Veronica Roth joins the growing list of authors whose work has been adapted into movies. The film version of her first book, "Divergent," opened in theaters Friday.
The 2011 bestseller is the story of a future world where the walled-in citizens of Chicago are divided into five factions. The system begins to show cracks when a young girl learns the truth about those in charge. The three books in the young adult series have sold more than 11 million copies.
Because of the popularity, Roth was approached about selling the movie rights. Many authors balk at allowing others to turn their works into scripts, but that was never a problem for Roth.
"My anxieties were just the standard anxieties of any author who hands over their work to be adapted. But I know that from the second the book hits the shelf, it stops belonging to the person who wrote it. It starts belonging to everyone who reads it. So I was pretty well practiced in letting it go a little bit, which is a good thing," Roth says.
The reality is that Roth wouldn't have been as happy with the final product if it had been an exact representation of the book. She spent more than 400 pages creating the world, characters and events. A movie with that much material would run more than eight hours.
Any anxieties Roth had faded once she picked the production team. She was confident that director Neil Burger — writer/director of "The Illusionist" — would make the right decisions in turning her book into a screenplay.
"The challenge for me was fitting all that story into a movie because we loved the story and all of the different characters and all the different events. But the movie is a different beast than the book. It has different dramatic needs. There are a lot of events in the movie and they are compressed. It has kind of a crazy pace because of that," says Burger, who was happy that Roth was on set or a phone call away if he had any questions.
Roth was kept in the loop on all decisions made in making the movie. That meant she had to split her focus with writing the third book in the series, "Allegiant," while the casting was being done for "Divergent."
