Ansel featured by Visual Tales Magazine

Ansel covers Visual Tales Magazine. 

Gorgeous shots by Ansel's sister, Sophie Elgort.

Be sure to check out the great article featured on Visual Tales Magazine site!

Ansel for Dazed & Confused Digital

Ansel sat down with Dazed & Confused Magazine to talk about having a leg double, Shailene's herbal tea and his childhood as the son of a world-famous photographer. Check out the article below

A long time ago – like, we're talking July last year – I called up the famous fashion photographer Arthur Elgort to chat about his trip to China with Linda Evangelista. Before hanging up, he said, "My youngest son is Ansel Elgort. He's going to come out in a movie soon that's going to make him big time." That movie was Carrie – the Kimberly Peirce remake of Stephen King's telekinetic thriller starring Chloë Grace Moretz.

Arthur Elgort was right. He did make it big time. "He believes in me," smiles Ansel when I tell him about our exchange. He's sat in the Soho Hotel, legs sprawled across the coffee table between us, munching on caramel corn. With only three films to date, the youngest Elgort is already girding his loins from the clamouring Tumblr 'shippers' (vehement fans who pair two people in a dream relationship). In The Fault in Our Stars, Ansel plays Augustus Waters: a cocksure hunk in remission who falls for Hazel Grace Lancaster (played by herbal hottie and homemade toothpaste guru Shailene Woodley). Together, they trek to Amsterdam to visit Lancaster's favourite author, Peter Van Houten. What really happens, though, is a deluge from the beginning of the second act when the floodgates burst. You'll sob in this movie, I swear. This acerbic account of young teenage love thriving despite being diagnosed with a terminal illness "says important things about sick people, shoots down the stereotypes," says Elgort. So for those of you that get this, bring tissues along when you go. Okay? Okay.

Did you ever get to use Shailene's herbal toothpaste?

Ansel Elgort: She offered it to me, the toothpaste, but I'm okay with Crest (laughs). She would give me stuff and I’d just eat it. I'm down for whatever, if you wanna give me something I'll drink your drink – the thing about it is if she's drinking it you know it's probably not bad for you.

And? How'd you feel?

Ansel Elgort: I wouldn’t feel bad, I never got sick or anything. The funny thing is that with Shailene if you ask her what things are good for, she'll like tell you for 95% of the things – the reason they're good for you is like, "This is good for digestion." It's like everything is good for digestion now.

How'd you guys first meet?

Ansel Elgort: It was during the audition for Divergent. There weren't sparks. We played brother and sister the first time we met. Shailene is a big presence, she dominates whatever scene she's in. If the actor she's with isn't good, she's going to dominate the shit out of them and it's going to be a mess. So it needs to be someone who's a strong enough actor. So you have to think about how can you beat her in that scene, because she's trying to beat you. 

There're all these hilarious things on Tumblr which create entire narratives from out of context gifs. Are they creepy to you?

Ansel Elgort: They all like to 'ship' us (see Shansel). We're not a thing. I think that’s really helpful – that we weren't a thing. I'm really comfortable being open around her because I'm not like, 'Oh no, I have to watch my step. I don't want to date my co-star.' There's no pressure there. There's no sexual tension between us, it's all just friendship.

What was it like having a leg double?

Ansel Elgort: His name was Tanner Boatwright. Good kid. When you're crafting a character, it's good to have a lot of influences. I understood already that Gus (Waters) has a lot of confidence, but you always ask, "Why does he have this confidence, where does it come from?" And one of the reasons might be because Tanner is really, really confident. I think it's because he's overcome something. He still snowboards and climbs and hunts – that's how he lost his leg, in a hunting accident. Someone shot him in the leg, he was 16. You can go one or the other way – one way is to go around moping your whole life that you lost your leg, and the other way is being really strong about it, and almost overcompensating with confidence. 

Where does Tanner's leg appear in the movie?

Ansel Elgort: The first time in the support group where I show my leg which is hidden. The other time is in the bed, when I'm on the phone, you see with me with my leg. And after the love scene they actually cut a hole in the bed and had me put my leg down to make it look not just like a knee. So it looks like it was cut off.

So all three of you are in the bed together?

Ansel Elgort: No. Tanner wasn't needed in that scene (laughs).

What films have you cried in? 

