 | John Carter, Warlord of Mars movie news |
The Summer of 2011 is in full swing with two hits and a miss for fans of science fiction and comic books adapted for the big screen. Many have said all along that this season was a bloated mess of films all vying for the same audience, but next year looks to be an even more crowded affair with Spider-Man, Batman, Star Trek and the Avengers all competing for the almighty dollar.
Concept art from the upcoming John Carter film
But alongside those films is a project that has been in development for some time and is the inspiration for many of the ideas that you'll see in those cinematic affairs. Based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' creation, the bug screen adaptation of John Carter, Warlord of Mars could be the most important of them all. Michael Chabon (author of the best-selling novel The Adventures of Cavalier and Clay) and the writer of Wall-E Andrew Stanton have combined their talents for the most ambitious Disney film in decades. With the elements of John Carter being an action-filled epic with a breath-taking setting, strange aliens and a heroic lead character it reads like a textbook case for success.
So get ready for what could be the kind of film that many of you may have been waiting for.
Long before "Star Wars," "Dune," or "Avatar," there was "John Carter of Mars" and his epic adventures on the Red Planet, which the natives call Barsoom. Next year marks the 100th anniversary of the Edgar Rice Burroughs fantasy-adventure character that deeply influenced generations of authors, filmmakers and artists, among them George Lucas and James Cameron, who found plenty to like in the stories of outsider heroes and alien princesses.
Now filmmaker Andrew Stanton (the writer-director of "Wall-E" and "Finding Nemo") is on a quest to bring the vintage hero to a 21st century audience with the Disney live-action epic that arrives in theaters in March with stars Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Willem Dafoe, Thomas Haden Church and Mark Strong and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon as part of the writing team.
Our Geoff Boucher caught up with Stanton to talk about the history, the hopes and the surprising Disney decision to skip Comic-Con International, which seemed like a natural stop on the project's path to the public.
GB: This source material has such history and such a legacy, but all of that is lost on most people today. You're not going to have a chance — at least not with the movie posters or television commercials — to really communicate the fact that this is the Rosetta stone for decades of off-world fantasies like "Star Wars" and "Avatar."
AS: No, that's true, but I don't want to explain it. Hmm, how can I put it? The fact that I became infected with it as a kid and then sort of put it aside and then didn't read it again until I was in my 20s — at which point I had become more serious about following a career in film – I was able to recognize the fact that [the book] was not as solid in the material as I had remembered. At the same time I put a lot of value on the fact that I had remembered it and that I couldn't ever stop thinking about it. The bones of it were strong, the sediment, the soil of it, was really fertile and ready to have built from it. I felt like the more history I delved into, too, informed my view of the material; that first book was really episodic chapters he did for a magazine and then put together in book form, so it really was like a serial with a cliffhanger on each chapter. It was more like putting train cars together instead of something with a grand design. I feel like looking for that grand design was the next logical step, the thing that maybe never got done by the original author. So then the question became: How do you find the one big conceit that has a beginning, middle and end instead of these little individual train cars of episodes.
GB: That must have been a very liberating realization for you.
AS: Oh yeah. If it had been a perfect piece of literature I would have been a little too intimidated to tweak it. I had every desire to make it feel on the screen like how it made me feel reading the book, and to me that's the most important thing. And I thought the only way to get there honestly was to read the book, come up with a bunch of ideas and never look at the book again. And from there just to look at what organically came together. What was really fascinating: I finally let myself read the book after the script was green-lit and all of these things that, in my mind, I was starting to give myself credit for coming up with were in there. [Laughs] But it made me feel very confident that we took it apart and put it back together and it held.
GB: In the story, John Carter is a Civil War veteran who finds himself mysteriously transported to Mars, where due to the gravity he is able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, so to speak, a conceit that would pop up in the 1930s in Superman. A battered, hardened solider, he learns of the alien culture and falls in love with a brightly hued princess, not unlike "Avatar." In the Burroughs tales, leaders are called Jeddak, there are beasts called Banths, there's a warrior rank of padwar — all of those seem to echo in the Lucas universe, as do key concepts and themes. Does any of that present a problem? