(More!) The Spectacular Now Screenings
We have a few more tickets to screenings (all for next week) in the following cities:
(first come, first served basis- cities are filling up fast!)
- Baltimore, MD
- Indianapolis, IN
- Las Vegas, NV
- Pittsburgh, PA
- Sandy, UT
- St. Louis, MO
- Tampa, FL
- Wauwatosa, WI
- Winter Park, FL
Sign up for The Spectacular Now Screening here
Interview with Author Tim Tharp
Overall, how did you feel about the movie? Was it a good representation of the book?
I loved the way the movie came out. I thought the actors were were wonderful, James Ponsoldt did a wonderful job directing, and the screenwriters were really able to pick out the segments from the book that needed to be in a screenplay. I thought they captured the overall spirit of the book pretty well, I mean….very well! The book has a sort of unreliable narrator so it’s up to the reader to fill in some of the blanks, and for the director and screenwriters, they had the opportunity to show that on screen. Some of the things that readers would be picking up on themselves. So, I thought they did a great job with that.
How involved were you in the casting process?
Well I didn’t have any say in who got cast. They did connect me to a link where I could watch auditions, and I gave my input. However, that was when the movie was still connected with Fox Searchlight. After Fox Searchlight failed, I didn’t hear from them for quite a while until I heard that Shailene Woodley was interested in the part of Aimee. I think that Shailene’s interest and casting really got the film back on track. I had not seen an audition for her, or Miles Teller. But, when I met them, and I saw them on set in Athens, I was very pleased with the choices. They couldn’t have picked better people for those roles.
Did the screenwriters pick your brain at all while you were writing, or did that stay separate?
No, that stayed separate. I actually didn’t meet the screenwriters until they came down to Oklahoma City. At one point they were considering filming in Oklahoma City, the book is set there. But, I told them then, that it didn’t actually need to be set in Oklahoma City. It can really be set in any suburban area. They had already written the screenplay by the time I met them, and in the screenplay it was set in Oklahoma City. Later on when James Ponsoldt came on board he wanted to have it in his home town of Athens, because he could picture all the scenes there. That’s why it ended up in Athens. Besides using my novel, they didn’t pick my brain as the process went along.
Was there anything that interested you, or you were surprised by, in the whole process?
I was on set mainly during the prom scene. There were actually a couple of really great scenes I watched being shot that didn’t end up in the movie! So, when I watched the movie for the very first time I was surprised, because there was a scene where Miles Teller as Sutter does a monologue in front of everybody, that gets him kicked out of the prom. Then, there’s a scene between Shailene Woodley’s character Aimee and Brie Larson’s character Cassidy, where they get in a fight, a big shouting match. That wasn’t in there either! Both those scenes were really well done, but I think I understand why they didn’t put them in there. For one thing they can’t put everything in there and also, they wanted to keep a certain tone going, that when you compressed it down into a movie you can’t do certain things that are in the book and maintain the tone. In a book, you have a lot more area, a lot more space to do it in.
The film’s ending, and the book’s ending, is very open ended – do you have any hidden knowledge of what happened to them?
Well I don’t plan on writing a sequel, or anything. I don’t want to explain it too much more since it would be a spoiler for anyone who wanted to read the book, but the book and the movie do end differently. At the end of the book, I do leave it up to the reader to interpret what is going on. You can read what Sutter is saying, and take something else out of it. That happens at the end of the book when he is having this interior monologue about how great things are. An earlier example of this is after the prom – Sutter gets kicked out the prom, his girlfriend has a fight with his other girlfriend, they get kicked out of the after party – then the next chapter starts with Sutter saying, “All in all, the prom was a golden success!” So, I expect the reader to understand the irony. To what the character is saying, and what we, as readers, understand about this character.
I thought the way the screenwriters took it was a little more positive than how the book ended.
