The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (film)

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a science-fiction movie based on the book of the same name by Douglas Adams. Shooting was completed in August 2004 and the movie was released on April 28 2005 in the UK, Australia and New Zealand; and on the following day in the USA. It was rolled out to cinemas worldwide during May, June, July, August and September.

Production

In a Slashdot interview http://slashdot.org/articles/05/04/26/1952248.shtml?tid=97&tid=133&tid=214, Robbie Stamp, one of the film's executive producers, noted the following about the cast of the film:

Related Topics:
Slashdot - Robbie Stamp - Executive producer

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• The hardest character to cast was "the voice of the Guide itself and in the end came back to somebody who was one of the people Douglas himself had wanted, namely Stephen Fry."
• "Douglas himself is on record as saying that as far as he was concerned the only character who had to be British, indeed English, was Arthur Dent."

Stamp also commented on how much role the studio and the other screenwriters (other than Adams that is) had on the film:

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• "I think that a lot of fans would be surprised to know just how much of a free hand we have been given in the making of this movie. I know how easy it is to see every decision to cut a scene as 'studio' pressure but it was always much more to do with pacing and rhythm in the film itself."
• "The script we shot was very much based on the last draft that Douglas wrote....All the substantive new ideas in the movie...are brand new Douglas ideas written especially for the movie by him....Douglas was always up for reinventing HHGG in each of its different incarnations and he knew that working harder on some character development and some of the key relationships was an integral part of turning HHGG into a movie."