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With 'Earl and the Dying Girl,' the 'Fault' is in comparisons

The movie’s young stars talk to Gary Thompson

Thomas Mann plays a film-obsessed teenager in Pittsburgh who with a friend undertakes to make a movie for a classmate, played by Olivia Cooke, who's diagnosed with leukemia in "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl."  (Anne Marie Fox/Twentieth Century Fox)
Thomas Mann plays a film-obsessed teenager in Pittsburgh who with a friend undertakes to make a movie for a classmate, played by Olivia Cooke, who's diagnosed with leukemia in "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl." (Anne Marie Fox/Twentieth Century Fox)Read more

THE STARS of the new teens-confronting-cancer movie are sick and tired of talking about that other teens-confronting-cancer movie.

"It's annoying!" said Olivia Cooke, star of "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl," a movie she was already in the midst of making when "The Fault in Our Stars" hit theaters last year.

"It's almost like people want to start a rivalry, or create this tension," Cooke said, during a brief visit to Philadelphia with co-star Thomas Mann. "Someone says this, someone else says that and I don't give a [crap]."

Yeah, said Thomas Mann.

"It's actually kind of offensive, because it has nothing to do with how we approached this movie," said Mann. "It came out while we were shooting, and none of us had even seen it."

Cooke said that she's done talking about the whole thing, then went on to talk about it just a bit more.

"They did well, we'd be lucky to have that success, but it's a completely different movie. When you put so much soul into something and all people can do is compare it to something else, it just cheapens it, it really does."

Actually "Me and Earl" has had a fair degree of success already. It was a smash at the Sundance Film Festival, won the Grand Jury award and the Audience award, and is polling a lofty 80 percent on the critics' website rottentomatoes.com.

Reviews confirm that Cooke is right to say that "Me and Earl" is a substantially different movie. Certainly the premise is different - Cooke plays a girl with cancer, but nobody falls in love with her. Her character, Rachel, instead takes up with a couple of film nerds, including Greg (Mann), who's been ordered by his do-gooder parents to hang out with her, which he does by showing her his collection of homemade spoof movies ("Eyes Wide Butt," a puppet movie called "A Sockwork Orange"), and trying to make her laugh.

The movies are alike in one respect - both are drawn from YA novels. Jesse Andrews' "Me and Earl," however, has lived in the literary shadow of "Stars," John Green's massive bestseller and cultural phenomenon.

And that's actually been a creative advantage for "Me and Earl." There is no vast army of hyper-devoted readers, leaving Andrews (he co-wrote the script) room to make extensive changes without fear of alienating a fan base.

Among the beneficiaries: Cooke.

"Just from a selfish point of view I was happy that Rachel was so much more fleshed out in the script. I felt like in the book she's limited to the way Greg sees her. In the movie she's so much more of a human being. It was a feast for me as an actress."

Andrews also made radical changes to the ending, which centers on a movie that Greg and collaborator Earl (R.J. Cyler) have made for Rachel.

In the novel, the content of the film is left to the imagination of the reader.

Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon knew that movie audiences would expect to see it.

"That was my biggest fear. How do you give it a shape?" he said. "It can't be a parody. It can't be a spoof of another movie. We had to go beyond that. Then I had this idea: What if it's an abstract film? An experimental film?"

The finished product that Rachel sees is a collage of images and music (Brian Eno).

Mann said that it's exactly something that Greg would come up with.

"My character spends the whole movie trying to push away the darkness and keep everything light. He doesn't do this by talking, all the time. He talks when he shouldn't, and I think the movie he makes, which has no dialogue, is his way, finally, realizing that."

The scene - Rachel in a hospital bed, her hair lost to chemo, watching the movie - moves audiences to hankie hysterics.

Just like . . .

Don't even, says Cooke.

That's a different movie.

Hers is the funny one.

"It's not this huge tragedy," she said. "I mean, it's got elements of that, but it's funny. I'm reading the script and I'm belly laughing all the way through."

Cooke needed a laugh. In her TV series, "Bates Motel," she plays an invalid awaiting a lung transplant. In her next movie, "Katie Says Goodbye," she plays a young woman forced to support her family by turning tricks.

"This is actually the most pleasant thing that I've done."