome with déjé vu. -Mm-hmm.
BOONE: Everything about it was so precise that it was just a very eerie thing.
So, I would say, we had one of the greatest production designers on the planet.
She really did a beautiful job building this place. It was a huge expense.
GREEN: Yeah. Yeah. But it was very important to the movie.
BOONE". Yeah. So important.
And there was just no way we could get into the Anne Frank House
shoot at the length we would have needed to shoot at.
GREEN: Right, this would have been days.
BOONE: Yeah, the very last night of the shoot
was actually at the Anne Frank House
and we only had two hours. So, we had to plug off...
You know Ben was just running around
with his rig and we were just grabbing as many shots as we could.
GREEN: That was a very special night.
-BOONE: It was. -We got to say goodbye to the movie
together in that place that meant so much to me and meant so much the story.
BOONE: Yeah.
-I mean, this, for me, was... -I can't get through this
without crying a little bit, Boone.
-BOONE: Oh, are you already? -(LAUGHS) I just got choked up a little bit
-thinking about the Anne Frank House. -BOONE: I know.
I mean, this was also a scene that was one of the ones that I broke down for Fox
when I pitched to get the job, because this felt like
the most critical scene in the movie from a character standpoint, from Hazel.
It is the moment where she decides to
give herself, give up fighting Ansel. Stop resisting him.
And actually be in love and be happy and take her own advice.
GREEN: Yeah, well, I think it is a question of deciding
that it's his choice.
-BOONE: Yeah, it's his choice. -That it's his choice to care about her.
One of the things I like about the way that Shai plays this scene is that
-it's her decision. it's her kiss. -Yeah.
GREEN: She kisses him.
It's very rare in a Hollywood romance, particularly about teenagers,
-that the girl kisses the boy. -BOONE: Yeah, absolutely.
-GREEN: In the book she's thinking... -And that is why in the Hollywood version,
-at the beginning, Ansel kisses her. GREEN: Right. He kisses her. Exactly.
Um, but, you know? In...
This would actually now be impossible because you cannot go up there.
BOONE: Yeah, you can't go up there.
But in the book, she talks about wanting to reclaim...
Thinking about, "You can't make out in the Anne Frank House,"
and then thinking, "Well, Anne Frank made out in the Anne Frank House."
You know, "Anne Frank was alive here. I am alive here. And while I am alive,
"| can make these active decisions, I can live, I shouldn't deny myself life
-"while I'm here." -Yeah.
GREEN: "And I should let this boy..."
If he's convinced that he's gonna be all right...
BOONE: Yeah, I mean that's what's so beautiful about this story.
So much of it is that, it's just living with fearlessness,
which I guess is the hardest thing to do,
-period. -Yeah.
We should mention that in a lot of these scenes, in rewatching it,
you can tell watching Ansel that Gus knows that he is sick.
-BOONE: He's certainly... Yeah. -There are a lot of moments,
for me at least, where I can tell that...
-BOONE: It's how he looks at her. -Yeah.
BOONE: So much of it is him knowing that he is on bought time.
And you can see him just soaking her up with his eyes.
It's really beautiful. He's just, like, drinking her.
GREEN: But I also sense that hesitance of him that he knows that he hasn't told her.
-BOONE: Yeah. -He knows that he's gonna have to tell her.
-He knows there is no way out. -BOONE: Yeah.
GREEN: And there is something brutally difficult about that, about knowing.
-It is a kind of betrayal not to tell her. -BOONE: Yeah.
It is a betrayal. But it was a kind betrayal.
GREEN: Yeah. I mean, I think
-it's a complicated betrayal... -BOONE: It was a human betrayal.
He certainly didn't do it maliciously to hurt her. He did it 'cause he loved her.
GREEN: Yeah, you know he wants to have this.
BOONE: That is such a beautiful shot, the light's so beautiful.
She looks fantastic and this kiss is just... Yeah.
For me, this is where it all comes together. Score. Picture. Everything thematically.
Like, this is the moment.
-And that kiss is great. -We made them do it 30 times.
-BOONE: So many times. -Even after I think you had it.
-BOONE: Yeah. -Everybody just wanted a few more.
-BOONE: Right. Why not? They're kissing. -Look at his eyes.
It's in his eyes, right then that I can see it.
BOONE: Yeah. All that love. -All that feeling.
BOONE". Oh, man. And this is followed by my favorite line in the movie.
The voiceover. And my favorite scene in the movie.
-It is really my favorite scene. GREEN". Really your favorite scene?
BOONE: The love scene. -Okay, you are no longer allowed...
After this moment you are no longer allowed to
cite a scene as your favorite scene.
All right, so the love scene coming up is my favorite scene.
It is the one scene... Well, there's probably more than one scene...
It hasn't changed once since our first cut.
Robb, cut it with me
and we repurposed this music. This music was written for the funeral scene
and for the scene where she wakes up in bed at night.
-GREEN: Wow. -And we were
cutting this scene and we were like, "No. This doesn't feel right."
And I went out to go grab something, came back and Robb was like,
"What about this?" And that was it.
-GREEN: I love the music in this scene. -It's so beautiful and it's so haunting
and so sad. It's why this moment works.
Like, just his vulnerability
here is just so powerful and it's that haunting, gentle piano melody.
It makes it sweet and it makes it sad.
Which is like the use of Kodaline at the end of the egging scene.
It's going melancholy a little bit after having this big moment of happiness.
GREEN: Mm-hmm.
-BOONE: There we go, this is for the girls. -(LAUGHS)
My editor always says, "We have to have this in here for the girls."
GREEN: Oh, man, he doesn't even work out that often.
BOONE: No.
GREEN: It's frustrating. I remember being on set with him.
I was like, "I run faster than he does."
(LAUGHS)
It is just that he has been given this physique.
BOONE: He has the body of a Greek god and that is just how it is.
-GREEN: Right. Yeah. -That's beautiful.
This is the one day of the movie that I chose not to go on set.
I thought that it just would be weird
and uncomfortable and I am so glad I didn't
because I am so glad I get to watch it.
BOONE: Yeah, I mean, the only people in the room,
and there were no monitors on outside,
it was me, Ben, the focus puller.
H wasn't even in there. Who's the second?
-GREEN: Kristen? Yeah. -Kristen.
It was Kristen and then Jake was in the bathroom
-with a monitor, just for the leg shot. GREEN". Wow.
