Veronica Roth: The Divergent Official Illustrated Movie Companion

Then, in storybook fashion, things changed very dramatically for Veronica Roth. Some months before this, she had attended a writers’ conference, connected with a literary agent—Joanna Volpe—and submitted a manuscript to her, which Volpe ultimately rejected. When the story of Tris and Four was finished, though, Roth sent it to Volpe first. Within one month, Volpe agreed to represent Roth and also sold the rights for the entire Divergent trilogy (which was not written yet) to Katherine Tegen Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Not bad for an author who was about to graduate from college.

Arriving at the height of a red-hot moment for dystopian young adult fiction, and offering just the right balance of full-throttle action and powerful romance, the book was a sensation before it was even published. Buzz built within the publishing company as editors Molly O’Neill and Katherine Tegen shared the manuscript with their marketing and sales teams. Booksellers and librarians devoured the advance copies, certain they were reading the next big thing. Roth stoked the excitement as well, with her candid and approachable blog. When the book was finally published in May 2011, it debuted at number six on the New York Times Best Sellers list and kept climbing steadily to the top spot.

By then, a film was already in the works.

Author Veronica Roth’s first visit to her publisher’s headquarters in New York City.

Divergent ’s debut on the New York Times Best Sellers list.

Author Veronica Roth with producers Doug Wick and Lucy Fisher.

ENTER HOLLYWOOD

R ed Wagon Entertainmentproducers Doug Wick and Lucy Fisher came upon the manuscript before it was published and were smitten with what they read. They immediately brought the book to Gillian Bohrer, Executive Vice President of Production and Development at Lionsgate. Gillian remembers reading Divergent for the first time one weekend in January 2011. As the book wasn’t published yet, she was reading photocopied pages in a coffee shop, and the page that described Tris’s decision at the Choosing Ceremony was . . . missing. “I had to know what happened!” says Bohrer. “I read ahead and figured it out. And then I couldn’t stop reading. I just couldn’t put it down.”

That Monday morning, she started spreading the word at Summit. “I knew the story would break through to a movie audience,” Bohrer remembers. “It had so many themes that would resonate with teens, from challenging your limits to finding your own family. Plus it had these amazing set pieces, from the Choosing Ceremony to the Ferris wheel and the zip lining. . . . I could see them in my head, just when I was reading, and I knew they would make for a fantastic film.”

When Summit’s Erik Feig was in New York a few weeks later, he met with Veronica Roth’s film rights manager, Pouya Shahbazian. “Erik Feig came in with a game plan,” Shahbazian says. “A playbook. He loved the novel, and Summit knew to a T what it would take to make Divergent into a larger franchise.” Two months before the novel was published and became an immediate success, Shahbazian and Red Wagon sold the movie rights to Summit, with partners Red Wagon attached to produce. “Veronica’s books are so well written and the characters are so engaging,” says Rob Friedman, cochairman of Lionsgate Motion Picture Group, “that readers become captivated from the very first page. As a studio, it is stories and the characters found in book series like Divergent, which make for great source material for film. When you have great content, it becomes easier to bring it to life. We are fortunate that Veronica chose Summit Entertainment to be a partner to create a visual experience that matches what she has worked tirelessly to create. We look forward to delivering what we collectively have worked on with the release of Divergent and can’t wait to see subsequent films based on the franchise.”

Summit Entertainment was the studio behind the wildly successful Twilight films as well as The Hurt Locker , the 2010 Academy Award winner for Best Picture. It had a proven track record of making high-quality films as well as lush adaptations of young adult properties. And the Red Wagon producers, Doug Wick and Lucy Fisher, had been in the business for decades, creating classic films from Gladiator to The Great Gatsby .

Unquestionably, Roth and Divergent were in good hands.

Author Veronica Roth with producer Lucy Fisher.

Tris (Shailene Woodley) and Four (Theo James) explore Four’s fear landscape.

Doug Wick alsoremembers reading the book for the first time and being struck by its epic reach. Of the many potential projects he was considering at the time, Divergent stood out right away. He explains, “For me, it always starts with the story. And Divergent takes elements of a whole lifetime and compresses them into one moment in Tris’s life. These are universal themes: You leave home, and your parents become a sort of blank to you. Then you begin to realize that they’re more than you thought they were. At the same time, you move from familial love to romantic love. Later, you integrate romantic and familial love. And then you lose your parents . . . so much of this arc appears in Divergent , and we’re only with Tris for a few months of her life.”

Wick felt an immediate connection to the story and saw many opportunities to make a film version of Divergent that was narratively and visually stunning. Divergent could deliver action and suspense, but at its core would be a character very different from the kind of character you’d usually find in an action film. Like Veronica Roth, Wick was captivated by Tris’s strength and determination. “With a female protagonist, we’d breathe new life into a genre,” he says. “Male clichés have become tiresome in action films. But credible, strong female protagonists . . . that was a huge untapped opportunity.”

In addition, he loved that the novel gave readers unique access to Tris’s inner life in the fear simulations, and he was eager to take on the challenge of dramatizing them on film. In these sequences, filmmakers would be able to access Tris’s thoughts and feelings in a way that movies normally don’t allow.

FINDING A SCREENWRITER

P roducers Wick and Fisher, in cooperation with the team at Summit, began to explore how they would translate Roth’s story into a different medium. The first step would be to develop a screenplay; from that, everything else would follow. Summit and the producers asked screenwriter Evan Daugherty, who had recently written Snow White and the Huntsman , to adapt Roth’s novel.

Author Veronica Roth with screenwriter Evan Daugherty.

Daugherty remembers what initially drew him to the project: “Tris starts off in this incredibly sheltered, selfless, peaceful world, and then basically she decides to join the equivalent of the navy SEALs. That’s a big character arc—it’s fun to track that,” he told bloggers at Bookish. Daugherty responded viscerally to the book’s action sequences, but in the screenplay he took great care to balance them with the growing romance between Tris and Four. “It’s important that the chemistry between them doesn’t just feel like it’s thrown in,” he explained, “but that it helps Tris grow as a character.” Skillfully, he showed Tris’s character development within the framework of fast-paced action and ensured that each fear simulation scene drove the story forward.