‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret’ Director On The Pressure Of Adapting The Iconic Judy Blume Novel – Contenders Film L.A.
19.11.2023 - 03:23
/ deadline.com
Kelly Fremon Craig, the writer, director and producer of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, opened up about what inspired her to reach out to Judy Blume to adapt the beloved coming-of-age novel into a film.
During Deadline’s Contenders Film Los Angeles event Saturday, Craig said that after The Edge of Seventeen, she was thinking about what was next for her and thought about authors who had impacted her life.
“The first person who came to my mind was Judy Blume,” she said during her film’s panel. “I mean, really, she turned me into a reader and a writer. I started to reread all her books with a thought of adapting them.”
Craig said that during that same time, Blume posted on social media that she had been thinking of optioning her books, but the only one she wouldn’t allow to be adapted was Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
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That’s when Craig sent Blume an email that she calls “a love letter.” “I just poured my heart out and told her how much her work had meant to me,” the filmmaker said. “For as long as I can remember, she really was the first person who spoke to me and made me feel, especially at that age, that I wasn’t alone. Her writing has such an honesty to it, and I think that’s such a gift at that age, when you can feel really like you’re the only person in the world going through something.”
Producer Julie Ansell noted that it was important for them “to make Julie Blume happy” about the adaptation.”
“That was sort of the pressure throughout the whole filmmaking and all of it, to really make a film that lives up to what the book is,” Ansell said. “Judy was