The book is really a tragic story. I still think the screenwriters left the ending somewhat ambiguous, the look on Aimee’s face doesn’t make it look like she’s about to throw herself into his arms. It looks like maybe she wants to think about this situation a little bit. I know that the screenwriters are big fans of the movie The Graduate, and the way that ended. I think there’s a correlation between these two movies in a way. When the screenwriters came down to visit Oklahoma City we were sitting around and we were joking and saying things like “we made Sutter a vampire!” Then they later on mentioned this ending and I started laughing and thought it was joke. But, what pictured at the time was this slow motion running towards each-other with their hair blowing in the wind. Something corny like that, and they didn’t do that.
Yeah, I think they did something great with the look on Aimee’s face – it is ultimately a question. Do you think that Sutter was good for Aimee, or is that just a complicated question?
He was good for her up to up to a point. He was also bad for her, with the drinking problem, and she was going along too much with that. In the end, he made a choice, that he maybe wouldn’t have made on the first page of the novel. That was to let her go. I think in the end he did do the best thing for her but it wasn’t the best thing for him.
What’s it like having all this new-found attention after the movie’s success?
I’m very glad that the book is selling more now, getting a lot more attention. For me personally I don’t really seek out getting a lot of attention, but I’m glad the book is and more people are reading it and finding it. I think that the movie and the book go hand in hand. People who read the book can go see the movie and enjoy it, and people who see the movie first can read the book and discover more about the characters.
Will the movie play in Oklahoma City?
It did! I just enjoyed working with everyone that was a part of it. They all have so much talent. The second time I saw it at Sundance I was able to watch it without thinking ‘oh they left those scenes out,’ I just watched it straight as a movie. That’s when I was really moved by it. There were some scenes in there afterwards I was thinking, ‘I’m not going to be able to do the Q&A after this!” We got through the Q&A just fine though.
Where did the inspiration for the characters of Aimee and Sutter come from?
Well the character of Sutter came from a bunch of different places. I can think of two specifically, one was from a short story I wrote when I was in my twenties. It was about a twenty year old guy who is a rebellious type and he ends up at this stuffy dinner party. That stuffy dinner party is in the book and it’s in the movie. I didn’t do anything with that short story for a long time. Years later I was having a coversation with a friend who just mentioned off hand a guy who would come home from school and mix martinis at 2:00 in the afternoon. It just struck me as interesting. For one thing I didn’t have any idea how to make a martini when I was in high school. Then, he’s doing it at 2 in the afternoon! I thought this must be a fun guy, but there also must be a problem there. Then, I sort of connected the two characters and Sutter’s voice came into my head. The other stories had a sort of sarcastic tone, but then I thought, what if Sutter had this sort of up beat and positive attitude while his life was unraveling? Then, it would be interesting. Then from his voice, everything else came. Then it was just a question of, who does Sutter meet? Who would be this person that he is drawn to, yet she would end up going along with things that aren’t good for her? That’s when I started thinking more of Aimee, and started thinking more of Cassidy, and others. What kind of people would Sutter be drawn to? Then I started thinking from their point of view.
Do you have anything new you’re working on?
Well I have a new novel out, it’s called Mojo. It just came out in April. As far as anything in the works, I like to keep that to myself until it becomes a little bit more completed! Mojo is a thriller about this slacker high school guy who finds a dead body in the dumpster. He gains a bit of fame around his high school for that until people start calling him ‘body bag’ instead – he’s kind of a chubby guy. As a result of that he decides he has to get his ‘mojo’ some sort of power or upper hand at school. He comes across a story about a missing rich girl in the paper. She’s been kidnapped, people expect, and there’s a 100,000 dollar reward. He decides that he is good at finding bodies, why not a missing girl? He and his best friends, Audrey and Landy look into the case, and get deeper and deeper into it and delve into the world of underground rich kids, and underground clubs, to find a solution to the mystery.
This concludes our exclusive interviews for The Spectacular Now. Check out all our interviews for Spectacular Wednesdays here!
