The bestselling author and prolific director behind the new erotic thriller “Verity” sat down with Variety for a wide-ranging chat. SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains minor spoilers for “Verity.” Colleen Hoover is the author of the wildly popular novels “It Ends with Us,” “Verity” and “Reminders of Him,” to name a few. She’s sold over 35 million copies worldwide, making her th e hottest author alive.
And several of her page-turners have been adapted into Hollywood films, including Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni’s domestic violence saga “It Ends with Us,” which grossed over $350 million globally and whose messy aftermath is worthy of a book — or really, a Netflix docuseries — unto itself (more on that later). Michael Showalter is a veteran comedian who first gained notice as part of the sketch comedy troupe The State before co-writing and starring in the 2001 cult classic comedy “Wet Hot American Summer.” Since then, he’s become one of the most reliable directors in the biz, helming the Oscar-nominated comedy-drama “The Big Sick,” Oscar-winning biopic “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” and Hulu’s Emmy-winning Elizabeth Holmes series “The Dropout.” The prolific novelist and filmmaker have joined forces for “Verity,” in theaters Oct. 2. Adapted from Hoover’s bestselling book, it tells the tale of Lowen (Dakota Johnson), a struggling writer who has a chance encounter with Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), a sexy stranger that gives her an offer she can’t refuse: get paid handsomely to ghostwrite the final novel in author/his wife Verity Crawford’s (Anne Hathaway) immensely successful book series.
You see, Verity’s experienced an accident that’s left her confined to a wheelchair and unable to move her extremities, let alone write. Lowen reluctantly accepts, but when she finds a manuscript Verity had stashed away, she starts to wonder if the woman she’s imitating committed a heinous crime. And Showalter had plenty of help from Hoover — who he calls “The Wizard of Oz” — when it came to sharpening its screenplay, texting her day and night throughout the pre-production process (and beyond) with questions about the psychology of certain characters.
The questions were so pointed that Hoover had to go back and reexamine the novel herself because she didn’t remember it in such great detail. Showalter: Yes, a lake with dead bodies floating around in there. It’s funny you say this because I did “Spoiler Alert,” which had two sex scenes in it, and it’s the first time I realized that a sex scene can be more than just a sex scene — you can tell story with a sex scene, you can learn about character with a sex scene.
So, I loved the erotic nature of this story and something that was very important in this story is to bring that stuff out. I have to credit Colleen, because in the script we added back in a lot of the more erotic aspects of it. Hoover: I feel like, as a writer and someone who’s been in the romance world for so long, I never felt the disappearance of it because romance is the bestselling genre — and dark romance, especially, is having a moment.
But I do think it’s disappeared from cinema. I don’t know the answer to that. I just know that, as a writer, you fill it in one area and not in the other.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
