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Joe Hill: It is one of those fairytale like stories where you get the wish you wished for and it turns out to be a curse. There is this moment when he says, “I want to know everything. I want to know every dirty secret, because it will make it easier to hate you.” And as a result he does learn every dirty secret about everyone around him and it becomes this incredibly painful thing and pitches him deep into a private hell. He eventually gets a confession and the unexpected truth.

Joe, it sounds like you really enjoyed how the film turned out. How involved were you in bringing your novel to the screen? Do you feel as if it stayed close to your initial vision?

JH: I think that it is tremendously close to the book in the most important way: that it is true to the spirit of the characters. It’s also very true to the plot mechanics. There are a lot of scenes right from the book in the film. But the most important thing for me is that I hoped that the characters would seem like the ones in the book and I think Dan and Juno and everyone brought so much heart and ability to it that they really did bring those characters to life in a special way.

There are really only two ways to screw up a film when adapting it from a book. You can totally forget the source material and run off and do a completely different story and it’s like, “Why did they even bother adapting something in the first place?” Or you can also be so faithful to the source material that you wind up with something that’s completely dead on screen. It just plods along. For a work of art to succeed it needs to dance, not plod. And I think they did a terrific adaptation. It hits all the right notes without bogging it down and has a huge overarching range with a very light touch.

Daniel, what was it like the first time you put on the horns and saw yourself in the mirror? How long did it take before they looked normal?

DR: They looked really normal, really quickly. That was what was remarkable about them. Whenever you see a line in the script that the character has horns, in my imagination it sounds fantastic, but how will they actually look? The first time I saw them on it was kind of a combination of relief, because they looked fantastic, and excitement. When you have something stuck to your head it can go either way – it has the potential to look silly, but here it really doesn’t.

The word “organic” is one of my most hated, overused words. But they do. They look like they are made from organic material and are coming from my head. They only took about 20 minutes to put on. They are very light.

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