So, it was very, very private
and we shot it very quickly.
Just covered it from a bunch of different angles
and we had it. They knew exactly what this needed to be.
-GREEN: Right. -You just wanted it to be real
and to be kind of gentle and beautiful
and like what it made you feel when you read it.
GREEN: Since you mentioned him, we had an amazing first AD on this movie, H.
BOONE: We did. H. H. Cooper, who is one of the...
-Yeah, he is a great guy. He is. GREEN". It's weird talking about H
in this particular moment. But he is great. He was so helpful.
BOONE: He is. We are going to be working again together.
-And Missy as well. Executive producer. GREEN". Yeah. I'm gonna fight...
She'll do it. She'll come back for Paper Towns, for sure.
GREEN: I love that. I love this scene. -This is a Jake Braver visual effects shot.
It is also a very romantic shot.
GREEN: Yeah, I love that it's...
You know, I love that they are allowed to be
-desirous and sexual. -BOONE: Yeah.
-'Cause what kid isn't? GREEN: Yeah.
-BOONE: What teenager isn't? -I got a question once on Tumblr,
"How do they have sex?"
-BOONE: With their private parts. -And I'm like, "People with disabilities
-"can have sex." You know? -BOONE: Can have sex.
I guess maybe it is a movie first with
just the cannula in the shirt and just all the trouble with it all.
-GREEN: Right. -It's kind of great.
Now, we always debated this, so my editor...
A bunch of... We always were like, "So, if it's not inside the circle,
"does that mean they..." And I know that you have done this before,
but would you explain the circle so that anybody who doesn't know,
can understand that it does mean that they had sex.
GREEN: Yeah. It does mean that they had sex. It used to be that all
17-year-olds with one leg were inside the circle.
-BOONE: Yes. -And now it is that
some 17-year-olds with one leg are inside the circle.
The implication being that Gus has moved out of that big circle of friendship.
-BOONE: Yes. Okay. -So, yes. They did it.
BOONE: Several people asked me, I was like, "No, they definitely did it."
But there is some intellectual thing behind the circle that I don't know. (LAUGHS)
There's a name of the circle, though. What is it called?
GREEN: A Venn diagram. -Yeah. Exactly.
GREEN: Karen Kavett, a longtime nerdfighter,
made the original Venn diagrams in the book
and also helped me to understand how Venn diagrams work.
BOONE: Yeah, see, I didn't have anybody explain that to me.
-So, I was confused. (LAUGHS) -They did it. That is it.
But maybe it is ambiguous enough that
that's how we held on to our sweet, sweet PG-13.
BOONE: Oh, no, they did it. You're hearing it right here.
This next scene is obviously
one of the most painful scenes in the movie to watch. What was it like to write it?
GREEN: No. It was really hard to write it.
Well, do you remember where you were when you wrote this scene?
Yeah. I was at Starbucks, where I wrote most of the book.
And this was one of the days where I I wrote it over many days,
-but I cried, I cried a lot. -Yeah.
-GREEN: It was very difficult to write. -And I will say,
we have now been in several screenings where the people who have read the book,
I've heard them start to cry as Gus sits down,
before he even says anything.
GREEN: Yeah. It's such a difficult...
He has no choices left.
I mean, it is a difficult moment.
He just doesn't have a choice.
BOONE: P.S. That boat, behind there? Not really there.
-We put that there. (LAUGHS) -Oh! Good work.
BOONE: I believe of all the shots in the movie,
the shot on the bench, I think, is an iconic shot.
It could be one of those shots people see, and just instantly, it's like,
-"Oh, yeah, that was that moment." -Yeah.
BOONE". So, it's just a hugely painful scene.
And he's great. This is one of the only exterior scenes we shot in Amsterdam,
other than outside of Van Houten's house and outside the Anne Frank House.
We were here for half a day. They're doing these incredibly vulnerable
(CHUCKLES)
Moments of acting while they have boats going by them,
really close to them. Huge boats, people waving.
GREEN: Tourists waving and taking pictures.
BOONE: Tourists yelling at them.
And you really have to block it out.
-GREEN: It was also freezing cold. -It was freezing.
GREEN: They had to be surrounded by these big coats the moment that
-you yelled cut. -Yeah.
GREEN: And they just... Yeah. -Get a coat on Shai as quick as we can.
'Cause those tears are freezing on her face.
GREEN: They just stayed in the moment. It was amazing.
BOONE: Yeah. Ansel was just... Yeah.
And her going down on his...
I always find this to be really... Yeah.
GREEN: This was a moment in the movie when.
There were a lot of these, where I just felt like...
-BOONE: Love that cut. -Oh, yeah. These people are just giving me
a tremendous gift that they were
sharing so much of themselves with the story.
BOONE: Yeah, that's what you want more than anything is for
actors to be vulnerable for your camera.
And usually, the only way to get that is to be vulnerable with them.
But, yeah, they opened their hearts to this movie.
(CRYING)
-Hey, listen. -(SNIFFLES)
Don't you worry about me, Hazel Grace, okay?
I'm gonna find a way to hang around here and annoy you for a long time.
(CHUCKLES WEAKLY)
BOONE: So, I do really like the Ray LaMontagne song
that plays at the end of this scene and carries us back to Indianapolis.
Or Pittsburgh, depending on how you want to look at it.
And this was a B-side he had written for the Gossip in the Grain album
that he had and that he had never used or given to anyone
and we were lucky enough to get it.
And it survived from some of our earliest cuts.
GREEN: It was important to me that they can still kiss in this moment.
-BOONE: 'Cause you would. -Yeah. You can be sad
and devastated and trying to process something
and still attracted to the people you like.
Particularly if they are as good looking as Shailene and Ansel.
-BOONE: Yes, they are quite good looking. -Oh, man.
(BOONE LAUGHS)
GREEN: And such great people. -Yeah.
-They are wonderful people. -It's been such a privilege to
become friends with both of them. And Nat and really the whole cast.
I am sure your movies are always like this, Boone.
But it was such a positive vibe,
-every day on set. -Yeah.
The first one was like that, too.
So much of, I think, the best thing about making movies
is you are kind of like a wandering theater troupe.
GREEN: Mm-hmm. -You just always go
and you've got a whole new crew of people
and you become a family and the family splits up
and you go make another family and sometimes you carry people over.