Ansel Elgort: I cried for the first time during The Notebook. I cry a lot during films. I'm a big crybaby.

Do you think that this is the next generation's The Notebook?

Ansel Elgort: No, I think that they're just totally different movies. Nicholas Sparks and John Green are very different writers. I don't read Nicholas Sparks books. I'm not that big of a reader to be honest. 

So what was the big clincher for this one? Why was this one the one you wanted to be a part of?

Ansel Elgort: Just who Augustus (Waters) was. That role is so special. And also the story in general. It's a beautiful story with important messages I think. Sick people in movies are so poorly portrayed, and even as an example – what Hollywood wanted to do for this film, when John first brought it to a studio, it wasn't Fox – they said, "Maybe we could bring in a different character who's not sick, and make it about her?" It's like, really? No! He said he couldn't believe that someone would suggest that. That's the problem with Hollywood and making movies about sick people, it's always about healthy people learning lessons from sick people. As if the sick people aren't important enough.

What was it like growing up with your dad (Arthur Elgort)? Did he ever bring people over?

Ansel Elgort: Yeah, I mean, I never knew. I grew up with Grace Coddington coming over to our house like all the time, but like she was just like the woman with the red hair.

She came over for dinner and stuff?

Ansel Elgort: Yeah! She was really nice. And the funny thing is people are always saying that she's so mean, but I've only ever known her as being very nice to us. If we saw her at a restaurant she might be doing her Grace thing, but then when she'd see us she'd be like, (endearing old lady voice) "Ohhh! Ansel, good to see you!" I was young enough at the time that seeing all these models I'd be like, "Oh, they're just tall girls." I wasn't really into girls yet. And then, now, I'm at that age it's like, "Oh, there's some pretty girls around in my dad's studio", but, you know, don't go over there…

Do you have any Adam Sandler stories from working together on Men, Women & Children?

Ansel Elgort: Yeah. He's really funny. I played basketball with him. More and more with him over summer.

Did you beat him? 

Ansel Elgort: Here's the thing. 

Oh no!

Ansel Elgort: So, you know what… no, I'm going to save that story until I'm promoting that movie. I gotta save it.

Oh, come on! You can't do that to me, it's my last question!

Ansel Elgort: I really wanna save it until that movie. I'm sorry.

Thanks Mel

Shailene covers Vanity Fair

Shailene covers the July issue of Vanity Fair. 

Credits to Miguel Reveriego, Vanity Fair

Here are the highlights:

Shai on George Clooney:

He has been an angel in my life for many reasons. He knew everyone’s name on set. He treated everyone as an equal and everyone got his warmth.

Shai on being herself:

As much as this industry is a platform for talking about big issues, there’s also so many fuckin’ issues. You could talk about Russia, or Argentina, or fracking, or G.M.O.’s. Maybe the only thing that I’m supposed to do is just show up and be me in every moment. Because I do feel like one of my gifts is to be open and lovely—simple things like smiling at strangers and having kind, small interactions. I think that is what’s going to ultimately shift things.

Shai on Miles Teller:

I look at Miles and, like, I’m sort of Julia Roberts in the same way she is to George. Their relationship I could see being our relationship in 20 years, and that really is special.

Thanks to Shailene Woodley Brazil for the scans!

AccessHollywood




Be sure to check out more of the article at the source and pick up the magazine in stores and online June 12th!

New York Magazine features Shailene Woodley

Shailene covers the new issue of New York Magazine with actress Brie Larson. The interview covers topics like acting since childhood, staying grounded in Hollywood, being friends with Brie, being a strong, female person and much more. Check out the whole article on vulture, it's a great read.

 

John Green Feature in Indianapolis Monthly

John is on the cover of this month's Indianapolis Monthly with a GREAT article about John and his work, namely TFIOS, the movie and most of all, his commitment to nerdfighteria. 

 

Photo credit: Tony Valainis/ Indianapolis Monthy

Here is an excerpt of the article:

Green had long wanted to write about teenagers living with illness, but without weighing them down in layers of angst or, at the other extreme, painting them as bruised heroes who teach us all an important lesson about being brave. Why couldn’t they just be the same fun, flawed, and complex kids he wrote about in his other novels—the kind of restless youth who play video games in their basements, throw eggs at their exes’ cars, and make out?

