Scott Westerfeld and McG on setting the book in motion.
In McG’s new sci-fi action-adventure Uglies, 15-year-old Tally Youngblood is eager to follow the same path as her peers — in their futuristic world, the day that teenagers turn 16, they receive mandatory, life-altering plastic surgery that rids them of any physical imperfections. Suddenly, they graduate from being an “ugly” to a “pretty,” embarking on a life of ease and leisure in the buzzing metropolis of New Prettytown, a seemingly utopian world where everyone is equal, and no one is ever lonely, frustrated, or unhappy.
But when Tally, played by The Kissing Booth star Joey King, befriends a fellow Ugly named Shay (Brianne Tju), she’s introduced to a world outside the shallow strictures of her conformist society. Embarking on a journey of self-discovery, Tally finds herself at odds with both her former best friend Peris (Chase Stokes) and the powerful leader Dr. Cable (Laverne Cox), an unyielding advocate of the procedure.
If Tally’s story sounds familiar, it might be because of the New York Times best-selling novels by Scott Westerfeld that inspired the film. The first book, Uglies, debuted to runaway success back in 2005, spawning seven additional books set in the same futuristic world, along with graphic novels. For his part, Westerfeld says he knew his work was in great hands once he spied the director’s heavily annotated edition of the series’ initial installment. “McG’s copy looks like the mega-fan’s copy of Uglies,” the author says. “He was really focused on the book.”
Already familiar with the novels, McG immediately agreed to direct the adaptation once the opportunity came his way. “The message of this movie, that beauty is interior, is a great message for today,” says McG (Charlie’s Angels, Shadowhunters). Here, McG and Westerfeld discuss bringing the novel to the screen.
A field of orchids
ON BEING TRUE TO THE NOVEL
With a script from Jacob Forman, Vanessa Taylor, and Whit Anderson, the new film is a strikingly faithful adaptation that builds on the story’s foundational themes and should appeal both to longtime fans of the series and newcomers to Tally’s world. “I’m very, very reverential of Scott and anybody who puts something into existence,” McG says. “He’s the creator. He generated the source material. It was so important to me that he was happy with the work we were doing, and he was such a great partner. He kept us on the rails, but he also gave us some latitude to do what was best for a different medium.”
Tally's pig mask
ON WORKING WITH EXECUTIVE PRODUCER AND STAR JOEY KING
Westerfeld wasn’t the filmmaker’s only key creative partner. In King, McG found an actor fully committed to portraying Tally as a flawed, multidimensional heroine. “She’s as smart as they come,” raves McG of King. “I would work with her a thousand times over. I know I’m not alone in saying that. She’s so locked [into] a place of emotional understanding of, ‘Where’s my character,’ at any given time, and, ‘What am I experiencing?’ The Tally character comes into this world not conflicted. She wants to get the surgery — she’s all in. She’s been in this purgatory state as an Ugly, and she’s ready to become a new Pretty. Then her world turns upside down.”
A hoverboard park
ON CONJURING FUTURISTIC LOCALES
McG sparked to the world Westerfeld had envisioned in his novels. Inspired by the eclectic design language of architect Zaha Hadid, McG worked with the art department to make New Prettytown the ultimate destination for any teen — it’s a hodgepodge of mind-blowing hiking destinations, extraordinary high-rise apartments, and Las Vegas-style all-night dance parties. “Conversely,” the director says, “Uglyville is very brutalist and monochromatic, very much Pink Floyd’s The Wall by way of all things George Orwell.” Finally, Smoke, where Shay — and eventually Tally — ventures to live alongside a group of rebels led by the enigmatic David (Keith Powers), “was meant to be the equivalent of the first time you enter the Yosemite Valley and your jaw hits the ground that something could be so beautiful,” the director says. In other words, truly breathtaking.
An undercover communication tool
ON THE ATMOSPHERE ON SET
Westerfeld himself was on hand for some of the sequences set inside the Smoke, which were filmed on location in Stone Mountain, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta. “They had built a real community out there,” says the author, who cameos in Uglies as a man pushing a wheelbarrow full of books in the idyllic rural community. “There was grass on the roofs of the buildings because that’s environmentally sensible and also because it’s a disguise from the air [from Cable’s forces]. You can go into those rooms [constructed for the production] and open up the drawers and there’s stuff inside the drawers. It’s kind of amazing the lengths that production goes to create a reality that feels lived in. I felt like the whole crew — costumes, hair, everybody — were people who wanted to honor the book.”
ON THE RELEVANCE OF UGLIES’ THEMES TODAY
“As different generations discover it, what the Uglies series means is super different,” Westerfeld offers. “When it was written, it was very much about plastic surgery. It was much more literal. Now, it’s more about what we do to our faces online or the way we present a version of ourselves that’s not true. We only show part of our life, the prettified, always-smiling, always-having-a-great-time version. We don’t give ourselves space online to show the parts of us that are sad or bored or, in whatever sense, ugly. And that erasure of that part of ourselves, it’s too bad. It’s part of who we are and it’s part of what being human is.”
