HHGG Interview with writer Karey KirkPatrick

But what followed was an interesting process because several names were bandied about and I even met with one of them (and we’re talking A list directors here). And the general sentiment from all of them was “No thank you, I don’t want to be known as the guy who screwed this one up.” And part of me understood and another part of me was saying, “Oh God does that mean I’m going to be known as the guy who screwed this up?”

He’d better not be, that’s all I can say.

Hopefully people will give it a chance and remember what DNA wrote about the script: “Whenever I sit down and do another version of Hitchhiker, it highly contradicts whichever version went before. The best this I can say about the movie is that it will be specifically contradicting the first book”, and not go all LOTR-fanoboy-like — I don’t want to hear <nerd voice> “Aaaaaactually, Marvin is supposed to be constructed of brushed steel, not plaaaastic, and chapter seven of ‘The Restaurant at the end of the Universe’ says that Marvin was ‘not in fact a particularly small robot’ [speaker pushes glasses up on nose]– and now he’s being played by a dwarf. This is a complete insult to Douglas Adams’ literary integrity.” </nerd voice>

Actually, I have already heard that. And it made my brain hurt. And it made me want to hurt people. Because the size of the goddamn robot is so crucially important to the stroyline.

And oh no! Ford Prefect is being played by a black, non-British man. Nevermind that last time I checked, England wasn’t “somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse”. Personally, I think the only important description of Ford in the book is (in reference to what the difficult to identify odd thing about him might be) “perhaps it was that he smiled slightly too broadly and gave people the unnerving impression that he was about to go for their neck.” Other than that, I don’t give two shits. Or even one.