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Emma Watson To Star In 'Queen of the Tearling'


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Ach, Sacred. Who really cares? Say it today, forget it tomorrow. Fans buying everything, even if it is a twist in mind every 24 hours. We should get used to it by now. Remember? Degree in June 2013......

 

People's lives change. All the time. I mean, if we lined up all of your life choices, I'm sure you haven't done exactly everything you said you would do. You're divorced, aren't you? Possibly at one time said you'd always be working in your high flying PR job. I was going to university to become a teacher, became a designer instead, said I would never live outside of Canada because I was too patriotic. If you're a person, then your plans are changing constantly and as long as they're not hurting anyone should not be criticized. 

 

Emma's degree has nothing to do with her career. And she's hardly the first one to need to take an extra term or two or three. Plenty of my friends took two years before they even figured out what they wanted to major in. I took 3 gap years myself to take the time to explore, try different things, get some work done, etc. Maybe when you were growing up back in the dark ages people took very set paths from high school to university to a job and whatnot, but that's simply not how it's done nowadays.

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Yeah I mean, the book has to be good to get this much attention. Another Hunger Games or Divergent, I suppose. :)

PRECISELY, but better coz Emma's attached to the project, even if as a executive producer.

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While I am super excited for Emma to have a new project, I am skeptical. Why is there a movie already planned for a book that hasn't come out?! The summery seem great, but the book could suck! Seems a bit weird to me.

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She's definitely trying to work with specific people in the industry.

 

You can call that calculating if you want to, but that doesn't mean that she doesn't care about the work she's doing.

 

You must not mistake calculation for a lack of passion.

yeah, she seems to try to walk a fine line there. Which may be ok as long as she doesn't contradict herself in regards to very recent statements (like, doing Shades after practically ruling it out).
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If the book is as good as it seems, then I'm glad the movie is being made before the books becomes popular.

 

 

One of the biggest problems with movies that are adapted from popular books is the pressure for it to be faithful.

 

A good book doesn't necessarily translate into a good film. It takes a lot of changes and adjustments to make it work for such a visual medium.

 

 

Also, I like that there won't be an assumption that the audience has read the books beforehand.

 

This just hurts the story because it rests upon the work of the original author and doesn't build its own world independent of it.

 

 

In order for this adaptation to work, they need to retain the main ideas, themes, and style from the book and recreate the central narrative.

 

Everything else will just serve as filler and bog down the script unnecessarily.

 

 

Hitchcock is famous for successfully adapting books into films and I always liked this quote about how he did it:

 

What I do is to read a story only once, and if I like the basic idea, I just forget all about the book and start to create cinema. Today I would be unable to tell you the story of Daphne du Maurier's The Birds. I read it only once, and very quickly at that.

 

That's taken from the book Hitchcock: A Definitive Study of Alfred Hitchcock by François Truffaut. 

 

You can actually listen to the full recordings Truffaut made of him interviewing Hitchcock for that book here:

 

http://www.hitchcockwiki.com/wiki/Interview:_Alfred_Hitchcock_and_Francois_Tuffaut_(Aug/1962)

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This doesn't sound like anything that I will watch. And its not even sure this project will happen at all. Many things left: Like the books aren't even out yet..

 

 

I really like your posts Ling!.

 

She really changes her mind every 24 hours.

 

^^ Oh well she's a woman,...

Edited by trixie
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But you forget she mentioned in an interview she'd love to write, direct, or produce. This is it! There is absolutely nothing wrong with her wanting to specialize in different areas of the filmmaking process.

 

Exactly Elena...Bonnie (Wright) has already done some directing....I will say this-Emma has so much film experience under her belt now-she knows how films are made, she has seen camera shots done, she knows how directors act...she is very creative and I can see her doing an amazing job behind the scenes. All the Potter cast has said that they want to work behind the cameras someday.

 

Trixie, we women ALWAYS have the right to change our minds right girl ;) "I can change my mind, a million times..." (Any Man of Mine, Shania Twain).

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  • 4 months later...

 

A review of an early and unfinished draft of the book:

 

 

I obtained an ARC of this at the World Fantasy Convention 2013.

 

The first thing I feel needs to be said is...

 

... THERE IS NO ROMANCE!!!

 

And this is a good thing. A very good thing. Romance can come in the later books, if it needs to, but for now I am just so happy not to have a book with a female lead whose relationship issues are integral to the plot.