So, it's the relationships you have and the moments you have with people
and the wonderful people you get to meet when you make a movie that's so much
the important thing, it is the part that nobody sees who sees the movie
'cause you all put all the love into it.
But there's a whole other story behind the making of the movie
and just the friendships that are built and the times that you have.
GREEN: Yeah. I always felt like a movie was a kind of a delusion.
-BOONE: It is. -And all these people come in...
BOONE: It's not the real world. It is a world you create.
GREEN: Yeah. Yeah.
BOONE: They throw you in a strange city with a bunch of people you don't know
and very quickly you get to know each other very well.
GREEN: Right. It's almost like summer camp.
BOONE: ll' is.
GREEN: You just become so close so quickly.
BOONE: It is like summer camp.
GREEN: Then you smash to Gus and Hazel being cute.
BOONE: And back to Nat Wolff, who we've missed seeing. Here he is.
GREEN: Yeah.
-BOONE: Isaac. -It's too long of a break without Nat.
BOONE: Yeah, we'll talk a little bit about Nat's preparation for the role.
So, he wore blinding contact lenses
when he was on set and blinding sunglasses
when he didn't have the blinding contacts in.
Um...
His mom took him out to New York City
and, I guess, took him around while he was...
GREEN: He walked around blind for a couple of days.
BOONE: And had him throw eggs blind and did some things like that.
And Margaret took him around.
GREEN: He also got to meet with a guy named Ethan, who went blind in his teens.
-BOONE: Wow. -And that was really important for Nat
because it was a way to talk to someone who had been through a similar experience
and he found Ethan really, really funny.
-BOONE: Yeah. -But funny with an edge, with a hard edge.
And I think he brought a lot of that to the character.
BOONE: Well, that is something I have said and I'd say it before,
it's like meeting these kids who are living with cancer
validated the book for me so much.
Like, I loved the book but meeting kids who were actually like Hazel and Gus
and had such big worlds and talked about so many interesting things
validated everything about this story for me
'cause they really felt even more real after that.
GREEN: Yeah, I am lucky that some of those people are still my friends.
I am going to see PJ tomorrow and we saw Josh and Cindy just a couple of days ago.
BOONE: That's so cool. -And some other people as well.
It is really special to be able to continue those relationships.
-This is a great Nat Wolff line. -Nat Wolff improv. Yeah.
-One of my favorite little moments, is him. -Yeah.
-BOONE: "Eggs? I smell eggs." -Did he grab that cigarette, too?
BOONE: Yeah, that's just him. He's like, "Give me a cigarette."
ISAAC: Hey, guys?
I smell eggs. That eggs?
BOONE: So good. GREEN: I love this car.
BOONE: "It's exhilarating, " was also one of my favorite things that he improvised.
(LAUGHS) "It's so exhilarating!"
GREEN: One of my favorite lines in the movie,
one of the most important lines in the movie, to me,
is an improvised line in this scene where
Gus says, "It's all dark to Isaac, "
and Nat's about to throw an egg and then he stops and turns around and he says,
"| am blind, not deaf and I don't love it when you make fun of my disability."
Because that is a moment where he refuses to be the butt of the joke.
-BOONE: Yeah. -He refuses to be the joke,
and he is like, "| am a funnier person than you are."
BOONE: He's like, "| am a character in my own movie."
GREEN: Exactly, "I am a funny person, not a joke,
"and I am going to prove that to you right now."
It is a way of calling out your best friend really lovingly.
-BOONE: Yeah. He did. -And he just did that in the moment.
BOONE: Yeah, no, and that's what you want in movies, more than anything else.
It's like those little magical things that they add to it that make it so much better
-than it was in your head. -That is the absolute magic of a movie.
-BOONE: It is. -I always thought that it would be less
when it became collaborative.
That somehow it would be less my vision alone.
But what actually happened in the case of this movie is
that it became more. All of these peoples' passion and talent and skills came together
to make it something that was much greater than what I had imagined.
BOONE: Yeah, having made two movies, I don't believe in the auteur theory
or any of that stuff. So many people work on a movie
and so many people make it work.
It's everybody. It's a gigantic collaborative effort.
I don't know that there is a more collaborative art form than making movies.
I mean, you'll see a thing at the end of the movie that says,
"13,000 people worked on this movie over hundreds of thousands of man hours."
-It's just true. -Yeah.
Speaking of how many people work on this movie, by the way.
The person who threw that egg
as the door was closing
-and managed to get it perfectly. -Yeah.
-GREEN: That is not a special effects shot. -No.
GREEN: That really happened. -We said, "Who's the best pitcher here?"
We had some people try out and that's what he did.
GREEN: It was an amazing, amazing throw.
BOONE: We weren't supposed to throw eggs in the house
and I know we had to spend some money cleaning up the inside.
-'Cause it went all over her carpet... -Worth it.
BOONE: ...expensive chairs. -Worth it.
-Very nice house. Yeah. -But it is in movie history now.
And I love this.
So, my first assistant editor, Greg Borkman,
put this Kodaline song in the movie.
And sent it to me on set
and I was so grateful to him for finding it and getting that moment tonally right.
I owe him a lot for that.
One of my best buddies.
GREEN: And this is where you start to really sense Hazel's fear.
-BOONE: Yeah. -Just the way she pulls the phone
-up to her ear. -'Cause she is expecting it at any time.
I know for Ansel, this next scene was
a really, really important scene for him as an actor.
Um...
Probably the most gratifying day for him on the movie, I think, he would say.
He really went to places he'd never been before,
I know really went home feeling like he had really given it his all.
GREEN: Yeah, it's just so raw.
BOONE: And this is just Ben Richardson running around with a handheld camera.
That's pretty much how this entire scene was shot.
I was behind him, with his butt in my face most of the time holding an HD monitor
and I'd just run after him and look at everything.
So, there was a lot of energy on set on this night.
We shot very late at night.
We also shot the ambulance scene, which was cut from the final film,
immediately following this, so this was a 5:00, 6:00 in the morning shoot.
We were just there all night and it was cold, cold, cold.
-GREEN: He was just... -Yeah. He just goes for it.
-GREEN: ...in that place. It's tough to watch. -It's tough to watch. Yeah.
GREEN: But, I think, this is what's really important to the movie,
that you see this reality
of your life becoming more circumscribed of the...
-BOONE: The dehumanizing... -(STAMMERING)
GREEN: That it is really, really difficult to hold on. Look at how bad...
