Mundie Moms

Monday, January 23, 2017

Cassandra Clare Shares the Troubles and Triumphs of Seeing the Shadowhunters World Onscreen w/ Barnes & Noble Teen Blog


Happy Mundane Monday Shadowhunters! I've had a crazy day today, hence my late post. Earlier today Barnes & Noble Teen blog shared their wonderful interview they recently had with Cassandra Clare. In the interview they talk about the books, the fandom, the TMI movie, and of course the Shadowhunters series. 

I think this is one of the most candid, and well done interviews I've read in a while. I shared a few snippets from the interview below. Please be sure you read the entire interview HERE. It's really good!


And how did Shadowhunters, the TV version, come about? 
Well, Constantin Films made the movie, but it didn’t make the money they wanted, so they didn’t plan a second one. But they still owned the option on film and TV for the Shadowhunters world, and they felt they had really missed an opportunity. They looked at the book sales worldwide and they thought, there’s an audience there we really didn’t reach. So they decided to try to reach that audience with a television show, and they had a lot of interest from different channels looking to develop with them. In the end they went with ABC Family, now Freeform.
How do you feel about your stories being translated this way?
Unless you’re able to get a really rare and stellar contract, it’s not up to you whether you have any input into a show or movie made from your work. So it’s been, I guess, an exercise in letting go—but no matter how much you let go, you can’t turn off all your feelings. You still care, more than anyone else in the world, about this story and characters. And you still answer to your fans. It’s always hard when people ask me, “How could you let such and such happen or be changed” in the movies or show, and the answer “it’s just not up to me in any way” is a hard one to give.
******* 

And how involved were/are you in the projects? 
My involvement was again really complicated. The problem with this kind of thing is people often want a simple answer and my experience has been that with both projects I’ve ricocheted back and forth from being involved to not involved at all and back again. You’re at the whim of the producers and showrunner/s. With Shadowhunters, they said they wanted me involved up front, and they involved me in casting, which was the first thing they did. So I got to be very involved in the casting of the main characters. Then they said they wanted my notes on the pilot script and sent it to me. Things got more complicated then.
How so?
I wrote notes, the kind of notes I’d write on another author’s book. Some good and some critical like: “This isn’t working,” “maybe this isn’t a good idea,” etc. After they received my notes they made clear to me something I hadn’t realized before, which was that their target audience was older and male—specifically the 18–35 male demographic. Which is very different from the book audience, and the audience I’d been thinking of, many of whom are young women and girls, of say, 14 to any age. The idea was that the show should be Batman and not The Hunger Games. So a lot of elements meant to attract men were introduced—technology and computers—and there were a lot of scenes with “sexy” women, a good portion of whom were bloodily murdered. For a long time the “steles,” the magical tools used to make runes, were turned into Mont Blanc pens because they wanted a merchandise deal with Mont Blanc, but that didn’t work out.
Read the interview in it's entirety here

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