The movie was greenlighted with a budget of $12 million, which now seems like a steal for a movie that is shaping up to be one of the summer’s blockbusters. “I wanted it to be a funny movie and a sweet movie,” he says, “but I also wanted it to be a movie about asking the question, What constitutes a good life? And whether it’s possible to have a good and meaningful life even if you have a short life.” When they described the movie they wanted to make, it was the same one that was in Green’s head. “Everyone was like, ‘Oh, it’s a Love Story for a new generation!’ And I was like, ‘That was the worst thing you could’ve possibly said to me.'” That’s where things stood until he heard from two producers, Wyck Godfrey and Isaac Klausner, whom he knew already from an earlier project. Naturally Hollywood called–but Green said no.

1 on the New York Times young-adult best-seller list. The Fault in Our Stars has 10.7 million copies in print, and after 77 weeks it’s still No. It’s important to a lot of other people too. Hazel and Augustus meet in a cancer support group. Hers is in her thyroid and her lungs–she wheels around an oxygen canister to help her breathe–and he lost a leg to it. The book’s heroes, Hazel and Augustus, are two clever and charming teenagers who live in Indianapolis. Most obviously it’s a work of realism, inspired by five months Green spent working as a chaplain in a children’s hospital, as well as by his friendship with a teenage cancer patient named Esther Earl, who died in 2010. Just as Green is a different kind of author, The Fault in Our Stars is a different kind of story from Twilight and The Hunger Games and the other major young-adult franchises of the past decade. In an inversion of the natural order of things, Green is more famous than a lot of the actors in the movie. With his brother Hank he heads a YouTube channel with 2 million subscribers and an organization called Nerdfighters that advances social causes and generally celebrates nerdiness. But he’s also what is commonly and increasingly less oxymoronically called an Internet celebrity, presiding over a sprawling social-media empire that runs largely on his immense personal charm.

Green is the author (or co-author) of five best-selling young-adult novels, of which The Fault in Our Stars is the most recent and the most best-selling (though they’re all pretty popular). That’s the thing about John Green, or one of the things anyway: people are generally glad to see him.

The fault in our stars movie trailer 2