He just wants to hold on to
his dignity, his sense of self and it's just being taken away from him
-and it's so hard for him to live with that. -Yeah.
GREEN: And that's the real hero's journey of his story,
that he starts out looking like a hero, looking strong.
BOONE: But he's actually just a scared little boy.
GREEN: Yeah.
And it's only when he becomes open and frail,
that's when they're most together.
That's when they're most honest with each other.
That is a journey that we are all going to have to take,
and he doesn't get to make it the way that he wants to.
He doesn't get to jump on the grenade and save all the kids like he wants to.
It's a different kind of heroism, but still very real.
BOONE: I thought a lot about the thing that struck me the most about the book
and in the movie, as well, that I related the most to my own life was
my friend who passed away, who had cancer,
who I was in hospice with,
and was with him up until he passed away.
He was a guy who didn't feel like he had accomplished that much in his life.
He had done sound for game shows for years and owned a record store,
and he gave me my first job,
and I was good friends with him for about seven years.
And he was a father figure to me.
He always was so worried that he didn't do enough or he didn't try to do enough.
He passed away and we went to just a little memorial thing for him,
and so many people came and I saw how many people's lives he had affected.
And I thought a lot about Gus and about my friend when I read the book.
That just resonated with me so much,
just her saying, "Isn't it enough that I love you?"
-GREEN: Well, and to be loved deeply. -Yeah, and to be loved deeply.
GREEN: In our culture, we reward broad love.
We think that the best kind of life is the kind that everyone notices.
The kind that you're famous or notorious or whatever.
But the truth is that all that really matters is the deep love,
the love between the people you're really connected to.
When he talks about that, and it will be very soon,
-Hazel really pushes back. -Yeah.
GREEN: That's maybe my favorite scene in the movie,
because Hazel just does not...
Even when he's dying, she won't let him...
She thinks that's just bull.
BOONE: It's not until the very, very end that we know that she got through to him.
GREEN: Right.
BOONE: 'Cause the reality of the dreams you have for your life against this reality
has got to be a pretty crippling thing,
'cause you feel like you could do anything, you're a big basketball star.
Everything should be going according to plan.
GREEN: Mm-hmm.
Yeah. No, I mean, it's just a difficult thing to...
It's really difficult to reconcile yourself to.
You know, I was thinking a lot about my friend Esther
when I was writing the book and also when we were filming the movie.
We started filming the movie the day after the third anniversary of Esther's death.
I was thinking about how...
Esther never knew, or I guess she did at the end of her life,
she got a lot of attention from
within the community of people who watch her videos.
It was a very important community to her.
But the meaning in her life, the real meaning in her life, was in her life.
It was her connections to real people.
And that's what Hazel's trying to say to him here.
Yeah. And I think it's hard to hear, 'cause you still...
You've been taught your whole life to want to be famous,
to want to be successful, to want to make an impact that everyone notices.
It's hard to hear that there's meaning in treading lightly, but there is.
And I like that she doesn't let him off easy just 'cause he's sick.
You think that the only way to lead a meaningful life...
is for everyone to remember you, for everyone to love you.
Guess what, Gus. This is your life, okay?
This is all you get.
You get me, and you get your family,
and you get this world, and that's it.
And if that's not enough for you,
then I'm sorry, but it's not nothing.
BOONE: But then those tears come up when she says...
It's always moved me so much when she said, "I'll remember you. I'll love you."
'Cause that's all anybody really wants.
-GREEN: And that's all you get. -And all anybody really needs.
GREEN: Yeah, that's all you get, 'cause it doesn't...
Being loved widely doesn't fill the void at all.
BOONE: 'Cause they still didn't know who you were as a human being.
So, it's the people who remember you and knew you and spent time with you
-that carry you on. -Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Like that line that Laura has about how she'll always be Hazel's mom.
BOONE: Yeah. Nothing will change that.
GREEN: And it is true. I think,
certainly, as long as either my son or me is alive,
-I'm going to be his dad. -Yeah.
GREEN: He's going to be my kid. -Yeah.
GREEN: That relationship does survive death.
The love does survive death, in that way.
BOONE: And they're survived through you, and you're survived through them.
GREEN: Yeah.
That's one of my favorite moments in the movie,
-the way that she clinks his glass. -Yeah.
GREEN". She's still kind of annoyed.
-She's still a little bit annoyed with him. -(BOTH LAUGHING)
GREEN: Now I'm the one talking about all my favorite moments.
BOONE: Yeah, yeah. You got favorite moments.
GREEN: /do. (LAUGHS)
And this is nice. This is a very nice touch
that was not in the book, that I like a lot.
BOONE: And this was Molly's idea,
-and we just said, "Great idea. Let's do it." -Yeah, it's visually beautiful.
BOONE: Which is, like I said, when you get people who are good at their jobs,
they bring great ideas to you, and you say yes as often as possible.
You know, there's a shot of Shai in the grass at the end,
wearing the white dress,
and that was just Mary Claire being like,
"I think she needs to wear a white dress. I think she needs to be transformed."
And she said, she said... (LAUGHS)
Ben and I were cracking up when she said it, but she was like,
"Maybe she's dead, maybe she's alive. We don't know. Maybe she's a ghost."
(GREEN LAUGHS)
GREEN: I loved that and it was really important to me.
Because the last two words of the book are "| do,"
the thing that you say when you're getting married.
And having her in that white dress, putting her in that,
-you know, it's a wedding dress. -Yeah.
GREEN: You can read it a lot of ways.
You can read it as a wedding dress, you can read it as a funeral dress.
BOONE: I loved it 'cause it wasn't literal
and it wasn't a specific time that it was taking place in,
and there was something sort of like...
I don't know. I liked the white, it felt transformative.
Once again, it was a stretch of a choice that I just believed in
-and I was like, "Let's do it." -Yeah.
BOONE: I didn't need it to make literal sense to me.
GREEN: Right.
That's what I like about it.
BOONE: This was a very challenging scene to film.
It was definitely one of the most challenging days on set.
It was one of the most important scenes in the film to get right.
Everybody had very strong opinions about what this scene should be.
We fought and scraped for every bit of it but we got it,
and it's one of the most powerful moments in the movie, I think.
Everybody gave so much of themselves that day
and cared so much about it being translated properly.
GREEN: It's a hard scene 'cause you had to hit two or three notes pretty quickly
that are hit in the book over several pages.
You had to do all of that kind of together.
