John Green says he is a novelist with a day job making YouTube videos. That seems a modest position description, particularly right now: he has been named one of Time’s 100 most influential people, and has written an international bestseller that has just been made into a Hollywood movie.
The Fault in Our Stars, which came out in 2012, is Green’s fourth novel for young adults (he has co-written a fifth). It has been a phenomenal success from its first publication. Green made the mistake of vowing he would sign all pre-ordered copies, and ended up autographing the entire first print run of 150,000.
The story’s central characters are Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus Waters, two sharp, witty and fiercely intelligent teenagers in love. They both have cancer, and their dark, funny and devastating story provides obvious pitfalls for a Hollywood adaptation. Yet the path from book to film was fast and harmonious, and the movie has been made with a kind of imaginative fidelity that is likely to find favour with the novel’s most demanding devotees.
Green, 36, says he wondered if it were possible to make a Hollywood film ”in which the leading woman has tubes in her nose for almost the entire movie, but she’s not treated as a precious little thing, she’s not treated as a mere tragedy.”
“She has a full, rich, complicated life,” he says. “And I really worried that nobody would be able to do that. But in the end I was convinced by the passion of the producers and the studio; they seemed totally committed to all the stuff that mattered most to me.”
At the same time, he knows films and books are different beasts. “I really don’t feel an ownership over my books once I’ve finished with them. Once they’re out, I really don’t think they belong to me. I think books belong to their readers. And so I hope I wasn’t too precious about it, or too protective about it.”
He went to the shoot, intending to watch for a few days, then stayed for most of it. “The director and producers thought it would be helpful to have me, [so] that the actors could bounce ideas off me and talk to me about characters.”
He had a ball. He describes how moving and fascinating it was for him to watch Shailene Woodley, who plays Hazel, cry on cue, over and over, for several hours, then ask him if he’d like to go for
