Back in March 2014, when Jared LeBoff, a producer at Marc Platt Productions, first read the thriller The Girl on the Train, it wasn’t yet a sensation, one that to date has sold more than 6 million copies in the United States alone. Sent to him in digital form by an agent of an unknown author, Paula Hawkins, it was a yet-to-be-published novel with three untrustworthy female narrators — one of them an unhappy, alcoholic divorcee named Rachel Watson who believes she has witnessed something key to a woman’s disappearance.
“It was eerie, creepy and enticing,” LeBoff said about the twisty, Hitchcockian tone of Hawkins’ book. “It just added up to a juicy piece of material.” Platt and DreamWorks Pictures apparently agreed, and without the headache of a bidding war, they soon optioned the rights.
In fact, it wasn’t until the following year, around the time the screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson (Secretary) was turning in her first draft of an adaptation, and Hawkins’ American publisher, Riverhead Books, was releasing her novel, that those associated with the screen version of The Girl on the Train realised this was more than just an ordinary novel-to-movie project. Their source material seemed to be everywhere. “I kept seeing girls on the subway reading the book,” said Wilson, who made a pastime of surreptitiously photographing people with noses buried in The Girl on the Train. “I sort of started a catalogue of girls reading the book, on the subway, in cafes; I saw a man reading it in a diner. It sort of confirmed the zeitgeist of something that Paula had captured.”
Within two weeks of hitting shelves and e-readers, The Girl on the Train shot to the top of the New York Times best-seller list. In reviews, it was often compared with Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn’s suspense phenomenon of 2012, which resulted in a high-profile film adaptation grossing roughly $369 million (Dh1.3 billion) worldwide and earning Rosamund Pike an Oscar nod. While Platt and DreamWorks didn’t have the same luxury of time as the Gone Girl production — an almost two-and-a-half year journey from print to screen — they had Wilson’s adaptation as interest in Hawkins’ book exploded. Tate Taylor, who directed another female-driven best-seller adaptation, The Help, was brought in.
By then, everyone was in fast-track mode, Taylor said. “They were like: ‘We’ve got to get this thing made. We’ve got lighting in a bottle here. We’ve got to get it out for fall of 2016.’ So we just amped it up.”
On a trip to London to meet with Emily Blunt, who would be cast as the sad-eyed, booze-soaked Rachel, Taylor also met Hawkins for what he called “a three-question business talk. She said, ‘What are your intentions?’ and I said, ‘This needs to be really dark and sexy, and it needs to be truthful.’ And she said: ‘I love it! Let’s get a gin and tonic.’ That was the entire thing.”
Another consequence of the book’s meteoric rise was that they now had a built-in audience to worry about. “In the movie world, everyone is looking to break through all the noise with a brand, and a best-selling book is such a thing,” Platt said. “But all of the sudden, you have expectations. What starts to creep into the conversation is how much you veer from the source material and how much you don’t. You ask yourself, ‘How can we make something that really works as a film, but yet still satisfy a very large fan base?’”
No one needs to remind him that when the film opens on October 7 (October 6 in the UAE), roughly 21 months after its original January 2015 book publication date, it will have to satisfy a fan base that has only continued growing. Having now spent more than 80 weeks and counting on the best-seller list, The Girl on the Train has hit No 1 in hardcover and e-book, trade paperback and mass-market paperback. Riverhead has printed close to 1.4 million copies of a special movie tie-in edition. Given the ubiquity of The Girl on the Train billboards, bus shelter posters and book displays in supermarkets, bookstores and airports nationwide, even publishing insiders have trouble pinpointing the exact cause of the exponential increase in sales. That said, every time Universal runs the film’s moody trailer — as it did on August 9, right before Michael Phelps won his 20th Olympic gold medal — Riverhead sees a buying surge.
Hawkins, speaking by phone from London, said she had watched the finished version of the film and spoke about what it was like to see characters she created walking, talking and moving around. “It’s a shocking film in parts, really frightening,” she said. “It’s an odd thing, because I actually know what’s happening, but it felt really fresh to me.”
Her positive response puts her in the position of addressing some readers’ irritation about changes made for the screen. To appeal to the larger American audience, the action, which originally had Rachel peering woozily into other people’s backyards from a commuter train running through suburban London, now puts her on the Metro-North rail line riding from Westchester County to Manhattan.
“What I say to everyone is, ‘There’s no such thing as a 100 per cent faithful adaptation of a book to screen,’” Hawkins said, adding that early on, when it came to selling the film rights, agents asked her, “‘Would you have a massive problem if the location was moved?’ I said, No, because what’s important really is the train, not what exists on the outside.”
Audiences should also not expect to catch a glimpse of the real-life Hawkins, even though, at one point, she had a cameo in the film. “I was on the set, and Tate persuaded me to be on the train as one of the other passengers,” Hawkins said with a laugh. “To be very honest with you, I was cut.”
Don’t miss it!
The Girl on the Train releases in the UAE on October 6.
