SPOILERS are ahead for the movie and book The idea of you. You have been warned.
So if you’ve made it past this intro, it’s safe to assume that you’ve streamed the Amazon Prime romantic comedy. The idea of you this weekend.
The film centers on a romance between 40-year-old Solène (Anne Hathaway) and 24-year-old boy band member Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine) – much like Robinne Lee’s 2017 novel on which it is based.
Film adaptations of books are often different from the source material, and The idea of you follows suit in this regard. In fact, the film whole end is a huge departure from the book’s conclusion.
To make a long story short: both in the book and in the film, Solène and Hayes initially separate. In the book, they stay that way – but, in the film, they reunite five years after their breakup.
What does Robinne think of this substantial change? She spilled everything Weekly Entertainmentand it looks like she’s made peace with what happened.
The author told EW that she “wasn’t involved at all” in the film and hadn’t even met director Michael Showalter yet — but that her husband was one of the film’s producers . “He told me about the changes in Michael, so I know some of the reasons why he did the things he chose to do,” she explained.
She also admitted that she didn’t “know why” a “happy ending” was necessary for the film. “You hope they stick with what you’ve written because it means something to you, but you also have to think about the box office, the viewers and what their audience is going to want to see,” added Robin.
And ultimately, Robinne says she feels good about the book’s ending, because a happier ending was “not the story I wanted to tell.”
“I wanted to highlight how, as women, we put other people’s happiness before our own,” she explained. “I wanted to feel like you were reading this woman’s diary. This was something that had really happened to her, and she had gotten caught up in this role and this romance, and it almost destroyed her and everything around her, and she had to let it go.”
You can read everything Robinne said here.
