John Green and the cast of Paper Towns do a little Q&A
While at the fan-voted Columbus, Ohio stop to promote the movie adaptation of John Green‘s novel, Paper Towns, he and cast members Nat Wolff, Cara Delevingne, and Halston Sage spoke with the local Dispatch and here are some of the highlights:
Q: Are you all as good of friends in real life as you seem onscreen?
Delevingne: Not at all. No, yeah, for sure. I think the chemistry off-set was really real, and I feel like that really transposed itself onscreen.
Sage: I was excited for (the press tour) because it was going to be fun to just all hang out again.
Wolff: We were all really bummed when (filming) ended.
Green: There was a lot of crying on the last day.
Wolff: Shut up, John.
Green: There was. I cried too. … Yeah, I think what makes the movie special to me is that all of these guys worked so hard to connect to each other in ways that were authentic with their characters.
Delevingne: We didn’t even have to try.
Q: What was the most challenging scene to film?
Sage: Agloe (a paper town in New York)
Delevingne: For me, it was shooting night shoots and being freezing because it was winter and then having (to put) ice in our mouths.
Green: They put ice in your mouth right before you go to talk so that your mouth is so cold you can’t see the breath. … It’s awful.
Q: John, how do you stay relevant to your young-adult audience?
Green: I didn’t know much about being a teenager when I was a teenager. … I try to write in a way that’s authentic to the world of the novel … We read good books about teenagers that were written 30 years ago or 130 years ago, and what’s relevant about them is the experiences, the emotions.
That stuff is eternal. That’s what I try to stay connected to because if I tried to stay connected to teen culture, I’m going to just look incredibly lame.
Q: The message of the book is about the problems of idolizing someone. Have you ever had that done to you or done it to others?
Green: Definitely … It’s hard to treat people as people when you admire their work a lot and kind of feel like you sort of know them, but, of course, you don’t.
You know them through their performances or through their Instagram, and that’s not quite the same thing as a person. That’s a very fraught thing in our age. I feel lucky because of the relationship that I have with my readers and people who watch our videos, I get to have a more kind of consistent relationship with them. They tend to be very empathetic toward me.
Q: If you invented a paper town, what would you name it?
Green: JohnGreen-Landia. . . . Gotta get that branding.
Sage: Unicornville.
Green: God, you love unicorns.
Wolff: Yeah I’d call mine JohnGreenyland.
Source: The Columbus Dispatch