Adrift's Sam Claflin says YA genre became 'overdone' and the quality slipped (exclusive)
It was because of his role in The Hunger Games franchise, playing the dashing Finnick Odair, that Sam Claflin’s career was boosted to star status.
Shailene Woodley’s name too became known globally because of the big screen adaption of Veronica Roth’s Divergent book series, in which she took the lead as Tris Prior.
Nowadays though, these type of young adult franchises are all but extinct and both Sam and Shailene believe it’s because the market became oversaturated and the quality started to suffer.
“The audience who were into that [genre] is grown up now,” Claflin tells Yahoo Movies. “It’s not to say that there’s not a new batch coming through but the next generation is into superhero movies at the moment.
“I don’t think it’s the end, I just think that the problem with any new fad is that it gets overdone and the quality starts slipping away.”
“And characters are replicated,” Woodley interjects.
“I feel like, actually, the best thing for it is that there needs to be a bit of a break before people start working on the quality versions of said fads,” Sam adds.
The Hunger Games franchise fared far better than the Divergent series which lost steam after the release of the second and third films – Insurgent and Allegiant – and the final film, Ascendant, is believed to be getting developed as a TV series.
Though Shailene has no shortage of strong female characters to play, and her latest in Adrift might be her strongest. The film is based on the true story of Tami Oldham, an American sailor who spent 41 days at sea after the boat she was sailing with her fiancé Richard (Sam Claflin) was practically destroyed in a hurricane.
“What I found so profound about this particular story is woman or man, male or female, it shows the will of survival and inner strength,” Woodley explains. “The fact that we are able to witness it through a 23-year-old woman’s eyes is quite rare because I don’t think a survival story has been told in a particular way for a long time.
“The human spirit is so powerful and often we aren’t in situations where we are able to understand fully our own capabilities so that was the appeal to me,” the actress continues. “The opportunity to explore what could happen if mind, ego, distraction were stripped from a scenario and you were faced with such a horrific, chaotic event.”
The actors shot the film in Fiji with Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur, who is no stranger to tough shoots that pits humans against nature. Kormákur earned critical acclaim for The Deep, which tells the true story of a fisherman’s survival in the ocean off the south coast of Iceland after his boat capsized, and the 2015 survival drama Everest.
Both Claflin and Woodley were put to the test shooting the film on a real boat and out on the open water, and for the first few days the stars admit they got more than a little seasick.
“The first day we were hundred percent sick,” Shailene says. “I just felt so awful, you had just got off a plane and it was the first day of rehearsals and he got seasick.”
“It felt like The Exorcist in the moment, that feeling of not being able to control it,” Sam recalls. “The first time I was on a boat in Fiji I was sick and Shailene, it was the first time we had gone sailing together and I could imagine her going ‘oh no, this is going to be a really long shoot.'”
Adrift is out in cinemas this Friday
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