BuzzFeed spoke with author Lois Lowry about her famous book turned movie. Here’s a few things we learned about The Giver .
1. Author Lois Lowry was inspired to write The Giver because of her late father's illness.
The Weinstein Company / The Giver
What inspired you to write The Giver in the first place?
Lois Lowry: Well as it happened, my father was very old at that time and in a nursing home. I would go to visit him about every six weeks in another state, and on this particular visit I realized for the first time that he was beginning to lose pieces of his memory. He didn't have Alzheimer's, but he was getting up there — around 90 years old — and he had forgotten my sister and that startled me. My sister, his first child, had died young, but he had obliterated somehow that memory and I began thinking on my way home, Heck, maybe it's a good thing you forget something when it's painful, but of course when you start thinking along those lines you realize that it's not a good thing. The product, what we're made of, is our whole path — good and bad. And so I began to think about the possibility of writing about people who had found a way to manipulate human memory. That was the start of The Giver, and I've never been a writer of science fiction or even a reader of it, but all of a sudden I realized I was going to have to write a book set in the future and that's what it turned out to be. That was the start of it.
2. There's no set time period of the book, but Lowry's grandson speculates it's 50 years from now.
The Weinstein Company / The Giver
Do you ever say what time period The Giver takes place in?
LL: No, it's just some time in the indefinite future. It's kind of interesting, I have a grandson who's 13 and he asked me recently how far in the future it was. He speculated it was 50 years in the future, and the reason that came up is because the filmmakers had asked me how the boy's bedroom should be decorated, and I said it should be very stark, nothing decorative on the walls, but maybe something educational like the periodic table of elements. And I mentioned that to my grandson and he said, 'Fifty years in the future, there won't be any helium anymore.' Well, who knew, only a 13-year-old [laughs]. So you know, things of that sort would be very different, but who knows, the future seems to be speeding up and I read an article recently implying that very soon we will in fact be able to manipulate human memory. Whether that's a good thing or a bad, we can only guess.
What do you think?
LL: That's a little scary to me.
Did they consult you for anything else for the movie?
LL: They let me read the screenplay and asked me to comment on it, and then the director emailed me periodically throughout the early part of the filmmaking asking my advice about set design, costume design, etc. So I was really in the loop from the beginning; they had no obligation to, I had no veto power, but they could not have been more gracious than they were and they brought me over to South Africa to watch the filming. They really have just been wonderful to work and be with.
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