And it was really, really difficult.
But, I think, in the end,
largely down to their performances.
I think Scott and Mike rewrote the scene several times.
BOONE: Many times, yeah.
GREEN: And I think... I was going to say "we. " I think they finally got there,
and it's really, really powerful.
BOONE: And even at the end, even in editing, we did some juggling.
We moved some things around, just trying to get that rhythm right.
It's such a long scene and it's all conflict.
And it's just making sure that you don't hit the same points over and over,
and everything is gotten across as succinctly as possible
and is balanced right,
is the key to scenes like this.
-GREEN: It is so hard to make a movie. -So hard.
(LAUGHS)
GREEN: And it happens over so long.
I was there on set and I could never have guessed.
I was there on set this whole day.
I could never have guessed what this scene would look like.
-You know what I mean? -Oh, yeah.
GREEN: I would never have imagined. -I was praying it would work.
GREEN: Yeah. I mean, I didn't know if it had worked.
BOONE: Yeah, 'cause they went to so many places
and it was so all over the place emotionally.
But what they gave you in the editing room is they give you choices.
So, it doesn't just have to be one thing,
and you could go down a lot of different paths.
What you want is to collect all the raw material that you can,
so that once you get in the editing room, you can play
and try to write the scene in as many different ways as possible
and just see what works.
GREEN: I want to rescind my earlier statement that
the scene at Funky Bones was my favorite scene in the movie.
This is my favorite scene in the movie.
It's also my favorite, favorite day on set.
BOONE: This has my favorite performance moment
from Shailene in the movie, definitely.
GREEN: This is what Shailene did in her audition
that made me think that she had to be Hazel.
BOONE: Same. Absolutely. I felt the same way.
I was worried. Shailene is so athletic and so strong-feeling that I was like,
"She can't be a frail, fragile girl who has cancer."
And when she walked into that audition room, she was that girl.
She was not Shailene Woodley anymore. She came in and she was Hazel.
That was a special night for these guys, too,
for Nat and Ansel and Shai.
This was the culmination, I guess, of the Pittsburgh shoot, in some ways,
and they were just so connected and so on the same page.
GREEN: Yeah. And we stayed up probably till 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning.
-It was a really, really long night. -It was a long night. A lot of dialogue.
Once again, a lot of camera setups.
Takes a long time to light.
You run it and then you got to re-setup another camera angle and light it again.
-It's not easy. -Again, I want to underscore that.
Every single shot that you see has been lit separately.
BOONE: I love that you're so amazed by this.
GREEN: I was completely amazed by it.
My first few days on set, I was like,
"This is so inefficient. Why can't they just light it for everything?"
And the answer, of course, is that you can't.
-You can't do that. -'Cause then it would look like bad TV.
-GREEN: Right, exactly. Right. -(BOTH LAUGHING)
GREEN: That's the difference between a TV movie and...
BOONE: Yeah, that is the difference, it's the time that's put into every shot.
GREEN: The way this shot is framed is so beautiful.
BOONE: Yeah.
And Nat makes it so credible, and he makes it so...
Going from the humor and pathos to the emotion is, uh, no small feat.
GREEN: I wanted this, I wanted the story to be a story where you laugh,
like, literally, laugh while you're crying.
My favorite part about watching the movie so far
with an audience has been hearing these laughs,
where Isaac says, "Then, having made my point... Robot eyes."
And then he gets emotional again.
I think that's so real,
that feels very realistic to the teen experience to me.
-BOONE: It's all those emotions. -That you're still yourself, you're still funny.
But you're also devastatingly sad.
BOONE: And then we come upon, what I'm sure...
So, I was inside the sanctuary with the actors,
and outside of the sanctuary was everyone else on monitors.
So, when Shai was giving this eulogy, I was in here, obviously,
and I wasn't out there to experience it.
-Was everybody just losing it? -Yeah.
I mean, I was.
BOONE: I knew you were losing it.
-GREEN: I was sobbing. -(LAUGHS)
GREEN: I was sobbing in front of a bunch of strangers,
because there were, like, agents on set that day.
And my publisher was there.
Julie has been with me through this entire process,
through almost many, many years of working on this book.
To have her there in this moment...
This scene in the book was very hard to write.
It took a lot of drafts and it was very slow.
BOONE: What was the draft process like?
Was it just the expanse of it and you were just shrinking it?
GREEN: Yeah, I was just trying to get it to its core.
BOONE: Yeah.
GREEN: I should say here that Hazel was wrong about set theory.
The infinite set of numbers between zero and one
is not bigger than the infinite set of numbers between zero and two,
but she's also right about set theory,
in the sense that what she took from Van Houten is correct,
that some infinities are bigger than other infinities.
I was interested in the way that...
BOONE: She understood what he meant.
Yeah, exactly. She didn't have to be right about the details to understand.
-BOONE: She learned a lesson. Yeah. -Exactly. That was the idea.
BOONE: Yeah.
GREEN: Yeah. This was directly from the book.
The dialogue is just directly from the book,
and it was one of those moments where I just felt like
she had an almost supernatural understanding of
the Hazel of my imagination.
BOONE: This was the scene that got her the job.
There was no doubt within a minute of her doing this eulogy
in a room with me and my casting director, Ronna Kress.
It just didn't take any time, and I was like, "Why did I make this so hard on myself?"
'Cause we auditioned 200 girls.
I was like, "Shailene's in her early 20s. She can't be 16."
She came in, and she was.
And there was no looking back. She was as good as it got.
I think she's the finest actress working in her age range without any doubt.
GREEN". Oh, yeah. She's just amazing.
BOONE: And this is the moment, for me.
It's the moment that she puts her hand to her face.
-She puts her finger to her nose. -Mm-hmm.
BOONE: It's my favorite little performance moment from her in the entire movie.
I think it's just great.
It's the stuff that great acting is made of.
GREEN: Those long shots on Gus are so... -So emotional.
GREEN: They're so difficult to watch because
you know it's the last time you're going to see him in the movie.
BOONE: Well, you don't. Nobody watching the movie knows.
GREEN: I do. I know. -You do. You know it's the last time.
That's right and they did the music so beautifully.
Nate and Mike did right when she did this right there.
GREEN". She's just trying to hold on.
BOONE: And I don't even know if she's in the scene at this moment.
It's her trying to keep it together so she can continue the scene,
but it's those little things that you steal
that make it so... They just all add up.
