Forget CGI, franchise frenzy and universe-building that goes on in movies — what comes first is words on paper.
Just ask the screenwriting team of Michael H. Weber and Scott Neustadter, whose expertise is adapting sometimes difficult novels into mini-masterpieces of character and emotion. Their newest, “Paper Towns,” is the second John Green novel they’ve adapted after last year’s “The Fault in Our Stars” and the latest in a string of nuanced, fully-rounded scripts that also includes “(500) Days of Summer” (2009) and “The Spectacular Now” (2013).
In “Paper Towns,” opening Friday, Nat Wolff plays Quentin, an Orlando high school senior whose lifelong love for his enigmatic neighbor, Margo (Cara Delevingne), is given a jump-start when the two share a night of mischievous pranksterism. But the next day, Margo disappears, and Q and his friends follow a trail of clues they believe she left to find her in another part of the country.
“Fault” was the duo’s first foray into the Green publishing phenomenon, and though “Paper Towns” was semi-familiar territory, it brought it’s own, unique set of challenges.
“As a book, ‘Paper Towns’ has a lot of different elements in one story,” says Neustadter. “It doesn’t really lend itself to a screenplay structure. So we asked ourselves, What is this story about, and one of the things downplayed in the book, we wanted to ‘up-play, which is, appreciating the friendships you make as a young person.”
Adds Weber, “The book has a lot of moments which, as a reader, are natural spots to stop and then pick up again, and you can’t have that in a movie. You need to make it flow from one moment to the next.”
Their streamlined alterations may be a small surprise to Green’s legion of young fans, but the result is a stronger, tighter story, all done with the blessing of Green, who had tried to adapt the book into a screenplay himself years ago.
“There’s not a lot of movies where everyone gets the girl but the hero,” jokes Neustadter, remarking on one of the similar aspects between the ‘Paper Towns’ novel and their screenplay.
“‘Paper Towns’ could not have been our first collaboration with John, because we needed to go through the experience of ‘Fault in Our Stars’ not only to build trust with im — in both directions, but get to know John and understand what’s important to him,” says Weber.
“The trust had to be there. We had to take those chances and play up certain things. We could not have done that if this was our first adaptation of a John Green book.”
Weber and Neustadter met in the late ’90s, when both were working at Robert De Niro’s Tribeca Films. They started collaborating on scripts, even after Neustadter went to the London School of Economics and, shortly after, got married and moved to Los Angeles. Weber is based in New York.
Their unique style of cross-country cross-talk is a benefit, they say, as their screenplays are hashed out “on the phone, on email, on shared documents, coming together as we’ll talk out an idea,” says Weber.
“All of our adaptations start as a endless conversations on multiple platforms at once.”
Often, those ideas come from subtle grace notes that find the crux of a novel and make it visual.
“Every adaptation has their own interesting, fun obstacles,” adds Neustadter. “The most wonderful thing about doing a script from a book is, you get to be a fan first. It’s like, you read the book first and fell in love with it first, and then you get to think, how am I going to make the best version of this?”
The duo says that their favorite page-to-screen adaptations are “GoodFellas,” “The Godfather,” “The Graduate,” “The Shawshank Redemption,” and “The Remains of the Day.”
Coming up for them is an adaptation of “The Disaster Artist,” about a guy who made a a notoriously awful movie called “The Room”; “Rosaline,” a version of “Romeo & Juliet” told from the point of view of another, unseen character in Shakespeare’s play; “Me Before You,” a drama starring Emilia Clarke set for release in 2016; another Green adaptation, “Looking for Alaska,” based on the author’s debut novel; and “The Rosie Project,” from Graeme Simsion’s book, which Jennifer Lawrence has just signed on to star in.
“Our greatest compliment on an adaptation is when people tell us they love something that’s in it from a book, and it’s not in the book,” says Weber. “Because that is the illusion you’re trying to pull off: It should resemble the feeling people have when they read the book.”
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