How Does The People We Meet On Vacation Movie Differ From The Book?

As someone who grew up in fandom, the People We Meet On Vacation screenwriter Yulin Kuang knows the importance of a good book-to-screen adaptation more than most. As a teen, she would journal pages of angst about how upcoming adaptations needed to be faithful, lest they "ruin her whole childhood". As she's become more successful in her career as a screenwriter and director (Kuang is currently adapting and directing Emily Henry's Beach Read), she's come to realise that the best adaptations can't be a direct copy of the book. So yes, the People We Meet On Vacation movie is different from Emily Henry's novel — in a satisfying way.

"I schemed my way into a position of power and influence over my favourite books so that I could rectify and do justice to all [of them]. And I think early on in my career, I was very fixated on trying to keep things as close to the book as possible," Kuang tells Refinery29 Australia. "But the reality that I've kind of learned over the period of time is that you can't actually just film a novel. They're very different things. They're very different mediums. And so to me, the task of the adaptation is not to be 100% faithful to the book."

This means die-hard book fans won't see every single scene from the Emily Henry novel play out on screen, but while some have been removed, fresh new scenes have been introduced. Kuang says there are book scenes she would have loved to include, but it's impossible to fit everything into the script. And even if she writes the scenes, they don't always make it through the final edit. "They end up on the cutting room floor for whatever reason, and each one of those is a small tragedy for the book purist who resides deep within my heart," she jokes. "But I think we also brought in a lot of things that I hope people will love too."

There's one particular scene near the start of the film which book fans won't recognise, and it came about after the writers received feedback from Netflix. "I was really excited about that [new scene], because it felt like getting to construct Poppy (Emily Bader) and Alex (Tom Blyth) fanfic," she says. "There's definitely stuff that [book purists will] miss, because I miss it, but there's also stuff that I hope will bring joy and delight as well."

Kuang is one of Henry's close collaborators, and while she can't tease too much about the upcoming Beach Read movie (they're currently casting, and she just had a VFX meeting), she says their working relationship was "a dream" from the start. Henry has been generous with her energy, time and thoughts, allowing Kuang to connect with the source material on a deep level. "[She would] provide me with these character maps of the characters that were always very helpful about, what's driving them? What's the fear?" she says. "She was so trusting, which I think, looking back now, that was such a gift."

Kuang is reluctant to confirm whether book purists will embrace People We Meet On Vacation, and quickly knocks on wood. "I hope they do, but you can never be too prescriptive," she says. "I can say this. This film by everybody, by Emily, by Brett Haley, our director, by me and the other writers, Amos and Nunzio, it was all done with so much love and care and respect for this source material... it has to stand as a work on its own that hopefully feels like a love letter to the book."