“We have the technology to make it the grand adventure that it deserves to be.”
‘Ender’s Game’ producers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurrtzman are currently out promoting their film ‘Star Trek: Into Darkness.’ In an interview with the Wall Street Journal blog, Speakeasy, the duo commented on a few of the challenges associated with the ‘Ender’s Game’ film. They also discussed how the views of the ‘Ender’s Game’ author, Orson Scott Card, may affect the film’s success. Read below:
What were some of the challenges you and director Gavin Hood faced in adapting Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game” into a film?
Orci: “Ender’s Game” was a book that we both loved from teenagehood. It was published in 1985 and I think we read it in high school, maybe even earlier. The challenge with the book is it’s very internal in that a lot of the narrative that occurs is within the character’s head and the trick is, how do you dramatize that? The answer is both through having some of those internal struggles be dramatically shown as scenes, and second, we have an advantage that the book does not have, and that is actors. We have great actors who can not only say things, but play things and play reactions on their faces and actually convey a lot of the emotion of the book. Thankfully now we have the technology to make it the grand adventure that it deserves to be. We have the technology to render a Zero-G environment in a totally believable and incredible way.
Orson Scott Card has publicly expressed his disapproval of gay marriage and homosexuality. (His appointment by DC Comics to write an upcoming “Superman” issue caused controversy and eventually led an illustrator to quit.) He is a producer on the film and is very much associated with it. Do you think his views may affect how the film will be received?
Orci: I was never aware of in the book – and we’ve read it three or four times during our lifetime before we got into this movie – I never saw any sign in “Ender’s Game” of anything that offended Alex or me. The book is beautiful. It’s about tolerance, it’s about responsibility, it’s about growing up. We just tend to judge a book on its own merits. Nothing that anyone could say is going to remove our original reaction of how we perceive this beautiful book. For us, it’s just about the book.
Kurtzman: Look, obviously it’s a First Amendment issue and Mr. Card is free to express whatever point-of-view he chooses to express, and we are free to disagree with him. At this point, that’s all I really want to say about it.
Read the entire interview here and here.
The ‘Ender’s Game’ film will be released in U.S. theaters on November 1, 2013.