She's so good here.
We really can't say anything bad about anybody.
It's like everybody was so wonderful.
It's like there's no bad stories to tell.
GREEN: It was a very charmed few weeks on set.
The whole time just felt like a dream come true for me.
BOONE: I mean, these actors had a hard job.
-GREEN: Well, they had to work so hard. -They had really, really difficult jobs.
GREEN: I spent three hours acting,
and I thought it was awful.
I was like, "Why did I agree to do this?
"This is so much worse than just being professionally excited."
I think we have to stop joking now
because something horrible is about to happen.
BOONE: So, this was shot during the day.
Ben has blacked out the windows and done the set for night,
and we were all downstairs around the monitors,
and this was the hardest thing to watch making this entire movie for me, definitely.
If you've had somebody close to you die, you'd know
what it's like to lose control, grief-wise.
She understood that and went for it.
And we were so grateful to her that she was willing to go to that place
-and make it this real. -Yeah.
It was definitely the rawest scene in the entire movie, for me, was this.
Your heart goes out to her so much.
GREEN: I was worried about her. I wanted to go up and check on her.
-(BOONE LAUGHS) -I did. I was really worried about her.
I mean, it was just so, so hard.
And I was thinking about the losses I've experienced.
She just takes you to that place. She lets you connect to your own emotion.
BOONE: 'Cause you remember. She makes it authentic.
And that's why you recognize and identify with it,
-because she's made it real. -Yeah.
I also liked that you trusted their performances enough here
-not to have any dialogue. -Yeah. Yeah.
GREEN: (STAMMERS) We know what's happening.
BOONE: Yeah, 'cause we shot it, Ben and I did, where it's close,
comes a little bit further back, and there's a wider.
And editing-wise,
Robb and I were just convinced we had to hold on her face the whole time.
We didn't use anywhere near the amount of footage we shot.
GREEN: Yeah. I mean, the crazy thing is that Shai probably did that 12 times.
-BOONE: Yeah, absolutely. -And every time, it was devastating.
That's why I wanted to go upstairs,
-'cause I was concerned about her. -(LAUGHS)
GREEN: And of course, after she did that for three hours,
she came downstairs and like, sat in the chair next to me,
"Hey, John, you want to go to lunch?"
I was like, "No, I don't want to go to lunch, Shailene. I'm terribly, terribly sad."
HAZEL". Later, when I started feeling better...
the nurse came in and she called me a fighter.
BOONE: We brought rain machines on this day.
(LAUGHS) But we brought our rain machines in and it was actually raining, too.
GREEN: Yeah. But it rained more, thanks to the rain machines.
BOONE: This is one of my favorite cuts in the movie.
Off her closing her eyes, to her eyes being closed at the funeral
I think, is a beautiful visual transition.
GREEN: Was that purposeful? Did you plan that out?
BOONE". Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
It's a nice...
I'm actually on the bed behind Shai. (LAUGHS)
You just can't see me.
I've been hidden.
GREEN: Yeah. /never made that connection.
I never saw how clever that was till just now.
-BOONE: (LAUGHS) Yeah, yeah. -Thanks for mentioning it.
And Ben, when Van Houten walks up here,
I love how he lit her face so much when she looks up at him.
GREEN: Mm-hmm.
BOONE: He puts this shaft of light on her face,
and it just makes the moment so powerful.
GREEN: One of the things that was really important to me...
There you see Murph in the foreground, by the way,
in his wheelchair there, on the screen left.
One of the things that was important to me
is that the movie not have that kind of gauzy lighting
that you associate with cancer stories.
I thought Ben did an amazing job of getting the light right
so it doesn't look over lit, it doesn't look over romanticized.
BOONE: Yeah, it just goes back to having the right references at the front.
He and I definitely... I had seen Beasts and knew his work.
We vibe to the same photography and the same looks in movies.
So, it was a harmonious partnership.
GREEN: And I love that he's wearing a white suit.
-BOONE: Yes. -Can't get anything right.
Can't even do a good job of being at a funeral.
(BOONE LAUGHS)
Isn't part of it is just like
Van Houten wants attention at the end of the day?
Just like everybody else.
GREEN: He thinks that he's going to be the center of it somehow.
BOONE: His "fake-pray"
-delivery I thought was classic. -It's such a good moment.
BOONE: Yeah, there.
GREEN: And I love the cigarettes.
He had an open casket in the book.
This is a little bit different, but I really love this moment,
I love this shot.
Obviously, you can't have an open casket at the actual burial.
BOONE: Yeah. In the script, there was originally two scenes.
There was originally a scene at the church
and then there was a scene at the graveyard.
I felt strongly, and we talked about it more as filming progressed,
and we ended up cutting the scene at the church,
'cause we thought that it could all happen in one fell swoop,
and we also felt like
once Gus dies, you really have to move quickly to get to the end of the story.
So, we compressed a little bit,
but you get everything you need here, all the beats get across.
Isaac, I think, had a second eulogy here originally.
I just was so long. There was just too much stuff,
and Isaac had already given such a beautiful fake eulogy earlier,
it felt like that encompassed it.
GREEN: Yeah. And his real eulogy in the book
is not nearly as good as his fake eulogy.
BOONE". Of course. Neither of their eulogies are.
GREEN: Of course, yeah. Shai's is not nearly as good.
Although, she did a great job. These are all improvised lines.
BOONE: Yeah. This is just her giving a speech, yeah.
But I liked very much the point of it with it being for his parents,
less so than for her.
She had had that moment for herself before.
GREEN: She'd said what she needed to say to Gus.
BOONE: If you look here in the background, you'll see Nat Wolff coming up on his cane.
-Which I appreciate. There he is. GREEN". Oh, there he is.
BOONE: And he's getting a lot of help there from his stage mom.
This is very nice.
I like this scene a lot. She's great.
Just taking that moment there is really nice.
GREEN: This is another moment where it's quiet,
when a lot of movies wouldn't have...
You let it be quiet. You let there be some space.
That air is so necessary, I think, for the viewer to be able to feel
-what she's going through. -To process everything that's happened.
-And then he comes and ruins everything. -Right.
Yeah, you need that quiet moment to
-make this really disruptive and miserable... -(BOONE LAUGHS)
...so you feel like, "Oh, God! Why is this guy in my car?"
BOONE: Yeah. Why is Dafoe here ruining everything?
GREEN: Oh.
