Let’s talk about the second book. Can you explain how you chose it?
When we were doing a deal with Deca, they were like, “What’s the second book? Because the first book is the first book, but the second book is what really interests us.” And I went, “Well I think right now it’s going to be this.” We started working on it, although I couldn’t really work on it because obviously my energy was focused on Lizzie Bennet.
So we started developing it and also considered the format of “girl talking in room” as the base. Then I ran into a roadblock, and what happened was I went, “Alright, darn it, I have to switch books.” So in late November I went to them and said, “I’m switching books, I’m switching to this.” And they said, “Okay, you do whatever you want.” Then I realised when I was doing the second book that this one felt boring. It’s not a boring book, but it felt like the way we’re doing it was boring.
“It felt like ‘Lizzie Bennet’-lite.”
Pride and Prejudice is the better story, most people would say that, and this doesn’t work as well and we’ve already done a lot of things. We can’t do things like costume theatre; I feel like no matter what we do that would feel very, very derivative. So we don’t have that element, so this book is going to feel very, very stale.
Was the second one an Austen book?
That’s unconfirmed. Then I switched back to the original book, not only because that one got me bored or it didn’t work, I actually figured out the hook in the other one. How to fix it, how to fix the thing that I couldn’t figure out how to fix. And so far, it’s the same. I think it would actually be very catastrophic if we switched books now. Not catasrophic, that’s a big word, but it would be difficult.
Problematic.
If we switched books now, in the time where people are discussing it and talking about how we are doing it. We had a budget meeting the other day, and all that, so it’s like, “Well, we’ll figure it out.”
You mentioned “girl talking in room” as the basis – would you consider adapting a book with a male protagonist?
Well, we have said that the next book is in the Austen, Bronte, those books, and all of those have female leads. So it’s pretty obvious that it’s going to be a girl as the main character.
But would you try a male protagonist in the future?
Oh absolutely. First person genre stories, if you think of any of the old monster movies – Dracula, Frankenstein – told in a kind of diary form. There are ways to do it. They would require a lot more effects and production and stuff, but there are ways to do it. At some point, if the format grows again, then the team can grow and the business can grow, then we will start doing other novels. And there’s also the other option too of non-public domain books coming to us and saying, “We want you to do our book as this.” Especially since not every book can be a movie, but every book wants a movie deal.
Has anyone approached you?
Not yet, but I think it’s still early. I think if we pull it off again with the second book, they’ll come out of the woodwork. They’ll just be chomping at it. Basically every book that has a movie option that has expired, or a movie option that never got made, would try to see if “Hey, can you do it for us?”
The Kickstarter is now over $350,000, which is ridiculous and great. What extras can fans expect to see on the DVD, given how much it has raised over the target?
It’s great, it’s crazy but it’s great. We know there are captions. We’re pretty sure that we’ll have a couple captions in different languages. At this point, Portuguese is probably a likely one, we have a large fan base in Brazil. I’m guessing next would be Spanish, and my guess for the next country would be Germany. We’ll explore all those things, we have to budget it all out.
I have actually not seen the new DVD budget, based on wanting to do captions, and we have a little more resources to play with, but we’re not going to go crazy. We’re going to try to keep is relatively close to the original budget of DVD production, but at the same time we want to have a good DVD. Captions of course are important to us, so I’m really happy to see that. We’re going to just have more and more featurettes.
“There are some deleted exchanges, not deleted scenes, but deleted exchanges between characters, and we’re going to have those in.”
I’m willing to try and do as many behind-the-scenes things I can think of; for example, when I was flying the other night I was looking through one of my journals, and I noticed that I had written out by hand a couple episodes of Lizzie Bennet, in outlines and in script, and I think I’m going to put some of those in the DVD.
I don’t know what other things we have planned, I just need to talk to the actors and see if, “Hey, do you guys want to do something fun?” I don’t even know what that is. I’m sure the answer is, “Yeah, let’s do something fun!” but we don’t know what that is. We’ll have fun with it for sure.
Have there been any more developments about how the transmedia elements will be presented on the DVD?
It’s not just how do you show tweets on a screen, it’s how do you show tweets on a low resolution screen.
With terrible navigation.
With terrible navigation. The navigation is what absolutely kills me in this. A clunky navigation system, particularly with an old DVD player, that really worries me. I don’t want it to be a bad experience. Maybe it’s all there somewhere, somehow as a digital file, but to have a bad experience, that means people don’t watch, period. That’s the big hurdle. If someone sees a way to do this, show it to me, but it can’t just be do motion graphics and show tweets on screens, because that’s not what it is. It’s also the user experience.
As a last resort, would you consider printing an accompanying booklet that has all of the transmedia events in order, or if you couldn’t make it interactive would you just not do it?
The booklet thing I’m not opposed to. I, as a storyteller, want all the story to be on the DVD. I want to find a way to do it, I just don’t want it to be bad.
Images: Lizzie Bennet Diaries, lizziebennet.com
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