Lena Dunham Explains Why She Changed the ‘Catherine Called Birdy’ Ending

thewrap.com:

Note: The following contains spoilers for Catherine Called Birdy.Director Lena Dunham described Karen Cushman’s “Catherine Called Birdy” as a work ingrained in her DNA with a world easy to bring to the screen and populate, but she did want to give the story a more hopeful ending.Dunham’s film follows Cushman’s story pretty closely, which focuses on young Lady Catherine, who goes by Birdy (Bella Ramsey), daughter of Lord Rollo (Andrew Scott) and Lady Aislinn (Billie Piper).

Birdy’s impending arranged marriage to some random stranger drives the film’s plot, as she does everything humanly possible to turn off her suitors. “The last act shifts pretty significantly from the book, and that just had to do with a real desire to be able to leave Birdy’s character in a better place than we found her,” Dunham said in a recent interview with TheWrap. “The book has a beautiful ending, but an ending that’s slightly somber and quite realistic.

Our ending has realism to it also. That came out of the dynamic between Birdy and her father that we built a bit differently than the one in the book.”In Cushman’s book, Birdy ultimately escapes her last suitor who she calls Shaggy Beard, because he dies, but his son marries her in place of the older, gross man.

Birdy is happy at the end of the book because she feels she will get along better with the son. The film ends with Birdy’s escape from Shaggy Beard as well, but not because he dies.