What Did Lily Collins, Jamie Campbell Bower Rewrite In 'The Mortal Instruments' Movie?
[Alert! Alert! Spoilers ahead!]
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There's a pretty huge twist at the end of The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones. (Yes, people who have read the books, that thing.) When watching the movie, I noticed that while the story was the same as in the book, the characters' reaction to the twist was different --- more nuanced and emotional, if you will. Turns out stars Lily Collins and Jamie Campbell Bower had a hand in making that change, quite literally. They rewrote it.
"We rewrote the ending. I'm serious," Bower told VH1 News. TMI author Cassandra Clare confirmed this account. When initial filming had wrapped and they saw the scenes in order, Clare said they felt it lacked "emotional closure" for the characters of Jace and Clary. "It pretty much just ended with Valentine telling them this very terrible lie and then we see what's going on with Clary's mom and then it just kind of goes."
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"Jamie and I felt so strongly about how it was left," Collins said. "When you don't know if you're going to do a sequel or not ... you have to pay honor to this part of the story, but you also don't want to leave the audience hanging so much that [they're] disgusted by [the twist]."
So, the actors turned to Clare and worked it all out on paper.
"Lily and Jamie and I actually took notes together from the existing script," the author said. "So they wound up doing reshoots in Toronto and they shot the end and used the end that we had written together."
"[Jace's] world is thrown into turmoil because of her arrival," Bower said, sounding quite passionate about the subject. "There needed to be a payoff. ... That emotion and that reality and that heart."