The Divergent Official Illustrated Movie Companion. Veronica Roth

future city there are only about thirty thousand people. “They’re occupying this grand, slightly abandoned place,” says director Burger. “They keep up the areas that they use, but then there’s a vast area of the city which is kind of crumbling and falling apart. When we see the city, we just see people walking in the middle of the streets, because they don’t have cars. There are a few trucks around, but mostly their transportation is on foot or on train.” He and Roth even discussed what people in this city might use for power. If they had it, how did they get it? Eventually, he came to the idea that there could be wind turbines on the sides of some buildings and power cables swooping between them.

      Roth smiles when she remembers some of her discussions with the filmmakers. “When I wrote the book, I was mostly concerned with Tris’s internal life, and she doesn’t notice all the details. She’s not a big describer of settings so, you know, I wasn’t thinking about what the chairs looked like or the needles looked like. I would never have been able to imagine all of that. Neil Burger has been one of the most detail-oriented and thoughtful people I have met through this whole experience. Talking to him, I’m sometimes like ‘I wish you had been here while I was building this world, because I think it would have been a little more fully realized if you had been around.’ He’s just so concerned with every little piece of the society and with representing it properly, even in the background.”