(MENAFN- Arab Times) Spoiler warning: Do not read unless you have watched "Paper Towns" which hits theaters July 24. The cast and creators of "Paper Towns" gathered for a red carpet screening on Saturday at the London West Hollywood and recounted one of their most exciting days on set which included a very special cameo. The film stars Nat Wolff and Cara Delevingne who attended the screening with the rest of the "Paper Towns" team. In the film, based on the novel of the same name by John Green, a group of five teens embark on a road trip and along the way have to stop for gas.
With a limited amount of time to reach their destination, the high schoolers race to collect snacks, go to the bathroom and refuel the van. "The Fault in Our Stars" teen idol Ansel Elgort returns to the Green fold to make a cameo as the gas station cashier. "If you're going to have a cameo like that, you've got to give it the weight it deserves," said director Jake Schreier. "The gas station scene is one of my favorite scenes in the book, and one that I was most excited about filming. And given that, I felt like it was a great place to put a cameo like that." The director also commented on how he shot the reveal with a dramatic pan up from the counter. "If you're going to do it, you've got to have a good reveal for the shot," he said. "You can't just cut to him." "It's a great shot," agreed Green. "Jake made a great shot.
I watched the movie in Brazil with an audience, and yeah, there was a significant reaction." "It was a fun day just in general," remembered Halston Sage, who interacts with Elgort in the scene. "We were shooting the gas station scene which is kind of like, 'Go, go, go,' which is kind of how the day was. We definitely got our exercise in." Although actor Justice Smith is stuck outside pumping gas in the scene, he recalled his thoughts on the dynamic between Elort and Sage. "He did the scene with Lacey (Sage) and that was kind of interesting to see her shoot him down because that's just a weird concept to me," he said. "Two beautiful people, I just assume they go together, but I guess that's not how life works."
Actress Jaz Sinclair remembered witnessing the reunion between Green, Elgort and Wolff. "It was really funny to watch him and Nat and John Green reunite, and that dynamic which was very different than the 'Paper Towns' dynamic," she said. "They were a little bit more bro-y than we were." Several special guests also attended the screening including Kylie and Kendall Jenner, who attended to support Delevingne, along with Jaden Smith, Jeremy Jordan and Wolff's brother and band partner, Alex. After the screening, the cast and other notable attendees, including president of Fox 2000 Elizabeth Gabler, gathered at the London for a reception.
At one point during the evening, Green was overheard imparting wisdom on some likely awestruck teen girls. "As the great poet Robert Frost once said," the author recited, "'In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.'" Green's words, it turns out, may rival the sincerity of his writing. Variety sat down with Wolff and Green to discuss themes from the movie and on-set antics.
Question: One of the themes in "Paper Towns" is the idea of how we tend to reduce people down to one word" where did that come from?
Green: I think it came from two places: One being that when I was a teenage boy I definitely essentialized people around me. When I had crushes on girls, I thought that idealizing them and romanticizing them and putting them on a pedestal was somehow doing them a favor, and somehow that was the way that I was supposed to act because I had been, I think, taught that by the broader culture. And, in fact, that was tremendously dehumanizing to those women, and also ends up being destructive to everyone involved. And then I was also thinking about the way that we still essentialize" we're constantly essentializing people as merely poor, or merely other, and in the end you can't have a relationship with people. I think the biggest job of adulthood is to learn to imagine other people complexly.
Q: What about playing the role - is that something that you've thought about growing up as an actor?
Wolff: I just feel like most books and movies that are handed to teenagers are filled with stereotypes, and that bores me. As an actor it's so much more exciting, and there's so much more to do when you have a character that's complicated and there's a bunch of different sides to him. And when I read the book, I felt that about all the characters - not just Quentin. I felt like I related to Margo and I related to parts of Quentin, and I liked how everybody was different around different groups of people. I think it's important to acknowledge that nobody is paper. Once you get close to anyone, they are complicated.
Q: The characters that you write are very earnest, but in modern society we tend to value cynicism. Is that something that you've thought about?
Green:Yeah, well there's not a lot of room for un-ironic emotion in contemporary culture. I think that irony is an important tool in dealing with the world as we find it. It's a tool of protection, but it can also be a tool of incision to get to some truth. But along the way maybe we've lost some of what I think of as the power of straightforward emotion and earnestness and seriousness. One of the things that I like about teenagers is they're extremely funny, and extremely clever and intellectually curious. But they're also willing to ask questions about the meaning of life without disguising them around irony, and ask questions about what are our responsibilities to other people without having to couch it in irony. And that's how I like to think, and so that's also how I like to write.
Q: Whereas adults tend to hesitate to be so straightforward because we're afraid of the backlash"
Green: And that ends up sort of hurting the quality of discourse because you can be so afraid to be wrong"
Wolff: Or be un-cool.
Green: Yeah, the consequences of being un-cool feel so big that a lot of times you end of not finding ways to have open and honest conversations.
Q: Nat, did you have a normal high school experience?
Wolff: Yeah, I did have a normal high school experience. I did feel like - because I was in a band and because I grew up in New York and because I was acting - I may have grown up a little quicker. And for the movie, I felt like I almost went in a time machine back to a time where I was a little more innocent and I had two best friends. There really was a period of time when I had two best friends, and I ended up really liking the idea of girls without really knowing them, kind of the way Quentin does. And by the end of the movie I just wanted to live in that world. I didn't want to leave.
Green: I feel like within the bubble of making the move - which really did feel like a bubble - it felt like we were all in it together, and no one else was in the world.
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