The Woman in Cabin 10 Author Ruth Ware Talks Netflix Movie’s New Ending
ComingSoon spoke with The Woman in Cabin 10 author Ruth Ware about her novel being adapted into the new Netflix movie starring Keira Knightley and directed by Simon Stone. Ware discussed getting to visit the set, Knightley’s performance, and the new ending for the film. The movie is now streaming on Netflix.
“While on board a luxury yacht for a travel assignment, a journalist witnesses a passenger thrown overboard late at night, only to be told that it didn’t happen, as all passengers and crew are accounted for. Despite no one believing her, she continues to look for answers, putting her own life in danger,” says the official logline.
Tyler Treese: It is always exciting when authors see their work adapted. Did you get a chance to visit the set at all?
Ruth Ware: I did, yeah. I got to visit when they were filming in London. But I think my personal kind of highlight was I managed to go and visit some of the filming on the yacht, which was incredible.
How was it getting to see Keira bring Lo to life? Because as an author, that’s a character you dreamt up and now you have this acclaimed actress bringing her to life on screen. I can’t even imagine how that feels.
It was incredibly surreal. The whole process of sort of seeing locations that I had described and characters that I’d dreamt up in my spare bedroom 10 years ago, suddenly embodied in flesh and blood was incredibly surreal.
Keira, as an actor, is just fantastic, and I think she’s a lot more beautiful than I had imagined Lo. When I wrote Lo, I imagined her much more of a kind of everywhere, and Keira, even wind-swept and terrified on a yacht, looking a bit kind of ruffled, is still absolutely stunning.
But I think she really nailed Lo’s character. You know, she got to the sort of core of Lo, [which] is her absolute relentless, dogged drive for the truth, and she somehow manages to convey that on screen, which is amazing.
I wanted to ask you about the unique structure of the mystery you laid out because we find out who did it and what happened, about a bit over halfway through the film, at least. What did you like most about having so much time to really see these characters figure out how they’re gonna move on and figure out this situation, rather than the twist waiting till the very end, like in a lot of mysteries?
Ruth Ware: There’s always two parts to a crime. One is obviously the kind of who-done-it, and that’s what sort of golden age crime and thrillers tend to concentrate on. So you find out who did it on the final page. But the other side of the coin, which is, I think, probably the more urgent and the more human one, is the desire to see justice. To know whether everybody’s going to be okay, to figure out how these people are going to be brought to account.
That was one of the reasons why I structured the book the way I did. We find out the answer to the mystery about halfway through, as you point out, but it’s immediately that who’d done it question is immediately replaced with a much more urgent one, which is, “Is Lo going to be okay? And is she going to be able to bring this home?”
I was very glad that the film reflected that same structure because as you point out, we’re suddenly we are suddenly made aware of the fact that figuring out the answer to this mystery is only half of the puzzle. The other half is, how on earth is this going to be made?
I wanted to ask you about the ending. Because we see these three women really come together, and I thought that was really inspiring to see these common people really coming together to bring down this manipulative person in power. Do you read this as like a feminist text? How do you kind of view that? Because I thought it was very interesting just to see these regular people coming together and putting truth first.
So interestingly, the ending to the film is probably the point where it’s most different to the book. So in the book, we’re completely inside Lo’s head, and a lot of the kind of resolution takes place kind of offscreen because she’s not aware of what’s happening. So there’s a sort of similar women to coming together to solve their problems, but Lo doesn’t get that moment of closure at the end where she gets to see justice done herself.
So it was one of the changes that I loved about the film, that she gets that kind of moment herself to be able to do that. And I guess, yeah, I wrote the book as a sort of response to the fact that there were a lot of, he said, she said cases in the news when I was writing it, and I was getting increasingly angry about the fact that women always seemed to be at the bottom of the pile in terms of who ever whose evidence was sort of listened to and taken seriously and not endlessly dissected on the media and on social media.
So I guess the ending is a sort of fitting riposte to that, which is lovely.
Thanks to Ruth Ware for taking the time to talk about The Woman in Cabin 10.
Source: Comingsoon.net