Back in July, when we interviewed James, Woodley, author Veronica Roth and director Neil Burger at Comic-Con, not many people recognized the British actor out of context. Seriously, I got in an elevator with him and absolutely no one else fainted. He’s been in this game for a while without becoming a household object of obsession. But it seems he is fully onboard with doing a project with a built-in fanbase.
“It’s a good thing if people are invested already,” he told me. “It helps. Obviously you want to do justice to it, but if people love the characters that Veronica created … it’s definitely a good thing.”
From the first sampling we just got of the movie, it looks like Burger is staying true to his word to remain faithful to the book.
“If I feel the same way about the book as the fans do, which I think I do, and the book works for me and it works for them, then we’ve got our heads around the same thing and we’re all going in the same direction,” he said. “Actually I added quite a few things back from the script that was first presented to me. I was like, where’s the zipline? Where’s Christina being hung over the chasm? So we worked those back in.”
Did you see what you wanted to in the first look footage? What else can’t you wait for?