BOONE: But then you get to that moment where he admits he has a daughter.
That humanizes him so much for me.
It doesn't make him any less of a disaster. It doesn't forgive his behavior.
But at the same time, it gives you such a deeper understanding of
how he got to this point.
GREEN: And he's trying, he's just trying in this son' of horrible way.
BOONE: Well, it's 'cause he spent years being this person that
I don't think he really understands how to help people.
GREEN: Yeah, he's just been so disconnected from people for so long.
The only person in his life is someone he employs.
BOONE: Exactly. And he treats her badly.
GREEN: He just doesn't know. He doesn't know how to do it anymore.
And that's one of the great tragedies, I think, when you do disconnect,
a lot of times it becomes really difficult to reconnect.
You see in his face. It's hard for him to even look at her.
'Cause I think it's just hard to communicate with people.
And I'm sorry for yours. And sorry for ruining your trip.
You didn't ruin our trip.
-We had an amazing trip. -(CHUCKLES)
Are you familiar with the Trolley Problem?
There's a thought experiment in the field of ethics...
known as the Trolley Problem.
Philippa Foot was an English philosopher--
Oh, my God.
Hazel, I'm trying to explain something to you.
-I'm trying to give you what you wanted. -No, you're not!
You are a drunk, and you're a failure...
and I need you to get out of my car right now...
so that I can go home, and be by myself and grieve!
You'll want to read this.
I don't want to read anything. Can you just get out of my car?
-Please get out of my car! -Fine.
(CAR DOOR CLOSES)
(ENGINE STARTS)
BOONE: This is one of those moments you worry is going to get cut,
that the studio is going to ask you to out.
But it's so critical to give you this breath
before she has the last, kind of the epilogue to the film,
with her dad and Nat and then with the letter.
Just having her by herself here.
And this was just Ben saying, "Let's just drive and get it."
-And we got that. -The song and the light...
BOONE: The song and the light and the sun hitting her in the right way,
everything came together perfectly
and it's a really nice breath before you come to the ending of the movie.
-GREEN: I love that song, by the way. -It's so beautiful, yeah.
Love this moment with Sam.
GREEN: Yeah, this is such a nice moment with Sam.
And this was really important to me because...
-BOONE: You have a kid. You understand. -Yeah.
You're always trying to explain to your kid the nature of the love, you know.
And this is a moment where he can kind of get at that.
But you can tell he's just so sorry.
BOONE: Really, in all of the books I've read and all the movies that I've seen,
this moment, for me,
and the moment with New/and Archer in The Age of Innocence
where he talks to his child saying, "| gave up what I wanted the most for you."
And this, where it's like,
"That you've loved someone gives you an idea of how much we love you,"
is some of the most beautiful parent moments with children.
And I believe in real life they're good parents.
-I just feel like that translated. -Yeah, yeah.
I think it was probably nice for them to be able to play good parents.
(BOTH LAUGHING)
GREEN: A lot of times in their roles they don't.
BOONE: Yes. Sam has twins, twin boys, and Laura has children as well,
which allowed them to connect deeply.
GREEN: The only line in the whole movie that I miss is a line in this scene where
in an earlier cut, he said, "Are you angry? I'm angry."
And she says, "Yeah, I am angry."
-BOONE: Do you want us to put it back? -Is it too late?
The movie comes out in two weeks.
-BOONE: It's too late. -It's probably too late.
Yeah, it was one of those things, it's for time, some of it,
you take a little bit out of every scene
just to make it be honed properly.
But it really felt like we needed to get on with it.
So, I liked it as well.
I really like the awkward hug.
GREEN: Yeah, the awkward hug. It's very Hazel and Isaac.
BOONE: Yeah, where he's not sure how...
He knows she needs to be comforted, but it is Gus' girl.
GREEN: Right, right. It's still Gus' girlfriend to him.
Ew. He's not my friend.
How do you know about that?
Well, I was talking to him at the cemetery...
and he said he came all this way to...
BOONE: This piece of music was the music I brought to Fox,
which closes out the movie,
which I listened to as I drove to and from the hospital every night
where I was visiting my friend who had cancer.
The M83 album, it had just come out.
I found this in my car, and this was how I coped
when I drove home every night was to listen to this M83 song.
So, this is one of those surviving things
from me just reading the script and wanting to make the movie
and really feeling like this song could encapsulate their relationship
and kind of how big it was.
And the key, I guess, was to find a song that felt big enough that
it could hold that infinity inside of it. (LAUGHS)
So, it always felt like this was it and this survived through every iteration.
GREEN: I think Gus' voiceover here is so good.
BOONE: So on point.
Yeah, he did such a beautiful job.
We recorded it two or three times. We recorded it once at the house here.
But it was in the basement and the entire time it's just so loud.
People are clomping around above.
We just honed it each time.
To be able to go back and have done it
after the fact that after he had given the performance,
he was so much more connected to who Gus was.
GREEN: Mm-hmm.
BOONE". One of my most beautiful shots in the movie is that shot right there.
-GREEN: Yeah. -It's beautiful.
That is all Ben Richardson.
He found these amazing lenses.
We were trying to get these Barry Lyndon lenses
that they lit with candles.
He found this distorted lens and we did all those moments like that.
And this one as well.
This is one of my favorite moments in the movie
and in the script when I read it, was this moment.
GREEN: And the way he grabs her hand is really lovely.
BOONE: And the specificity of the nail polish.
It's like specifics are what make things real.
And this felt really real to me.
Yeah. He gave a beautiful, beautiful performance. They both did.
GREEN: Yeah, it was such a gift to the story to have them together,
and, I think, over the course of the movie, they just became so close.
And you really feel that.
BOONE: So, here's the white dress in question.
GREEN: There's the white dress I love.
BOONE: Mary Claire, I said, "Bold choice," and we just ran with it.
I do still get emotional when I watch the end.
Everything just comes together.
(SOFT ROCK MUSIC PLAYING)
GUS: You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world...
but you do have a say in who hurts you.
And I like my choices.
I hope she likes hers.
Okay, Hazel Grace?
Okay.
BOONE: You know, it's funny, we lost this shot.
In editing, they swore to me
we didn't have the close-up of her face at the end when she says, "Okay."
-GREEN: Oh, wow. -It was lost in a bin somewhere.
And I was like, "Okay, I guess we're ending with this medium shot of her."
