One of the biggest questions we had to ask The Perks of Being a Wallflower author and director Stephen Chbosky was a quite simple one: Why did you direct your own book?
Furthermore, we had to know if there was any other director he could’ve seen taking the project on.
“This one was so special and so personal to me that I couldn’t possibly leave it to anybody else,” he told Hypable at the Los Angeles premiere last night. “I really felt like I owed the fans a faithful adaptation of a book that I know has meant a lot to them. It was for them.”
Could he have seen any one else direct? “No,” he replied bluntly. “Listen, I love a lot of filmmakers out there. I really admire Cameron Crowe. There are so many people I think are tremendous. Jason Reitman is great.” But ultimately it came down to being “very true” to the story. “I know what [the story] means to some kids. I could not mess it up.”
For Chbosky, the first time as a big director had to bring challenges. “The biggest challenge… totally boring answer, but this is the truth. What’s the most challenging is that, when you write a book that is a first person, subjectatory, epistolary novel, and then you take it to something that’s completely objective like cinema, but with the same catharsis and the same emotional impact and the same sense of intimacy, they’re completely different languages and to find the picture that went with the thousand words was hard.”
We also spoke to lead actress Emma Watson at the premiere, who spoke briefly about Potter and also told us what drew people into the Perks story.
Hypable’s review of Perks describes the film as a story with “perfectly picked actors, eloquently written plot, and thought-provoking messages on love and life.” It makes its limited release in the United States on September 21.
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