INSURGENT : EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEWS!

INSURGENT : EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEWS!

The second film in the Divergent series is reaching for the sky, Richard Edwards finds out

A funny thing happened to Divergent on the way to the big screen. While it was busy becoming the closest thing to a rival for The Hunger Games’ crown as queen of the YA sci-fi franchises, its young stars suddenly became hot property in Hollywood. Not a bad place to be when you’ve got a sequel, The Divergent Series: Insurgent, on the way.

Not only has leading lady Shailene Woodley followed up her starring role as heroine Tris Prior with a memorable turn in hit teen weepie The Fault In Our Stars, but Ansel Elgort was her co-star in Fault…; Miles Teller’s nabbed the role of Mr Fantastic in the upcoming Fantastic Four reboot and has also attracted awards season buzz as a young drummer in Whiplash; Zoe Kravitz is about to put the pedal to the metal in Mad Max: Fury Road; and Jai Courtney will be the new Kyle Reese in Terminator: Genisys. Not bad for a bunch of 20-somethings who – while hardly unknown – were far from hot box office when they signed up for a big-screen adaptation of Victoria Roth’s bestselling book series.

“It’s thrilling,” producer Lucy Fisher tells SFX. “We’ve now done two movies together and we know them really well. It’s thrilling to pick people that turn out to be that talented for your own movie, and then to watch them fly into their future with the kind of work they’ve each been doing. Everyone’s cheering everyone else on. That’s the good part. The bad part is now trying to schedule them!”

GRIM FUTURE

A quick recap for anyone yet to choose a faction. Roth’s phenomenally successful trilogy of novels (Divergent, Insurgent, Allegiant) is set in a post-apocalyptic future where the authorities keep order by sifting the populace into five factions based on their personalities: Abnegation (the selfless – they love a bit of public service); Erudite (the intellectual elite – they like technology); Dauntless (the brave – they’re into tattoos); Amity (the peaceful – anything for a quiet life); and Candor (the honest – they tell it like it is).

In the first movie, Beatrice “Tris” Prior’s mandatory, state-sanctioned aptitude tests revealed that she was Divergent, possessing attributes of all five factions – a big no no. So she left her home in Abegnation to join the all-action Dauntless group, spending the film learning the ropes, forming a relationship with instructor Four (Theo James) and keeping her Divergent status a secret from the movie’s Big Bad, Erudite leader Jeanine (Kate Winslet).

“They’ve gone through 40 years of living in a year,” laughs Douglas Wick, Fisher’s fellow producer and real-life husband. “So Tris has begun in the normal rite of passage of trying to find out who she is, where she’ll excel, with the conventional rite of passage identity problems. Then things start to get much more complicated as she finds out she’s different.

But when she starts to discover who she is, to have both parents die, to have to kill a close friend, and to have the world she knows ripped apart – that’s as traumatising an event you can give a young woman.” “Yeah, I think everyone was weathered by what they went through in the first movie,”

Fisher adds. “The characters are all much more complicated. The first one is very much about finding yourself and trying to find your own identity and separate from parents and do that. In this one it’s, ‘Okay, I have my identity. Now, what do I do with it? What kind of person am I going to be with that?’ It’s the next level of evolution as a human being, and things aren’t so black-and-white.”

Insurgent opens with Tris, Four (now also revealed to be Divergent) and a small group of allies (including Tris’s Erudite brother Caleb – Elgort) on the run from the authorities. Dauntless leading light Eric (Courtney) is now Jeanine’s attack dog hunting them down, as their fugitive status takes them to places we haven’t seen before, expanding the Divergent world in the tradition of all good sequels.

“We don’t have to spend 10 minutes explaining the whole setup, and it’s a big relief,” laughs Fisher. “In the first film Tris was born and grew up in Abnegation and then she moves to Dauntless so we sort of saw that whole thing, but this time we go to Amity and Candor and Erudite. So we experience a whole other way of living and thinking.”

We also get to meet an entirely new group – or more accurately a group we didn’t actually know were a group. The Factionless were all over the first movie, but we thought they were just vagrants wandering around future Chicago because they had no place else to go.

In Insurgent it’ll turn out they’re actually a rather well-organised outfit, led by franchise newcomer Naomi Watts as Evelyn – who just happens to be Four’s mum. “She’s our new villain and a great addition,” says Fisher. “She’s the source of a lot of Four’s problems, and someone you can’t quite get a pulse on. What is she really…?”

