Garth Jennings talks Hitchhiker's Guide
Jennings Interviews on The Guide
LatinoReview
caught up with Garth Jennings and got him to spill a few spicy details about
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a Touchstone Picture that
comes out April 29th [yes, this Friday]. Personally, I like Jennings, the
guy has the potential to make great stuff. But if he blows The Hitchhiker's
Guide, I may never forgive him. On that note, here are a few details from
the Garth Jennings interview:
There are millions of nit-picking geeks
out there. And millions of people who have never read the book. How do you
satisfy both audiences?
Garth Jennings: Well, I was reluctant to do the job at
first, because I was a fan. And I heard the script was coming from Hollywood.
And they didn’t tell me that Douglas had written the script. I thought,
they won’t have gotten it right, because I loved it growing up.
And after I read it and got onboard, I realized that it was this wonderful thing: Douglas had completely attacked it as a new genre. He’d done the radio series one way. The tv series another way. And you can see what he’d done with the script is already approach this differently, for a movie. And I thought, as long as we stick to his guidelines, and the spirit to this material, and we make something that celebrates “Hitchhiker’s” rather than gets bogged down with absolutely every word—that was the main thing.
And having his family very close to production, and having people that worked him very close to it, meant that we could always bounce things off people and make sure we weren’t going in the wrong direction, or do anything that would be an “un-Douglasy thing.”
Give an example of an “un-Douglasy thing.”
Garth Jennings: I guess it would be like if Arthur Dent
had burst through the door to save Trillian with a laser gun and shot the
place to pieces and said, “Give me the girl!”
[Laughter.]
And actually, we did shoot that as a DVD extra. It’s in the “deleted-deleted” scenes. It was so funny—the fans were so worried that that was the kind of thing we were going to do. I said, “We’ve got to shoot that.” We have Martin with his dressing gown, in black, going, “DO Panic!” [Makes machine-gun noises, laughs.] It was a great relief, because basically we felt that what we were doing was making a movie that would hopefully appeal to as many people as the books appeal to.
For the entire interview, head over to LatinoReview.
For the movie stills, movie trailers, clips, and synopsis, go to The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Movie Page. |
Add to Heffee!