 

I started reading 'The Queen of the Tearling' (can I just call it QoT?) with a mood of doubtfulness. I've been burned too many times by hyped-up books that didn't deliver. From the back cover of my ARC and what I've read on the internet so far, I think we can expect a huge marketing drive from the publishers as the July 2014 publication date draws nearer, probably in the same style as The Bone Season this year. I certainly don't agree with the comparison that's already been suggested calling QoT "Game of Thrones for women"; GRRM's books are complex in a manner that no one has managed to successfully emulate. And I don't know if QoT is going to be the fantasy of the year or anything like that. But it's a very, very good read, and with a bit more editing would be worth a full 5 stars. 

 

I'm not going to give a plot blurb because Goodreads already has one. I'll start with Kelsea Glynn, the main character. She's one of the best female characters I've come across in fantasy in a while. Understandably given her circumstances, she's scared and uncertain, but she does the best she can. She does what she believes to be just even though she knows it may well be her undoing, and even her kingdom's. She feels lust for a man she doesn't think will ever want her, and she wishes she was beautiful, but these traits don't define her; they're not important at all. She's stubborn and apt to disagree with her protectors, but not stupidly so. I'm quite disappointed, really, that Emma Watson has been cast to play her in the already-planned film. Kelsea in the book is described as uncompromisingly plain, and knows that she won't be able to win her subjects over with beauty and grace. 

 

There's a fairly large cast of other characters, but the significant ones stand distinctive. Mace is Kelsea's main protector, and while at the beginning he seems like nothing more than a hard, blunt warrior his layers are gradually peeled away until you realise you like him almost as much as Kelsea. It's worth noting that Kelsea is the not the only POV we follow through the book; there are three others, and all manage to get well inside the heads of the characters in question except for one. The main antagonist, the Red Queen of Mortmesne, is sadly under-developed. Until the very end her POV fails to descend deep enough, and she reads as little more than a textbook, generic villain. The first time we meet her she's annoyed by the snoring of a slave, so she presses a button to summon her guards and orders his tongue to be cut out and his vocal cords severed. That scene was the only one in the book that had a sense of gratuitous, shock-factor evil (also, the image of the Queen having two buttons, one red and one black, in her room just feels ridiculous and out of place). Ultimately I think QoT would benefit from having the Red Queen's POV cut from it entirely.

 

There are a few other flaws. The descriptions, particularly at the beginning when Kelsea's riding towards her new Keep, felt rather bland and the use of a number of technical-sounding words like "continuous" gave the prose a sense of sterility. I didn't notice this so much as the book went on, so either I got used to it or the prose improved. One habit of the author's which I very much disliked - and which thankfully ceased after the first third or so of the book - was the way she broke up exciting, fast-moving scenes with unnecessary chunks of exposition. Characters recalling memories and giving us back story are fine, but not at climatic moments! 

 

I also felt a bit frustrated at the vagueness of the geography of the 'New World' that the story takes place within, though perhaps when QoT is published it'll come with a map. And there's always the next two books to develop the world further. 

 

For most of QoT, I wasn't on the edge of my seat; but soon after the beginning I began to itch to get back to it as soon as I could. Eventually as the plot heads to its climax it IS hard to put the book down, and there were moments when I felt genuine shock or sadness. 

 

It may be that this ARC was rushed to get it out in time for the World Fantasy Con, and that there'll be more editing before the publication date next July. I hope so, because with a little improvement QoT could easily be worth a full 5 stars. I'm sure it's going to do very well, especially if there's going to be a big marketing drive behind it. It's not THE book of the year for me, but it's one of them.

 

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  • 2 months later...

http://iceybooks.com/blog/2014/01/the-queen-of-the-tearling-by-erika-johansen-cover-reveal-and-giveaway.html

 

Q.: Can you talk about the main characters in THE QUEEN OF THE TEARLING – who they are, which ones are your favorites, and how you reveal them to the readers?

