[Editor’s Note: This story contains spoilers for the ending of “We Were Liars.”]
There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who read E. Lockhart’s “We Were Liars” and never recovered, and those who haven’t.
This writer is among the former, having devoured the 2014 novel when it first released, rereading it a day later because I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and then putting it back on the shelf and shuddering every time I looked at it for the decade-and-change that followed until the Amazon Prime Video series premiere on June 18. (The show world-premiered at Tribeca Festival in New York earlier this month.)
“We Were Liars” published during a veritable YA boom in books and Hollywood; it was the same year that “The Fault in Our Stars” hit theaters and “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1″ dominated the box office, an era when “Divergent” and “The Maze Runner” were also on the big screen. After “We Were Liars” debuted as a New York Times bestseller (and won multiple awards), it seemed destined for the same fate as those other juggernauts — but in Hollywood, as in the novel, reality is a little more complicated.
After “five different writers and two different directors,” as Lockhart explained in an IndieWire interview, for a possible feature and then a “whole saga” with a potential show, the book’s rights ended up back with Lockhart, who optioned it to showrunners Julie Plec and Carina Adly MacKenzie.
“I was optioning it to them specifically as showrunners, instead of to a production company or a streamer,” Lockhart said. “That’s all the difference in the world, if you can option it directly to somebody who’s going to be creatively involved on a writing and showrunning level. That means that you, the novelist, are in conversation immediately with the creative person, and that the creative person respects and is interested in the feeling that your book evokes.”
The feelings in question cover a lot of ground in this series, from the teen Liars (Emily Alyn Lind, Shubham Maheshwari, Esther McGregor, and Joseph Zada) to the bickering adults (Caitlin Fitzgerald, Mamie Gummer, Candice King, Rahul Kohli) to their growling patriarch (David Morse). There’s the love and jealousy, betrayal and heartbreak, that you expect from a good YA show — especially on the streamer that adapted “The Summer I Turned Pretty” — and much, much more.
“I’m super biased, but I think we offer more feelings than you get with your average show,” Lockhart said. “That is a combination of our subject matter, but also our approach to cinematography and the intimacy with which you get to know these characters over eight episodes, and also the way that our ending functions. The truth of the mystery is an emotional truth, and that’s not always true with thrillers.”
That emotional truth is still protected until people reach it themselves (publisher Delacorte’s original campaign told readers to lie about the ending), but it reveals a lot about Lockhart’s drive as a storyteller and her ongoing quest to share the inside of her mind.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
IndieWire: It speaks to how the climate of adaptation has changed that this could have been a movie, and now it’s a show. What makes it work well for TV?
E. Lockhart: It’s a thriller. Thrillers work well on TV because episodic television has cliffhangers and pauses built into its structure that actually escalate or elevate the mystery component of a story. That’s certainly the case with “We Were Liars.” Julie and Carina are known for “Roswell, New Mexico,” and “Vampire Diaries,” and “Legacies”; those shows all center the young adult audience and the young adult characters, and value what those fandoms crave and the experiences of the young women at the center of the story and their perspectives. So it was lucky for me to be giving my book to people who cared about young adult storytelling.
How was the experience as an executive producer?
I was surprised to find that post-production was my favorite [part]. In retrospect, that makes sense, because editing a novel, you do that same thing. You go over every section with a fine-tooth comb. You think very carefully about pacing down to the sentence level, about where chapter breaks are and where you want the audience to take a breath and calm down for a little bit and then ramp up again. It’s really very similar on a TV show, so I felt like I had good skills and was getting to use them in a new medium, think about images and sound and music and all of that — as well as the story elements that I’m more used to thinking about.
What were you looking for when you got into casting?
We saw a lot of very beautiful actors. We also saw a lot of very funny actors. We saw a lot of intelligent and nuanced actors. We had a wealth of possibility, and I think we were looking for people who had a lot of depth. We had seen so many guys who were snarky and funny and entitled and gorgeous, and they were great. But when we saw [Joseph Zada], he was heartbreaking at the same time as he was all those other things. We saw, “Oh, this kid who’s being kind of a little dick is in pain.” He’s ashamed of himself. He’s in the closet — he’s not ashamed because he’s in the closet; he’s ashamed of something else — he’s struggling, and you could see it on Joe’s face. We were like, “That’s our guy.”
Talk about expanding into eight episodes and adding new material. What was your involvement in writing and breaking that and building out the story?
Because the novel is first person from Cadence’s [Emily Alyn Lind] point of view, it’s very much the inside of Cadence’s head and her perspective. The TV show really does broaden it out. We had four writers of Indian descent who had all kinds of skills as storytellers — comedy and thriller and family drama — but they also were very open [to] sharing their lived experience and their perspectives, which weren’t all the same as each other.