“From our interaction with the fans we found that there was really a fascination with the Factionless,” chips in Wick. “Because the Factionless, in a world encumbered by rules, are more or less rule-less. Part of the fantasy of the Factionless is freedom, subversiveness, not having to do your homework. We took that very seriously, even in the construction of the Factionless world. From afar they seem to be homeless, then you see that they’ve hidden the fact that they’re very well organised. We basically said, how do you show a world hidden beneath the city, that’s highly functional? So there’s a lot of warrens and each warren you’d see is made of repurposed junk from the other factions.”

FRESH START

With Divergent director Neil Burger having stepped aside, Insurgent has a new man at the helm in the form of Robert Schwentke (Flightplan, RED, RIPD). “Robert had two really strong qualities,” explains Wick. “First, he’s completely fascinated by psychology. When he came into the room, he was so fascinated by the issues facing Tris, of how a person who’s had so much grief and guilt manages to go on in the world. He came in with just an utter fascination of how someone survives that kind of trauma.

“The second thing he brought was an extraordinary visual instinct. He was really intrigued by the tool that Veronica creates to sort of dramatically see someone’s inner life. When you talk about things like fear landscapes or these sims to see what your nature is – how much you’re Erudite, how much you’re Amity – to do those as vibrant action scenes, he came in with dazzling visual ideas. But what was great is it was always connected to psychology. We had too many directors who came in and they were either too much into the psychology or too much into CG effects which wouldn’t really be rooted in character. He really came in with a huge number of ideas and insights on both fronts.”

Those trips into characters’ minds –which formed a key part of Divergent with the initiation challenges Dauntless wannabes had to face – will be a part of the mix once again, though there’ll be new twists. “It’s much more visceral, much more visual,” says Wick. “One of the things we were allowed to do, just in terms of being faithful to the story, was the old sims are done out of Dauntless, so everything was appropriately low-tech. Now that we go to the labs at Erudite, we have much more licence – and we fully take it.”

It also looks like the sci-fi elements of the movie are going to be ramped up this time out. For starters there’s a new McGuffin that didn’t appear in the books, as Jeanine is obsessed with a box that could hold the secret of how the faction-based society came to exist from the ruins of the old world…

“In the climax of the book, Tris and Four find a message,” explains Wick. “What we basically did was take Veronica’s idea and try to adapt it into something that would work better for a movie. The license we took was to get into the room at the end of the book, so Tris has to face down one of her demons. We made the opening of the box not just be that one scene, but many scenes.”

“It’s an organising principle that wasn’t in the book, that Veronica likes,” says Fisher. “So far, fans have sort of said, ‘Yeah, that made it less confusing for me.’ But we’ll see.”

Keeping the fans happy is one of the movie’s biggest challenges. They love the books, debating minutiae to such a degree that any misstep could be crushed by the blogosphere.

“We try to stay true to the essence,” says Fisher. “We treat the fans like our partners in some ways, and respect them and invite them into the process a little bit – because we don’t want to disappoint them. They understand the material as well as anybody. But there’s always a group of fans that don’t want anything changed at all. They’ll write pages about how the colour of Tris’s hair was not how they imagined it. It’s an interesting world!

“The other thing that we’re very mindful ofis – and this is a very un-cynical thing – when you say 33 million books sold, unless you’re a moron, you say Veronica has tapped into something,” adds Wick. “She’s articulating some powerful thing in the culture. Frequently, we go back and ask why did all those people want to buy the books? They might say it’s because Tris’s hair colour is red, but then you have to use your own common sense to say, no, that’s probably not what turned them on. It’s more likely to be because Veronica is an extraordinary storyteller.”

The story doesn’t end here, of course, and Schwentke will return to direct Allegiant: Part One (inevitably, the final book is being split in two) when it goes before the cameras this summer. “The challenges are enormous,” Wick admits. “On Insurgent, we believe that we continue to better explore the characters, and to make the storytelling compelling. We’re very aware that each of the next two movies have to continue to advance creatively. You have to see more fascinating aspects of the character. It’s got to become more compelling visually and with more groundbreaking effects. It just has to do all those things better than last time, or certainly the people involved would be very disappointed.”

The Divergent Series: Insurgent is released on 20 March. Veronica Roth’s Divergent books are available now in bookshops and as ebooks.

Source : SFX