Interview [Written]: Rob Thomas
This is for all you Veronica Mars fans: A WGA.org interview with the movie’s co-writer and director Rob Thomas.
It’s hard to believe that Veronica Mars started — and almost ended — her life as a book pitch.
“It was supposed to be my fifth novel,” explains series creator Rob Thomas, “but I got hired on Dawson’s Creek, so I moved from Texas to Los Angeles and started working in television.”
Luckily for Mars-heads everywhere, Hollywood had its typically corrupting influence on the young writer. Confesses Thomas: “The very crass reason that it never became a book is because I could write TV scripts faster and make a lot more money doing that.”
Thomas’ quasi-avarice did two things. First, it helped him afford his Los Angeles home. Second, it gave birth to a show about a hard-boiled, teenage private detective that would amass an impressive cult over its three years on the air. So much so that when Thomas and series star Kristen Bell started a Kickstarter campaign to finance a Veronica Mars movie, they raised a record-breaking $5.7 million. Thomas directed and co-wrote with Diane Ruggiero the resulting feature, which hits screens today.
As a successful developer-creator for shows like Party On and the new 90210, Thomas now has his mortgage under control, so he’s coming full circle by putting out a series of Veronica Mars books that will continue from where the movie leaves off.
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Part of the charm of the original series was the whole kind of self-empowered young adult thing. You’re not going to have access to that because she’s a grown up now. How will you make up for it in the movie?
In a way, the logline was the selling point of the series; what made her unique was her young age, and in some ways, I feel like it’s also what turned people off. If I had not been involved with Veronica Mars and I read the logline “teenage private eye” I would have rolled my eyes and moved on. So I am interested in seeing what sort of response people have to this idea of a 28-year-old Veronica now, it becomes less of a hook.
Sure, she’s a young woman private eye but that doesn’t have quite the bang of a 17-year-old girl. Maybe it will make more people actually believe in it and think, “Well, it sort of makes sense, that premise no longer makes me roll my eyes.”
The fans who fell in love with her at 17 will be there for the movie and maybe the fact that she’s no longer a teenage private eye could invite more people in.
Fans played a huge role in the genesis of this movie. Did that influence your creative process? Did you feel pressure to give the kids what they want?
There was a bunch of the giving the people what they want. When we started to finance it on Kickstarter, I thought there was a chance that we might not get any theatrical release and if we did get a theatrical release, it might be 10 select cities. I was really thinking, We’re going to make all of the money on this movie from VOD. Since fans financed this movie, it’s going to be for the fans. So I really did write the movie thinking of it as a love letter to the fans, that’s what I’m going to give them. It’s really only been in the wake of this huge Kickstarter promotional explosion of getting over five million and being on the cover of Entertainment Weekly that made me sort of start to rethink that a bit.
Suddenly it became apparent that we would be released on a bunch more screens and the studio wanted this movie to cross over a bit. So we did add some stuff to the movie, we added a two-minute origin story main title sequence, putting the origin story up front for non-fans.
Even in the editing room in the aftermath I started asking myself the question of maybe I should include this bit or that bit because we’re hoping non-fans will join the party and that line might be necessary to bring them along.
I’d been toying for years with the idea of doing Veronica Mars as an FBI agent when we found her again, like a young Clarice Starling type. Yet once it became fan financed, I honestly couldn’t figure out a way that would roll in all the characters that people wanted to see into an FBI story. What is the case that allows me to bring Mac and Wallace and Piz and Dick Casablancas into the movie? Any idea that I had made me roll my eyes — so that’s one of the ways the fan financing influenced me. I chose a plotline that would let me get to all the fan goodies. But I am a fan of the show and a lot of the things that the fans dig about it are the things that I liked. I like having Dick Casablancas in the show, so I’m glad I figured out a way to use him.
Here is a featurette for the movie:
For the rest of the interview, go here.
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