 

As a reader, I prefer to imagine the physical appearance of my characters, rather than be told, and this preference transfers to my writing. So for most of my characters, the physical description is sparse at best, limited only to what I feel the reader needs to know in order to follow along. I’m also committed to only revealing characters a piece at a time as it impacts the plot, so many of the characters’ motivations and origins remain ambiguous throughout the first book. My main characters are Kelsea, a Queen in training, but also an ordinary young woman who has to do the right thing in a difficult time. She’s guarded by Mace, a warrior who’s the Captain of her Guard. The Red Queen, ruler of the neighboring kingdom, who at first glance appears to be a nasty piece of work, but is, in fact, not the master of her own destiny. Javel, a guard on the Keep Gate, gets caught up in a plot that he wants no part of. My personal favorite character, Father Tyler, is a priest who slowly begins to realize that his church is rotten to the core.

 

Q.: How did you come up with the character of your heroine Kelsea Raleigh Glynn? A Queen in training who seems ordinary on the surface but holds great power inside her?

 

I generally find protagonists much less interesting when they’re extraordinary people to begin with. Ordinary people thrust into extraordinary situations are far more interesting to me. Therefore, I wrote about a fairly ordinary girl who’s been placed in a situation she never asked for. (For more on Kelsea, see my attached “Behind the Book†essay)

 

Q.: The setting of THE QUEEN OF THE TEARLING feels like a kingdom in Medieval England even though it takes place in the future. What kind of research did you do in order to get the details? The way people dress? The weapons they use? How they fight with each other? The way they make their money/sustain their way of life?

 

I didn't research these topics. I felt that humanity would revert to agrarian society, certainly, and be forced to work with the materials at hand (wood, metal, stone, wool, etc.). But I also thought such a society in the future would be fundamentally different because humanity already had discovered electricity, created the printing press, used advanced weaponry. Although these things no longer exist for them, the knowledge that they once did would change everything. I’m sure my conception of this world’s clothing, weapons and organization was governed heavily by several novels and fantasy movies, but I also thought it would be a mistake to make it too authentically medieval, because that’s not what the Tearling is. Rather, I tried to imagine what humanity would look like if relatively modern people were abruptly thrown back into the seventeenth century. Whether it works is up to the reader.

 

Q.: Describe the hierarchy of the new society. Who is the Queen’s Guard, the Caden, the priests, the Mort hawks, and the landowners, those working the land? Where do women and children stand in the hierarchy? What is the Keep? The Arvath?

 

The Queen’s Guard, as the name suggests, guards the ruler of the Tearling. The Caden is a club of assassins. Anyone with a sword is basically more powerful than those who don’t have one. Outside of the ruling family, women have largely been relegated to traditional roles (mothers, wives, prostitutes). Those who work the land are entirely subservient to those who own the land. The Keep is the dwelling place of the royal family. The Arvath is the Tearling’s version of the Vatican.

 

Q.: How did the people completely lose their knowledge of technology? From medicine, to engineering, to electricity, to combustion and transportation, to telecommunications, and the Internet?

 

The Tearling was begun with a strong bias against technology. The settlers didn’t bring any with them. They haven’t lost the knowledge of what humanity used to possess, but they also have a longtime, almost superstitious fear of trying to recover it. (Readers can be assured that as they read the series, they will find out more about what happened to society before the Crossing).

 

Q.: In the book you talk about books as being extremely rare in the Tearling. Can you discuss how books and other writing started to disappear?

 

Books began to disappear before the Crossing. Barty and Carlin brought up Kelsea in the Tearling woods until she turned nineteen, the age of a Queen, and she had use of Carlin’s books in the house.
How had Carlin acquired all of her books? Paper books had been at a premium long before the Crossing; the transition to electronic books had decimated the publishing industry, and in the last two decades before the Crossing, many printed books had been destroyed altogether. According to Carlin, William Tear had only allowed his utopians to bring ten books apiece. Two thousand people with ten books each made twenty thousand books, and at least two thousand now stood on Carlin’s shelves. Kelsea had spent her entire life with Carlin’s library at her fingertips, taking it for granted, never understanding that it was invaluable in a world without books. Vandals might find the cottage, or even children searching for firewood. That was what had happened to most of the books that originally came over in the British-American Crossing: the desperate had burned them for fuel or warmth. Kelsea had always thought of Carlin’s library as a set piece, unified and immovable, but it wasn’t. Books could be moved.â€

 

Q.: Magic, especially black magic, plays a very big role in the novel. The Tear Sapphire necklaces that Kelsea Glynn wears, that the Red Queen wants to get her hands on, bring to mind the Ring in the Lord of the Rings. Talk about the role magic plays in the books.

