Emma Watson became famous for her role in the Harry Potter movie series. Now that the young actress has grown up, she’s ready to take on more challenging roles, like her recent project, The Perks of Being a Wallflower. The film is based on the novel by Stephen Chbosky, who also wrote the screenplay and directed the production.
“I read The Perks of Being a Wallflower script having not ever read the book before, and I just loved it—it made me cry, I laughed hysterically and it really, really spoke to me,” Watson told Flicks and Bits. “So I said, ‘I’d love to meet Stephen,’ and my agent said, ‘The problem is, the writer who wrote the script and the book wants to direct it, he’s a first time director. How do you feel about that?’ I was like, ‘Well, I’ll just meet him and see how it goes.’”
“And the minute I met [director Stephen Chbosky], any fear that I had about this being his directorial debut just kind of vanished. He knew how he wanted to shoot every single shot of this movie. He had been dreaming about making it for 10 years, he had every little thing planned down to the finest detail. And he has such passion for it, how he saw it as a movie and not just as a book—that was so inspiring.”
The production took place on location in Pittsburgh, where the cast began to form attachments to each other during shooting. Watson recalled, “It’s funny because I came from Paris, I had just done some work for Lancome and I got on the plane and arrived in Pittsburgh, and the Crowne Plaza, which was the hotel that we were staying in, it’s situated in the middle of a huge parking lot, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, where am I?’
“And the minute I met Ezra Miller and Logan Lerman (Percy Jackson) and Johnny Simmons and Mae Whitman (Arrested Development), everyone, I just realized that this was going to be the scene and setting of one of the best summers of my life. We shut down the whole ground floor of the Plaza, we opened all the interconnecting doors in our hotel and we played music and cooked dinners and we shared clothes, stories…we just bonded in a way that you don’t really get to bond unless you’re on location with a cast and crew.”
The actress noted that this arrangement was ideal for the tone of the movie, which is about a tight-knit group of high school friends. “We all hit it off,” Watson said. “I was averaging three hours of sleep a night because we would film The Perks of Being a Wallflower all day together, then we would want to stay up all night together, it was that kind of an experience.”
