Taylor Zakhar Perez and Nicholas Galitzine in “Red, White & Royal Blue”.Photo:Jonathan Prime/Prime Video
Jonathan Prime/Prime Video
Turning a beloved bestseller with over 400 pages of rom-com fireworks into a two-hour movie is no small feat.
Casey McQuiston’s 2019 novel, like the new movie, centers on a son of the U.S. president Alex Claremont-Diaz (Taylor Zakhar Perez) falling in love with Prince Henry of England (Nicholas Galitzine).
Other subplots are excised or condensed, but the central love story remains intact.
“Anything that wasn’t about Alex and Henry didn’t belong in the film. Anything that didn’t feed into that story had to go. It’s just the logic of movie storytelling,” says López. “There’s actually less than 20 seconds of the film in which one or the other doesn’t appear.”
Taylor Zakhar Perez and Uma Thurman in “Red, White & Royal Blue”.Amazon
Amazon
The director continues, “I was making decisions that maybe I’d have to explain to the fans later on, but at the end of the day, I knew what I was doing was in the best interest of the film. Iamone of the fans, and I knew the best way to deliver something fans would appreciate is to make sure I delivered a good film.”
“When I realized that was my mission and responsibility, everything became clear in terms of decision-making,” he says.
Red, White & Royal BlueauthorMcQuiston clearly approves of the film adaptation,writing on Instagramearlier this week that the book has now “become much bigger than me — something gorgeous and perfect in its own way, beaming out into a bigger world.”
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Taylor Zakhar Perez and Nicholas Galitzine in “Red, White & Royal Blue”.Jonathan Prime/Prime Video
The actors felt the pressure of doing the popular book justice too.
Says Perez, “We have a lot on our shoulders and we had to make sure this is a really good film — or else we are going down!” Galitzine adds, “It was very cool, if not a little nerve-wracking, because most of the time you’re not doing something which has this built-in fan base. And a really fervent, impassioned fan base at that.”
Red, White & Royal Blueis now streaming on Prime Video. The novel is available wherever books are sold.
source: people.com
