How Director Vanessa Caswill Entered the Colleen Hoover Universe (and Made the Best Adaptation Yet)

Caswill tells IndieWire about finding a visual language for the tricky emotional balance in Hoover's work and serving as a cinematic "midwife" to her cast and crew.

Over the course of her career in both television and features, director Vanessa Caswill has adapted novels as beloved as the classic “Little Women” and Jennifer E. Smith’s contemporary YA bestseller “The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight” (shortened to “Love at First Sight” for the screen).

That background made her an ideal choice to take on Colleen Hoover‘s “Reminders of Him,” a movie Caswill knew would be scrutinized of millions of extremely devoted fans waiting to see if she could deliver a faithful interpretation.

Luckily, Caswill was one of those fans herself. “I really fell in love with the story,” Caswill told IndieWire. “When it’s an adaptation, I just use the book as a Bible and try to get as much as I can from the page.”

For “Reminders of Him,” that meant burrowing into the story of a woman (Maika Monroe) recently released from prison who tries to reconnect with her young daughter — now in the care of grandparents who do not want the mother back in her child’s life — while falling in love with a man (Tyriq Withers) connected to her complicated past.

“For adaptations, in addition to the surface story, I’m really trying to look at what the author was embedding in the book in a more subconscious way,” Caswill said. “I want to embody its energy.” Because the emotions in “Reminders of Him” are so heightened and intense, Caswill knew there was a danger of going too far into the direction of melodrama. “That’s really just about having talented actors and always choosing the more restrained, grounded option when you’re making your choices in those moments,” she said.

Caswill’s careful calibration of tone makes “Reminders of Him” the best Hoover adaptation to date, as it skillfully balances some fairly dark material with hope and romance that never drifts into forced sentimentality. One of the strengths of the film is a precise visual design that alternates between distance and intimacy, with Caswill using the landscapes of her Alberta location to clearly and concisely express the sense of loneliness and isolation afflicting her heroine.

“The first thing I really resonated with in the script was the first line, which describes a long, lonely road,” Caswill said. “ I thought, we really need a vast landscape here and it needs to be a metaphor for what’s going on with these characters, so we open over a shot of this road amidst the mountains. These characters are so disconnected from each other and also from themselves — they’re a lot of grief they’re all carrying, but they’re not connected through it. I wanted to capture that in the landscape and have it feel isolating, but as the story progresses to become a benevolent, surrounding, almost divine force that supports them.”

Light and color were both important ingredients, as Caswill and cinematographer Tim Ives relied largely on the beauty of Alberta’s natural light and its long magic hours. “We were also really pumping in the neon for the nighttime scenes,” Caswill said, noting that she wanted the film to embody Americana and looked at a lot of appropriate references with Ives and production designer Francesca Massariol.

Along with the department heads, Caswill also came up with a specific palette that assigned certain colors to certain characters and ideas — the orange of Withers’ character’s truck becomes associated with memory, while yellow comes up at key moments in the heroine’s most significant moments.

In terms of lensing, Caswill and Ives soften the imagery as the film progresses in order to reflect the growing bond between the two lovers. For Caswill, it was all about riding a line between romance and reality. “That was quite fun,” she said, “trying to make something that felt elevated and colorful, but also grounded and truthful.” The goal was to find a cinematic corollary for the tone of Hoover’s writing, which deals with heavy subject matter but has plenty of moments of levity.

“It was about trying to find that balance,” Caswill said. “Colleen has a very unique sense of humor, and I wanted to honor that and make sure we could move in and out of these emotional high and low points with ease.”

Caswill credits her cast — which includes veteran actors like Lauren Graham and Bradley Whitford alongside newcomers and nonprofessionals like country music star Lainey Wilson — with finding the right tone and making editing less of a challenge than it might have been. “I wanted people who were passionate about the material and had something of themselves to give, and they did and they were willing. That’s both courageous and generous, and I was really grateful for it.”

When it comes to creating an environment for the actors and crew, Caswill said she sees herself as a kind of midwife tasked with bringing the baby that is the film into the world. “The cast and crew are the woman giving birth, and she just needs space and acceptance to bring whatever is needed into the moment and feel safe and free,” Caswill said. “ More than anything, I just want people to feel creative and like they’re able to have fun and be themselves. There’s not really right or wrong, everything is open for discussion and we find our way together. That’s what I try and do, and I feel when it works. And it definitely worked on this film.”

Universal Pictures will release “Reminders of Him” in theaters on Friday, March 13.