 

I’m not interested in magic for magic’s sake; thus the lack of magical creatures running around these books. I’m also usually more annoyed than charmed by rule-driven magic, in which the rules of and limitations on magic’s use become integral to the plot (J.K. Rowling is the lone exception for me). Rather, I’m interested in magic (such as Tolkien’s archetypal ring) that is powered by and works on the user. Magical jewels are certainly a fantasy trope by now, but I wanted to try to use them in a different way here. Kelsea cannot control her jewels, and doesn’t really even understand her jewels, but they are doing something to her. I was interested, but not fascinated, when a character put on Tolkien’s ring and became invisible. Fascination came when someone tried to let go of the ring and couldn’t. The little tricks one can do with magic are far less interesting to me than its darker effects.

 

Q.: What writers and books had the biggest influence on your writing of THE QUEEN OF THE TEARLING?

 

Frank Herbert’s Dune is the big one. It’s science fiction, not fantasy, but at its base, Dune is the tale of a young scion who must recover his fallen house, and it has always been one of my favorite books. THE QUEEN OF THE TEARLING is nowhere near as good as Dune, but I tried in my own way to perform some of the same tricks.

 

I also kept The Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley, in mind. I wanted to write a fantasy book in which action and magic, while present, were subordinated to politics and interpersonal dynamics. I was also determined to write a strong female protagonist. Bradley accomplished both of these tricks to a marvel; those who like THE QUEEN OF THE TEARLING should really go back and give The Mists of Avalon a look.
Terry Brooks’s The Elf Queen of Shannara. I enjoyed all of Brooks’s first seven Shannara books, but this one, about a tough but young and uncertain girl who must undertake a quest and prove herself worthy to be a queen, is my favorite. Brooks’s fantasy is always stuffed to the brim with magic and interesting creatures, but he also routinely forces his protagonists to take difficult personal journeys, and Wren Elessedil’s journey is one of the best.

 

Last but not least: Stephen King’s The Eyes of the Dragon. Stephen King is my favorite author, and in my opinion, his lone stab at pure fantasy is also one of his finest books. Here we have a kingdom that, like the Tearling, has fallen under the sway of corruption from within. One of King’s great gifts is to make the reader feel that everything is at stake; in The Eyes of the Dragon, the entire kingdom may rise or fall based on a single act. The plotting is fantastic.

 

Q.: Can you give readers a little bit of a teaser of what will happen in book two and three of the series?

 

In Book 2, the reader will watch Mortmesne invade the Tearling, and see Kelsea’s situation grow bleaker by the day as the Mort draw closer to the city. The reader will also see events that led up to the Crossing, and why humanity took such a desperate gamble. In Book 3, by contrast, the reader will get to see what happened after the Crossing: how the Tearling was formed and how it degenerated. Meanwhile, Kelsea and the Red Queen will form an uneasy alliance against a greater adversary.

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Emma was reported to be seen talking to 3 ppl in particular the night of the Golden Globes...Alfonso Cuaron, Robin Wright,  and Channing Tatum. Maybe she was hard at work during the Golden Globes and trying to find the cast and director for "Queen of the Tearling". Isn't this something a producer tries to do and she is a co-producer so..... speculation.... Alfonso Cuaron to direct...Robin Wright as "The Red Queen" and Channing Tatum as the lead body guard and possible love interest perhaps.... I know it would be amazing if this...wishful thinking could be a reality but you never know. Speculation at best but my fingers are always crossed. ;)  Can't wait for the book and then the movie especially.

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  • 2 weeks later...

This might just be the right project for Emma to try producing as she'll be working alongside David

Heyman. I think Emma likes to work with familiar faces.

 

I've been saying all along that Emma, Rupert, Dan, Tom, Matt, Bonnie, Evanna, James & Oliver should

start their own production company--like a co-op--they would all have equal ownership and work together. 

They've all worked together for about 10 yrs, so they know their strengths and weaknesses. I know that

Bonnie has already done a screen adaptation called The Sea. 

 

I think either Cuaron or Yates should direct this movie. Again, she needs to work with directors she knows

really well. If she does a comedy, then Columbus/Newell would be best. I think her favorite makeup artist,

Amanda Knight should do the honors in this movie. She's been doing her makeup since she was 9. 

 

Maybe Kate Winslet as the red queen??

 

 

 

 

 

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