Thanks to an EnderWiggin.net reader, we got a tip that there are a series of videos from a book signing that Orson Scott Card did earlier this month for his book ‘Ruins‘ which was released on October 30. The signing was held at a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Orem, Utah.
In this first video, Card jokes about how he was offered a part that involved cool uniforms, but insisted that he’s improving the look of the movie by only appearing by voice as a pilot on a shuttle as Ender and Graff.
He goes on to reiterate what he said in a previous interview about how few scenes are in the movie from the book but this time says there are NO scenes from the book in the movie.
There are no scenes from the book in the movie, and there are no scenes in the movie from the book, but that’s actually not a surprise. That’s pretty much the way my scripts were too because Ender’s Game is an unfilmable book. That’s something we learned 20 years ago.
I find this particularly confusing, as if there are no scenes from the book in the movie, then what exactly is going to happen in this movie called ‘Ender’s Game‘? It certainly sounds like it follows the story. Perhaps he means that there are no lines from the book in the movie?
If you filmed every scene it would be a four and a half hour movie, and I don’t care how much you love Ender’s Game, four and a half hours is a long time to sit in a theater. We also discovered very quickly that one battle in the Battle Room is one too many. You gotta see it happening, but it’s like watching Quidditch. How exciting was that? You already know how it’s gonna come out, you just wanna see them fly around a little bit, bingo it’s over. And that’s kind of how Battle Room is. It’ll look great, but we’re not going to follow these battles closely.
Looks like I’m going to have to agree to disagree with Mr. Card on this one because I really preferred watching Quidditch over reading Quidditch! I also don’t really think that one Battle Room scene is necessarily enough to appease not just fans, but newcomers. Summit will of course want non-book fans to come to see the movie and I’m not entirely convinced that one or even no battle would make the point of Battle School clear to these viewers.
In the second part, Card talks a bit about how Harrison Ford is in person, mentioning that he’s a very shy, quiet person who goes off into a corner once the cameras are off. He goes on to talk about meeting the other kids and how they suffered doing their wire work, but ended up being in the best shape of their lives.
He touched more upon the script and how they went with Gavin’s script over his.
Here’s the thing about movie. It’s going to be different from the book. It has to be. It couldn’t be filmed the way it was, the way the book is. And so what I’m hoping is, it’s brilliant. I would love it if Gavin’s script was really good. Now I did a reading of the script that I was really proud of, but you could lose your job greenlighting a film scripted by the author. That’s just the truth. And you can’t lose your job over greenlighting a film scripted by the director. So they went with the one where nobody loses their job, whether it wins or loses.
He goes on to tell his fans to go see the movie once and if they love it, bring their friends back and if they don’t, bring their friends back to show them how awful it is. Still, he sounds confident about how things will turn out. “I am very hopeful that it’s going to be terrific.”
Later, Card takes questions from fans and the first one is actually one that I’d been dying to know as well, so it was great seeing this asked.
I read Ender’s Game back when I was 17 in the 80s. The thing that really grasped me is that in it you talk about the internet, you talk about laptops, wireless internet, chatrooms, […] and identities online. What gave you the insight?
The novel by 1985, while the internet was not open for public access yet, there were services like […] and Delphi. I had been on bulletin boards, I knew about flame wars. I mean there was all kinds of stuff like that.
Despite his answer, I still found the things he described in Ender’s Game to be very prescient in that the desks he “created” in the 80s are now the tablets of today. (not laptops imo)
There are three more videos that you can watch here: Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5
Source: Donovan Heap via Roko
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