Dutton Juvenile/AmazonJohn Green's first young adult novel is finally getting the big screen treatment!
Paramount Pictures' Looking for Alaska, based on Green's 2005 book of the same name, will begin filming in Michigan this fall, the Michigan Film Office announced Thursday. This will be the third movie based on a Green novel: The Fault in Our Stars came out in 2014, and Paper Towns just hit theaters July 24.
The book Looking for Alaska tells the story of Miles "Pudge" Halter, who leaves behind his familiar life in Florida to attend Culver Creek Boarding School in Alabama. It's there that he meets Alaska Young, a beautiful, quirky girl who changes his life forever.
The film adaptation of Looking for Alaska was stuck in development for some time, but thanks to The Fault in Our Stars' success in theaters, the ball started rolling again. In a tumblr blog post earlier this year, Green admitted it took him a while to come back around to even wanting his first book to be made into a movie. "To be honest, a lot of times I've wished I could get the rights back to prevent there from ever being a movie," he wrote, "because the story is so personal and I know it's also an important story to lots of readers, and I don't want to mess up their relationship with the book or its characters."
"But I find myself now actually excited about the movie," he continued. "I think [Michael H.] Weber and [Scott] Neustadter (the same people who adapted TFIOS and Paper Towns) wrote an amazing script, and Wyck [Godfrey] and Isaac [Klausner] help produce it like they did for the other movies, and now we have a director I can feel genuinely excited about...Becca [Rebecca Thomas] gets Alaska–she wrote me this letter that just made it clear to me that she gets it way deep down, and if you've seen her movie Electrick Children you'll know she has a really cool visual imagination. I am not by nature optimistic, but I think it could be a really great movie."