Orson Scott Card, author of Ender’s Game, did an in-depth interview with New Zealand weekly magazine The Listener and in it talked about his writing methods for Ender’s Game and it’s sequels and also gave a brief opinion on the movie.
I wrote a script that showed great promise in achieving that.
However, I have no evidence it was ever read by anyone beyond a small circle of friends and producers whom I had worked with for years. Certainly, there is no trace of any of my scripts in the Gavin Hood script that was filmed. Hood gave the executives what they were looking for: a script that used elements of the original story within a format that followed the film-school rules that, although they don’t actually work, give executives in Hollywood a warm sense of recognition. Within those paradigms, the film Ender’s Game has been shaped into a tight, fast, hard-hitting film that rockets along at a breakneck pace — the adventure version of Ender’s Game. It is an excellent film of that type; it is, in fact, about as good a job of filming Ender’s Game as anyone could have expected Hollywood to achieve.
Readers who are disappointed at elements of the book that are not in the movie should keep in mind: my own scripts also cut sharply, because filming the entire novel would have taken about six hours. Huge swaths of material had to be omitted, and the movie actually includes elements from the book that I removed!
Read the complete interview at The Listener.