There are a hundred ways to design that narrative, and Green struggled with several of them. In a a Q&A on his own website, he pointed out that an early, scrapped version of the story centered around a group of kids with cancer who created a club called the Dead Person’s Society that met in a cave. In another draft, he chose a blind character to narrate the story. But all of the right elements started to fall into place when he developed a friendship with a feisty teenager named Esther Grace Earl, an active member of the author’s online fan community whom he first met at a Harry Potter convention. Earl was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at the age of 12 and died four years later, in 2010. A prolific video blogger, she might have influenced Green’s decision to tell his kids-with-cancer story through the spot-on voice of a female narrator. She certainly ignited the book’s theme of short lives lived fully, though Green insists the female character in his book, Hazel Grace Lancaster, is not the fictional version of his friend with the same middle name. When he finished the book, more than a decade in the making, Green—who eventually would help Earl’s parents publish a posthumous collection of her essays through Dutton (a division of Penguin Books)—dedicated The Fault in Our Stars to Earl.

It’s a sweet boy-meets-girl story, full of characters who are comfortable in their own skins and possess enviable language skills, elements that resonated with Green’s core readers. But more than any of his other books (none of which, by the way, shy away from heartbreakingly PG-13 motifs), The Fault in Our Stars recalibrated the scales for the teenage love story by retelling the romantic epic in the language of PET scans and G-tubes.

By the time he started writing TFIOS, Green had moved back to Indianapolis from New York City, where he and Sarah had lived while she attended grad school at Columbia University. Sarah accepted a position at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 2007—a great opportunity to work under then-director Max Anderson and senior curator Lisa D. Freiman. “The IMA had this reputation for being the next cool museum to work at,” Green says. “Sarah felt like there would be opportunities for growth, which of course there were. She went from being a curatorial assistant to being a curator in five years.” Indianapolis was also a good place for him to settle into his typical creative mode: blocking out huge chunks of uninterrupted time to write.

And Green is no John-Boy Walton when he writes. He becomes irritable and hard to be around (no one wants to go to lunch with him), and the perfect words do not just flow onto the page. He writes with the intention to revise, in rough drafts that he wants someone else to read as soon as he’s done with them. That could be Sarah, at night after they put their two kids (4-year-old Henry and 1-year-old Alice) to bed, or his editor of 11 years, Julie Strauss-Gabel at Dutton Children’s Books, who says that all of his novels endure “a constant back and forth.” And though her client’s public persona is anything but sedate, when it comes to the actual writing, she insists, “he’s always been such a great partner in the quiet craft of working through projects.”

But there was nothing quiet about the escalating buzz when word got out about Green’s forthcoming book. The buildup to The Fault in Our Stars’s publishing date hit a feverish pitch when Green promised to sign all 180,000 copies of the work in its first printing—an endeavor that sent him to physical therapy with an “astonishingly painful” elbow condition called ulnar nerve entrapment. He believes his signature changed 2,000 copies in—an unnecessary “h” evolved, and it nearly drove him mad. “I would get paranoid about my signature, because I knew that someone was going to get this book, and they would open it up and be like, ‘Well, that sucks.’ Sometimes I would apologize in parentheses underneath.”

But the commitment paid off. The book that Kirkus Reviews described as “a smartly crafted intellectual explosion of a romance” and Time called “damned near genius” has seven million copies in print. And while Green’s books had been optioned for films before, leading nowhere, Hollywood’s interest in this one was more urgent. Director Josh Boone—who had lost a friend to cancer and was struggling with the healing process when he came upon Green’s book—championed the project, and, to Green’s surprise, the wheels quickly started turning.

Green’s personal imprint on the book proved so deep and indelible that the author was granted an unusual amount of pull when it came to the film treatment. During the casting phase of The Fault in Our Stars, he lobbied for the relatively unknown Elgort, who auditioned for the male lead of Augustus Waters alongside fellow lanky, soft-featured up-and-comers like Brenton Thwaites, Nat Wolff, Nick Robinson, and Noah Silver. “He didn’t look like Gus in some ways that I felt might be problematic to the audience,” Green says. “But I felt like he understood Gus in such a deep way. I knew I was going to have to sell him. And I feel totally vindicated because he is so great in the movie.”

