The new adaptation of Scott Spencer’s bleak romance novel, “Endless Love,” starring Alex Pettyfer and Gabriella Wilde, hits theaters today, but if you’re familiar with the macabre source material, this version might strike you as ever so slightly more upbeat.
When the twisted love of Jade and David returns to the big screen — an earlier adaptation starred Brooke Shields — it won’t go as far as the book did.
“[This movie] is not as dark as the book,” Pettyfer said when MTV News spoke with the two young stars. “They are going insane a little bit [in the book]. There are drugs involved.”
Wilde agreed, explaining that while the theme stays the same, the characters come from different places. “The base of the characters is different in the book,” she said. “For Jade, her character in the book is different from who she is in the movie. There are obviously similarities. They’re both about falling in love, but it’s a different angle. There’s a different viewpoint on it.”
But since there’s still a romance at the center of the story, Pettyfer and Wilde had a do what they could to make the intensity believable for the audience. That included two extra weeks of rehearsal before filming started in Georgia.
“We had rehearsal time set aside, so we rehearsed together in LA,” Wilde said. “Then we had two week in Atlanta as well, before we actually started filming, so that we could actually spend time getting to know each other and working on the script without diving straight in.”
“Endless Love” opens in theaters on February 14.
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