How Where the Crawdads Sing's folklore vibe influenced its journey to the screen
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Where the Crawdads Sing was one of those books you could not escape in the fall of 2018.
Selected by Reese Witherspoon's then still-fledgling Hello Sunshine book club, the novel catapulted onto the bestseller list and was swiftly optioned by Witherspoon and Hello Sunshine. Now, on July 15, the film adaptation hits theaters — but it was the book by Delia Owens that proved to be the team's North Star throughout.
"When I read this book, it just drew me in," says Witherspoon, an executive producer on the project. "I fell in love with Kya. I fell in love with this world. It reminded me of the South and that classic storytelling that takes you back to a time and place that feels a little simpler. Then, Delia layered over all of these kind of real-world, natural-world metaphors, and she writes with such richness that I thought, 'This would make an amazing movie.'"
Witherspoon and the team eventually brought on director Olivia Newman (First Match) to helm the project, who had found a similar resonance in the novel and her own love of playing outdoors as a child. "Reading Delia's book tapped into that imagination I had as a kid of what would it be like to actually have to survive alone in the wild," Newman tells EW. "To me, it tapped into the ultimate childhood story."
Indeed, Owens drew on her own childhood to craft the novel. "My mother always encouraged me to go as far into the wilderness as I could," she tells EW. "She wanted me to experience seeing wildlife. And she would say to me, 'Go way out yonder where the crawdads sing.' I've known that expression all my life. I've always lived in the wilderness, I've always been so interested in how much we can learn about human nature from nature itself. And that was the inspiration."
Screenwriter Lucy Alibar, who is also from the American South, was also swept up in Owens' imagery and her descriptions of nature that Kya inhabits. "I saw that marsh and that swampland," Alibar says. "I saw that so clearly when she wrote it. And I always wondered if we were kind of in our minds going to the same places. Like Delia, I grew up very close to nature. Where we're both from, people kept a very close relationship with the land and with the water, with the marsh and the animals. Like Delia, I drew from that."
Similarly, Newman found a time-honored tradition of storytelling within the pages of Owens' novel, which was something she sought to emphasize while making the film. "When I finished the book, I had this feeling that this was a story that reminded me of folklore," Newman says. "It reminded me of the fable you would hear told and retold in different versions, set in different places, and this one just happened to be the story of the 'Marsh Girl,' set in North Carolina during the '50s and '60s. There's this universality to the story and to the themes of the book that lend itself to that fable."
"When we were thinking about how we were going to shoot it and the production design, we really wanted to give it that fable-istic sense that lends itself to that timeless feeling," adds Newman. "We could go back to passages from the book and look at how Delia described the house, look at how the marsh was described as this necklace of grasses, and go out and try to find the similar-looking landscapes."
Michele K Short/Columbia Pictures; G.P. Putnam’s Sons
The cast also looked to the novel as their guidebook. Daisy Edgar-Jones, who stars as the "Marsh Girl," Kya, says she re-read it more times than she can count and that she was continually pulling out quotes she felt should inform a scene or character choice. "My script was always covered with [quotes from the book and] anything that resonated with me," she says. "But then there's also a level where you have to leave it and know that you are hopefully making something that's unique in itself. I like to think of them as cousins in a way. There's similarities and familiarities but they're also two separate things. So, there was a level of going, 'Right. I need to now just take my own interpretation and fall what into what this world is.'"
Still, even with that divide, Owens was a regular source of advice to filmmakers and visited the set during filming. "I got so emotional about this idea of this woman who's written this novel in her 70s and all of the characters were just in her mind," says Witherspoon. "This whole universe was just in her imagination, and then she got to see all these amazing artists collaborate and bring their best selves and their best work, and then she gets to walk into her own imagination. That's what's so magical about moviemaking."
Adds Taylor John Smith, who plays Kya's friend and lover, Tate, "When Delia came on set, she was like, 'I've been living with you in my head for so long and now I get to finally see you in person.' It was like this oh-my-God moment."
Listen to the latest episode of Screen After Reading for more from the team behind Where the Crawdads Sing.
Check out more from EW's Screen After Reading, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis, and more as we dive into the art of bringing books to the screen.
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