Julie Plec Interview

E! Online caught up with Julie Plec at the inaugural ATX TV Festival. She talked about the season 3 finale and whats to come for season 4.

SPOILERS!

Check it all out here.
Below is an excerpt:

We think most viewers were surprised that you actually made the decision to turn Elena into a vampire in season three, not at the end of the series. When did you make that decision and was it a tough call to make?

When we had our first network meeting with the CW back when we started the show, we were talking about the books and how there are multiple books and I think we said, “Oh by the way, at the end of the second book, she’s a vampire.” They were like, “Holy s–t! Are you going to do that?” We were like, “Well, we’ll get to it eventually. Maybe season five or season four.” And so we always knew that that was part of the journey. As much as I talk about how we stray from the books and how we only use them as a jumping off point, we honestly do like to try and find our way back to fundamental tentpole moments in the book series because it feels like there’s a world of stories there and why not? At one point, we had pitched that it would happen at the end of the second season. When we started the second season it was something that we thought, you know what, this could actually get there and we didn’t want to because we felt like it was too early, but we kind of had it in our minds. Then what it gave us this year, because we knew from the get-go that was where we were going to end up, it gave us the opportunity to treat the second half of season three almost in its own way like a series finale.