Q: Have you, or have film studios, wanted to make âEnderâs Gameâ a film before now? Why did you choose now to make the film?
A: Weâve been working on this movie for many years. Chartoff Productions, with Lynn Hendee as the producer who worked most constantly with me, optioned âEnderâs Gameâ more than 15 years ago. I wrote many scripts, with their counsel, and we took it to studios and possible producing partners many times.
The problem was that despite the visual strength of some of the scenes, the book is very hard to film. It takes place through Enderâs point of view â in the book, you always know what Ender is thinking. But a film canât get inside a characterâs head. So even if you show the scenes, it doesnât mean the audience will like or care about the character.
We found that people who knew the book already would read my scripts and say, âWow, you nailed it.â But someone who had never read the book would read the same script and didnât understand what all the fuss was about. It wasnât until my final attempt that I finally understood how to make it work.
Harrison Ford and Asa Butterfield star in âEnderâs Game,â set to be released on Nov. 1, 2013. (Photo courtesy Summit Entertainment)
The story wasnât about Ender vs. the aliens, or even about Ender vs. the adults. It was about Ender with the other kids â helping them, caring about them, showing an example of strength and courage, and never acting for his own benefit at their expense. I realized that to work, the script had to make the audience want to have Ender as their leader â not because he was so smart, but because they could trust him completely.
The script that had that idea at its heart worked. But that is not the script that was filmed. The director, Gavin Hood, shot the script he wrote himself, without reference to mine. That is not a surprise â executives can lose their jobs for filming an author-written screenplay.
I had my personal education in screenwriting, though, and more to the point, my personal exploration of my own book and what worked in it. So this spring, as I wrote the audioplay version of it â a six-hour miniseries for voice actors called âEnderâs Game Aliveâ â I didnât have to go through the long learning curve. I knew how to adapt it. Of course, itâs a completely new script because the needs of audio drama are absolutely different from film scripting.
But I think when Audible.com releases the Skyboat Road production this fall, audiences that give it a try will find that yes, you can have a complete dramatic adaptation of âEnderâs Gameâ despite the inability to get inside Enderâs head. Of course, I had six hours to work with; the movie has less than two.
As for the movie: It got made when it did because there were finally studios willing to bet some serious money on making it work. First Odd Lot Productions came in, partnering with Digital Domain; then Summit brought in the rest of the budget. In midstream, Summit was bought by LionsGate.
I have to say that the LionsGate executives have been absolutely brilliant in their support of a production that they didnât actually choose to do. Iâve seen a rough cut, and while there are changes that will annoy some fans, itâs a sharp, tight, emotional movie that contains much of what works in âEnderâs Game.â
Best of all, the movie doesnât erase a single word of the book. So people who first encounter the story in the movie can always turn to the book to get the whole thing. And those who see only the movie will still have had a good time in the theater. Harrison Ford, Asa Butterfield, Ben Kingsley, and all the other kids and adults do a fine job in their roles, and the designs look great.
I think the special effects and acrobatic teams did the Battle Room as well as it can possibly be done. Good thing, too, because the kids about killed themselves learning how to make the moves on wires that the Cirque de Soleil professionals taught them to do. I bet they wished more than once that there had been a way to really film it in freefall.
Q: Will this affect the future of your writing career? Will you spend more time on screenplays or continue mainly with novels?
A: I make my living from fiction. To me, that is the finest storytelling medium ever designed. Even when a person aspires to screenwriting, television is the place where writers have the most freedom and the most influence over the final product. Most screenwriters labor on many scripts and see few, if any, make it to the screen â and even then, their work is usually at least partly undone by others. So in writing fiction, I have an unlimited effects budget, I can use all the locations I want, the cast is always superb, and nobody can come in after me and cut or reshoot scenes they donât like.
Harrison Ford and Asa Butterfield star in “Ender’s Game,” set to be released on Nov. 1, 2013. (Photo courtesy Summit Entertainment)
Harrison Ford and Asa Butterfield star in âEnderâs Game,â set to be released on Nov. 1, 2013. (Photo courtesy Summit Entertainment)
For good or ill, when I write a novel, itâs written â unless I come back myself to fix it. I made a stupid mistake near the end of one of my novels. Fixed it in the paperback; weâre fixing the audiobook right now. Just a small revision in the last half of the last chapter. But such a howlingly dumb error. I was tired. And in my defense, nobody else caught it, either. Ever. But I did, and I couldnât write the next book in the series till I fixed it. So yeah, even my fiction isnât the final version.
Iâve written Valentineâs and Enderâs meeting after the war three different ways, in âEnderâs Game,â âEnder in Exile,â and most recently in âEnderâs Game Alive.â Which is the real one? Maybe someday Iâll do a new edition of âEnderâs Gameâ that reconciles them all. What matters is that in each case the scene does the job it needed to do. The characters are true to themselves, and each scene works within its context. Thatâs all I can ask a scene to do. After all, you do know that I just make this stuff up, donât you?