Though the story takes place in Indianapolis, TFIOS was actually filmed in production-friendly Pittsburgh—where the tax credits were worth re-creating local landmarks like the sprawling Funky Bones sculpture at 100 Acres and other details, right down to the Indiana license plates. Green was on-set for much of the filming, and he traveled with the cast and crew when the production took them to the Netherlands for a few pivotal scenes against the real-life backdrop of Amsterdam, including some rare footage shot inside the historic Anne Frank House. The author’s Tumblr, Instagram, and Twitter feeds served as both travelogue and cogs in the movie’s hype machine, whipping up behind-the-scenes excitement. Meanwhile, that clearinghouse of the teen psyche, Hot Topic, came out with a line of T-shirts featuring The Fault in Our Stars lines and imagery, including “Some infinities are bigger than other infinities,” and “Maybe okay will be our always.”

Fans got their first glimpse of the movie during a 30-second clip that aired on the Today show in January. Another clip premiered before a live young-adult audience during the MTV Movie Awards, whichGreen attended, wearing a Burberry suit and tweeting a play-by-playfrom the inner sanctum: “David Hasselhoff is sitting seven seats away from me. What?”

A whole new audience will get its first taste of “The John Green Experience” when the movie comes out this month and its writer makes the rounds with the publicity dog-and-pony show—the movie junkets and long days spent answering the same questions over and over. He doesn’t like doing TV interviews. He gets nervous and spends too much time fretting and thinking of what to say—like when he went on the Craig Ferguson show last March and couldn’t get any work done for weeks leading up to it. But this time he’s on board with anything 20th Century Fox asks him to do. “If I didn’t like the movie, I wouldn’t do any of that stuff,” says Green, who was treated to a private screening in Los Angeles. “But this is something that I’m really proud of.”

In one of the many passages in The Fault in Our Stars that will probably make you cry, 17-year-old Augustus Waters, a former high-school basketball star who lost his right leg to osteosarcoma, grapples with the idea of love and nothingness with such blue-eyed eloquence that Romeo Montague would give him a chest bump at the club: “I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.” Spoiler alert: The theme of oblivion runs throughout the story. But it is also a theme that seems to guide Green in his own life’s storyline, which, much like his Crash Course videos, is at its best when he goes off-script.

“My idea was that I would escape oblivion by doing something memorable,” he says. “After my first book, which was my first attempt to grapple with this urge that we all have to be larger than life, I used to ask kids when I would visit high schools how many of them wanted to be famous, deep down. And most of them did. Or they were lying. And I would be like, why? We are very focused on this idea of surviving death. It is not possible—there is 40,000 years of evidence. I have tried to refocus, in my proper adulthood, toward other things.”

You should really read the whole article at the source if you're interested. It's a great piece.

Shailene Woodley on Dallas and Riviera Magazine

Dallas Magazine

 

  

 

DONE WITH THE DESCENDANTS AND BEING DIVERGENT, SHAILENE WOODLEY SHINES IN THE FAULT IN OUR STARS THIS MONTH.

 “Let’s get in our comfies!” declares Shailene Woodley at the end of her extensive five-hour photo shoot. The 22-year-old actress, who stars as the teenage cancer-patient protagonist in this month’s The Fault in Our Stars (based on the best-selling young adult novel and romantic heart-wrencher by John Green), is speaking to no one—and everyone—on the set.

 And while her sentiment is meant to address the 5-inch heels that further accentuate her already long, lean, nearly 5-foot-9-inch frame; the painstakingly applied makeup she would normally eschew; the pixie cut that is rarely so perfectly coiffed; and the never-before-worn, form-fitting designer duds she’s donned instead of her standard secondhand treasures, it’s also an affirmation of Woodley’s mindset and general life orientation. Call it an impromptu, casual cri de coeur, California-style!

Born in Ventura County’s Simi Valley, Woodley bears many attributes often associated with those who make the Golden State their home. To start, she’s permanently peripatetic. “I’ve never lived in the same place, let alone the same house, for more than seven years,” says Woodley, the eldest of two children born to an elementary school principal (dad) and a middle school counselor (mom), who moved twice within California prior to returning to Simi Valley before her 10th birthday. To this day, she remains perpetually on the move. “I live in my car,” she jokes, pointing at her ride, which has a patina that makes clear its familiarity with the state highway system.

MORE OF THE TRANSCRIPT UNDER THE CUT