CraveOnline: There’s one major change that doesn’t affect the structure so much, but changes the way I interpreted the structure which I thought was very clever. They have a wonderful dance together, and then they spend the whole evening talking.
Chris Weitz: Yeah, they get to know each other.
That was nice!
It’s kind of important.
“You have to be very tricksy about why they don’t give each other their cell phone numbers.”
Why have I never seen that before?
Because usually it’s not very interesting to see characters talk! [Laughs.] I mean, I think in the 1951 animated version the prince has seven lines of dialogue. So to me, it was an opportunity, an opening, to just show how two characters might fall for one another, how they might come to know more about each other, which is kind of important.
You also have them meet briefly before that night to establish a sort of connection. There was a moment where I was just like, is this the Sleeping Beauty scene, or did this come out of them just needing to meet sooner? What was your decision behind adding that scene?
I think it had come out of a sense that it would be great to have two characters meet without knowing their social ranks, because that plays a lot into the fairy tale, obviously, that the prince is this distant, seemingly unattainable goal. But we wanted him to be unattainable because of the circumstances that intrude, not because he was from a different class than her.
So that’s what came into it. Then you have to be very tricksy about why they don’t give each other their cell phone numbers. [Laughs.]
You found a couple of tricksy things. Like why the stepmother doesn’t recognize Cinderella at the ball.
That’s magic. Magic!
Speaking of the Fairy Godmother, because she’s basically just a plot device if you really think about it…
Mm-hmm…
One of the things you did to incorporate her more is, she’s actually telling the story in voice-over.
Right.
And one of the things they tell you in every screenwriting class is, “No voice-over. Ever. Never. No. Never good.”
Right.
Was it hard? Was it a difficult decision to make?
I love voice-over. I don’t think that’s really good advice. Because voice-over is often used to compensate, post facto, for things that don’t work, that’s maybe where the advice comes from. But when my brother and I were doing About a Boy it seemed like the only way that we were going to get into the universe of the character. When you’re adapting a novel that’s the tricky bit.
So no, it was fun. I think that we ended up trimming back on the amount of voice-over because there’s only so much that you actually need to establish it, but as a frame it was really handy.
