"I think, interestingly, Garth [Jennings] had a pretty clear sense from very, very early on of who he wanted. I know he did with Martin [Freeman] and I know he did with Bill Nighy. And I know he had a pretty good idea of the kind of face he wanted for Zaphod, so Sam Rockwell was a natural. Mos [Def] he didn’t know about to start with, but as soon as he met him he was convinced.”
Casting Mos Def as Ford Prefect: “It wasn’t that he wasn’t sure about Mos, it was that he hadn’t thought about it. He set out to cast Bill Nighy. At the very beginning he said, ‘I want Bill Nighy to do Slartibartfast.’ That was it. He didn’t know who he was going to cast as Ford. But when they sat down and met with Mos, they just thought, ‘This guy’s got this fantastically strange, cool vibe about him.’ They knew that they were going to have Martin so putting them next to each other, that was going to be a big deal.”
Addressing Fans Who, No Matter How Good the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" Movie is, Will Say Hollywood Did it Wrong: “I always make this point: ‘Hitchhiker’s’ is a body of work. There isn’t a right and a wrong. Yes, there are physical descriptions of characters which, of course, stay the same. But the point I wanted to stress was that Douglas himself was always ready to reinvent. And he would not have… Were he alive, we would be reinventing. We would be chopping things out. He’d be putting new things in if he wanted to change a character. He was up for change and so the real fan knows that, the real fan knows actually that that was the way Douglas worked and thought.
What can happen is that if the originator isn’t there sometimes, in a way, people can be over-precious to the detriment of the material. And that wouldn’t have been doing Douglas any favors. The thing that will do Douglas favors is just making the movie great. And if that’s meant that we’ve had to make some changes, then so be it - and Douglas would have been up for that. So much of the new material we’ve got in there is Douglas’ anyway.
I’m sure that we’ve made some mistakes somewhere along the line and there’s things that I know I’ll go, ‘How did I miss that?’ But I hope not too many of them. I think that if we can please 90% of the fans, then I’ll be very happy. It may be that we’ll please a lot more than that.”
Robbie Stamp on Why It Took So Long to Make a “Hitchhiker’s Guide” Movie: “It’s a long time, isn’t it? Everybody asks that and it’s one of the hardest questions to answer. Who knows the mysterious ways of Hollywood anyway? I mean, why and how this should be this way. I think, having said that, there are answers and I think it has to do with the very, very episodic nature of the book. The radio series was written on a weekly basis with no real sense of narrative shape or drive. It just sort of finished. And the book the same. Douglas was probably fundamentally less interested in narrative than he was in ideas. I think the ideas and the comedy are what drove him. There’s fantastic descriptions of things. That’s what he loved. That’s really hard in a movie so I think that finding the right narrative spine [was difficult].
I think that there were probably times where Douglas got interested in Zaphod, because the risk with Arthur is that he’s a one joke guy. He’s an Englishman who wants a cup of tea and after 40 minutes, that might be beginning to wear a little bit thin. And so, ‘Well, let’s make it Zaphod’s movie then.’ So there were scripts that Douglas was working on where maybe the gravitational pull will be over there, but in the end, one of the decisions we made was that it was going to be Arthur’s point of view. We were going back to very early drafts of the movie that Douglas had written. In the sense that it was Arthur’s point of view, we would reveal information when Arthur was in a position to get it and that was the decision. And once we did that, really the whole first third of the movie just fit into place.”
A Few Alternate Storylines: “There were versions that began with the stealing of the Heart of Gold. There were versions that began with ’42,’ setting up that story. And so you could sometimes be a long way into the movie and you weren’t quite sure whose movie that it was that you were watching. Is it this crazy two-headed President of the Galaxy? Is it this slightly funny 42 thing? But by giving it that narrative spine, I think that we cracked some of those problems. I think it was resolving those narrative problems that was probably the main reason it took so long.”
