The Fault in our Stars (2014 Josh Boone)

The trickily spelled Scott Neustadter and Michael H Weber wrote this from John Green's 2012 book (the title is from 'Julius Caesar') and it kicks off by warning the viewer it isn't one of those Hollywood films which ends on an apology and a Peter Gabriel song - 'This is the truth'. I wonder if that's really true though because it sort of does go to a very well written but ultimately weepy and uplifting ending. They broke into writing with (500) Days of Summer and followed that with another adaptation - The Spectacular Now - which also features the talented Shailene Woodley. The scene in the restaurant in Amsterdam is straight out of a classic comedy. Anyway, I'm not complaining - I like their writing. A lot.

Ansel Elgort (oh - he's the lead in Baby Driver, which we were only talking about today!) is a confident lead opposite Shailene, with Laura Dern, Sam Trammell, Willem Dafoe, Lotte Verbeek and Nat Wolff.

Boone's first film was the Greg Kinnear / Lily Collins film Stuck in Love. The writers have completed Our Souls at Night (2017), an X-Men film and Where'd You Go Bernadette.

I like this, from Go Into the Story:

Scott N: "The false assumption I was under — that I think a lot of aspiring writers are under — is that most scripts in Hollywood are extremely good. Nothing like a few years reading unsolicited material to debunk that idea. But beyond that, even some of the scripts I was receiving from agents and managers, they weren’t exactly tremendous either. And they were getting bought and some of them were even getting made (12 years later, I still don’t entirely understand the getting made part of the equation but that’s a whole other story). Anyway, when the bar was set at Sorkin level, I was certainly not going to even attempt to write a screenplay. It was only when I realized there’s only one Sorkin, there’s only one Tarantino, there’s only one Cameron Crowe — it freed me up psychologically to give it a shot."