“we said, ‘ how do you show a world hidden beneath a city?’”
haven’t seen before, expanding the Divergent world in the tradition of all good sequels.
“We don’t have to spend 10 minutes explaining the whole setup, and it’s a big relief,” laughs Fisher. “In the first film Tris was born and grew up in Abnegation and then she moves to Dauntless so we sort of saw that whole thing, but this time we go to Amity and Candor and Erudite. So we experience a whole other way of living and thinking.”
We also get to meet an entirely new group – or more accurately a group we didn’t actually know were a group. The Factionless were all over the first movie, but we thought they were just vagrants wandering around future Chicago because they had no place else to go. In Insurgent it’ll turn out they’re actually a rather well- organised outfit, led by franchise newcomer Naomi Watts as Evelyn – who just happens to be Four’s mum. “She’s our new villain and a great addition,” says Fisher. “She’s the source of a lot of Four’s problems, and someone you can’t quite get a pulse on. What is she really…?”
“From our interaction with the fans we found that there was really a fascination with the Factionless,” chips in Wick. “Because the functional? So there’s a lot of warrens and each warren you’d see is made of repurposed junk from the other factions.” With Divergent director Neil Burger having stepped aside, Insurgent has a new man at the helm in the form of Robert Schwentke ( Flightplan, RED, RIPD). “Robert had two really strong qualities,” explains Wick. “First, he’s completely fascinated by psychology. When he came into the room, he was so fascinated by the issues facing Tris, of how a person who’s had so much grief and guilt manages to go on in the world. He came in with just an utter fascination of how someone survives that kind of trauma.
“The second thing he brought was an extraordinary visual instinct. He was really intrigued by the tool that Veronica creates to sort of dramatically see someone’s inner life. When you talk about things like fear landscapes or these sims to see what your nature is – how much you’re Erudite, how much you’re Amity – to do those as vibrant action scenes, he came in with dazzling visual