We had punched in as much as we could and we didn't have the close-up. (LAUGHS)
And Neustadter saw it and was like,
"Dude, what about the close-up at the end?"
I was like, "| swear we shot it, but I can't find it,"
and we went and searched and found a bin that they were in...
-GREEN: Thank goodness. -...on the Avid and we were able to get it.
Robb was like, "Oh, my God! We almost lost this shot." (LAUGHING)
So, let's talk a little about Wyck.
Wyck and Isaac, who were the on-set producers,
and Missy, who handled the money and really was our mom, in so many ways.
-Huge, huge assets to this movie. -No movie without them.
BOONE: There's no movie without them.
Isaac found this book.
He was one of John's champions.
He and Wyck loved this project for so long, before I ever came along,
and had a deep understanding of it.
-Let's see who pops up here. -Here's Mary Claire.
BOONE: Mary Claire, who is wonderful.
-There you go. Go, Woodley! -There's Shailene.
Yeah. I mean, I do think that producers...
-I almost didn't understand what they did. -They guide. They're your guide.
-GREEN: But, yeah, they... Right. -If you have a good one.
GREEN: They shepherd the movie from the very beginning.
BOONE: Yeah.
GREEN: That was so important to this particular project.
Because this is not an easy movie to make.
BOONE: No, it's really difficult.
GREEN: It's not easy to get it green-lit. It's not easy to get someone hired to direct.
-The whole process was challenging. -Yeah.
They got this to completion in the shape that it's in now,
translated this purely without it becoming diluted
is a miracle, a small miracle in Hollywood, I would say.
GREEN: It really is. It's very difficult to do this kind of thing in Hollywood.
-Ronna Kress did an amazing job. -She did an amazing job.
GREEN: I loved this cast.
-I'm so grateful to her. -Yeah.
There's Missy, who we love.
H, who was my first AD, is one of the best guys on the planet.
Kristen, as well, did a wonderful job.
GREEN: Yeah, Kristen was so comforting to me.
Yeah, all the times that I spent with Kristen was just like getting a hug.
BOONE: But why H and Kristen, worked so well for me
is because I'm pretty laid back and H was totally laid back,
you'd never know it was a bad day on set. (LAUGHS)
GREEN: No, I never knew when either of you guys were stressed out actually.
BOONE: Big shout out to Jake Braver.
There are more VFX shots in this movie than in the first Jurassic Park.
GREEN: Wow! Is that true?
BOONE: You'll never see them all, but Jake did them.
And I really wanna really point out Katrina Schiller.
Katrina was the music editor on 12 Years a Slave.
Has done a lot of work with Michael Mann.
What Katrina's job is,
is to create a temp score that Nate and Mike use as their guide
-when they go in to actually do the score. -Hmm.
BOONE: So, her finding pieces that felt right for me, that I was comfortable with,
she was a huge architect in what the sound of this movie is
and what the score ultimately was.
GREEN: Deb Peterson, who did the...
Was a very good friend of mine on set and always very kind to me.
BOONE: I'd point out Luca as well.
GREEN: Luca, the script supervisor, is some kind of genius.
She worked on almost every Robert Altman film.
So, she has worked with some of the greats.
She was a wonderful supportive presence on set.
She made me very comfortable
and made me feel like everything would be okay. (LAUGHS)
GREEN: Yeah, the grips did a very good job.
Those were some of my favorite people to hang out with.
-BOONE: They were so nice. -Yeah.
BOONE: Just everybody we met in Pittsburgh...
John Adkins was fantastic.
-Kate Chase was great. -John Adkins is an Indiana guy, by the way.
BOONE: Ah. That's why I like him. All these guys.
GREEN: Now I feel bad for all the people we aren't naming,
-'cause everyone was great. -Everybody.
GREEN: The props manager, Kelly.
BOONE: Everybody, day to day, going into work,
was a, uh, beautiful thing to be a part of.
They're all wonderful, wonderful people.
GREEN". Your assistant, Jon Ong.
-BOONE: Yeah, Jon was fantastic. -Great guy.
Really fun to hang out with.
-BOONE: He took care of me. -Always had your Starbucks.
BOONE: Took good care of me. All I need during the day is my green tea
and he made sure I had that.
You need a lot of green tea to get through a movie. (LAUGHS)
GREEN: You consume more green tea than...
BOONE". I'll point out Skip Kimball, our colorist,
who did every James Cameron film.
He's one of the best colorists in the business,
and he did a wonderful job on this film with Ben and I.
Um...
So many people. The catering people were fantastic.
-Mark was wonderful. -Mark was amazing.
BOONE: He took good care of us.
GREEN: Every day the food was just gold.
BOONE: The Amsterdam unit's so wonderful, so friendly.
We were only with them a couple of days.
They were as wonderful as the people in Pittsburgh. We were really lucky.
GREEN: Yeah, they were really welcoming to us.
Again, great food and nice people.
BOONE: Really nice people.
I'll point out Phosphene.
Phosphene did a lot of visual effects work on this movie with Jake.
They cut Gus' leg off, they put the stars in the sky.
They did a lot of the harder effects shots and they did a great job.
GREEN: Congratulations, by the way, for listing
Christ ls Our Friend, written by Mike Birbiglia,
as one of the songs in the movie.
BOONE: Felt like he needed it. That's Bill Ricchini,
also a buddy of mine, who had a song in the first movie.
Jake Bugg, who we love. Alex Wolff, who is Nat's brother.
That's the song Nat's singing...
(BOTH LAUGHING)
...when he's having his emotional breakdown.
-It's actually a song his brother wrote. -(LAUGHING)
Yeah, all these songs are wonderful. We were really lucky. All these people.
Birdy for writing so many songs for us.
She wrote some songs with Dan Wilson from Semisonic.
Lykke Li, who is wonderful.
We were really lucky. We had wonderful music.
Point out again here all these medical professionals in Pittsburgh
who opened their doors to us
and gave us access to their patients and their facilities
just to have the realism in the movie.
It just was absolutely necessary.
John, do you want to say anything as a wrap-up here
as we're getting to the tail end of the crawl?
Do you have any final words?
GREEN: The only person I think we haven't thanked and honored is Josh Boone, who...
-(BOONE LAUGHS) -.. . I'm just gonna say it,
just made such a great movie and it felt like such a gift to me,
and I'm grateful to him every day.
BOONE: I was only as good as the people I was surrounded by,
and they were the best of the best.