That fleshed out Gat (Maheshwari) and his Uncle Ed (Kohli), who are both characters of Indian descent, while all the other characters are white, old-money Democrats in the same family. That was exciting to me. That’s not something I could do in the novel with the same level of authenticity and depth and nuance at all. I think that’s something that my readers are going to be very psyched to see. People have a lot of love for Gat as a romantic hero, and I think they’re going to learn more about him in a fuller, deeper way than was possible in my imagination.
It’s tempting to be precious about the material as a writer.
At some point, Carina said to me, “Oh, you must feel like we’re taking your baby and putting it on the table and cutting it open,” and I said, “It’s a very old baby. Go ahead.”
Did you have a pinch-me moment during this process?
I think probably the first time I saw Emily Alyn Lind in costume. I’d seen them do a table read, and I had met her and talked to her — and even seeing costume fittings where she was trying things on and having them fitted, but maybe she didn’t have her shoes on, she didn’t have the makeup, she didn’t have the hair. The first time I saw her in the full Cadence costume, that was a real moment. I felt like this character had come right out of my brain, and there she was in front of me.
After that, though, I was at work. If people don’t know, when you’re shooting on location, it seems really beautiful and lovely — but where you are for a lot of your work day, if you are a producer, you’re in a black tent. Whenever I would step out, I would be like, “Oh, it’s the sea, it’s the beautiful houses!” but I’ve been in this tent watching monitors. Then I would kind of catch my breath… but a lot of the time you’re in this tent watching monitors, so you feel like the amazing thing is on the monitor, not actually right next to you.
You wrote the finale. What was it like adapting your own material?
I think because the book is old, I felt loose and ready to just try it out in a new medium. I went to the writers room for two weeks, and [we] broke the episode together, and then I went to script. It was just a new playground for the same story, or an expansion — a chance to stretch my wings. Filming it was really, really fun. I was on set for all of Episodes 7 and 8, and they were both directed by Erica Dunton, who is a favorite of Julie’s, and I really saw why. She runs a very beautiful, very creative set. She’s very funny, she’s very authoritative, she’s very, very visual. Some of my favorite times were first thing in the morning when Erica would be walking through with the DP and talking about why we’re shooting it from this angle, what’s important, what does she want it to look like, and understanding the way her visual imagination was taking hold of the words that were on the page.
The finale features one-on-one scenes that Cadence has with everybody. In the book, she addresses the three of them together, and it is as emotionally gut-wrenching, but talk about separating these.
That idea definitely came from the room. One of the things the TV show is able to do is to give Gat, Johnny, and Mirren (McGregor) each a very different arc inside the house during the big thing that they’re all doing. Each of them has a very clearly articulated reason for making the choices that they do, and a very different story of what happens, and then a different goodbye with different concerns. Mirren is thinking about being seen, and Johnny is thinking about damnation, and Gat is thinking most about Cadence and her journey and how he can love her from where he is now and give her the best future. And of course, we had to get the Scrabble in there.
I’d love to go deeper, if you’re open to that.
One of the questions that “We Were Liars” as a novel asks, and that a lot of my books ask, is asked by Johnny in that goodbye scene, which is, “What do you do with yourself if you have done something terrible?” Something that you deeply, deeply regret; something that you don’t know how to forgive yourself for. Can you find a way to forgive yourself or not? What do you do with yourself? He says to Cadence, “You can feel guilty, but you are also going to go on and live a life and do a million good things,” and that is redemption. It doesn’t erase the fact that you have done what you’ve done, but the good things will count.
When people say, “What do you want people to take away from the book or from the series?” That’s the thing that I am most interested in as a takeaway, that no matter how badly you’ve screwed up, you can go on and do good things. You can go on and do things that you are proud of. And that doesn’t erase the past, but it can still be a life very worth living.
That reminds me of what you said about the big emotions — that is very intense even for adults.
Oh yeah. I’m still wrestling with all of that. And Mirren wants to be seen. For so many young people, the question is not only “Does anyone see me?” But also, “Can I see myself? Who am I? Can I can I even see the person that I want to be, or the person that I am fully? Will others see me? Will they recognize me?” If that’s how you feel, you’re not alone. I just keep writing novels, trying to get people to see the inside of my head, because it doesn’t match the body that I’m in. I think Mirren is having that struggle, and Esther McGregor’s performance in that scene is so beautiful and so heartfelt. She says at some point, “I feel like nobody saw me.” And Cadence says, “I do. I do see you. I see you. I see you. I see you.” That’s a moment of peace between them, and that’s my jam.
Looking back, reflecting on this whole process so far, I would just love to hear your thoughts and takeaways from the experience.
Writing a novel is a solo endeavor. Making a TV show is really not. There are hundreds of people employed by this show. Plec and MacKenzie are one hundred percent the showrunners of it, and I was there as a member of their team to contribute to them going down the runway. All the best moments were the moments when I accepted that and got on board their train and helped them realize this new version of the story, rather than trying to clutch it to my chest.
“We Were Liars” is now streaming on Prime Video.
