Stephenie Meyer on Andrew Niccol's "Subtle Shifts" in 'The Host'

Fred Topel of Crave Online had the opportunity to sit down with author/producer Stephenie Meyer at this year's Sundance Film Festival. Meyer spoke about Austenland, Twilight, and of course The Host. 

How different was adapting The Host to the Twilight books?
The Host was a huge challenge because Twilight, you can stop and look at the plot and just say A causes B causes C. It's fairly straightforward. There are some supernatural things you have to figure out how to film but that's some special effects person's job. It's not the screenwriter's job. With The Host, it's a 200,000 word novel. To fit it into two hours is a real challenge and there's so much we had to cut. So we really had to boil it down to the real essence of the story and also we had the issue of one person who was two characters, and that was something that threw a lot of studios when they were trying to figure out how we were going to feel it, how it was going to come across right... 

Was there one big change that those filmmakers sold you on that would be better for the movie?
You know, there were little visual things. I don't know that they had to sell me exactly. When I was writing the novel, to me the world looked very much the same as our world looks. Not much has changed, but Andrew [Niccol] has subtle shifts and he glossed up the human world and made it a little shinier, and the way people dress and the cars they drive. He just had this vision for the look and particularly for the Seekers. They have a very distinct look that I hadn't envisioned. It works beautifully. It just makes the world just that much off kilter. We can tell it's not our world even though it looks like it. He's a genius. It was fun to have someone like that coming up with ideas. It's easy to go, "Yes, yes, absolutely." 

Read the entire interview here.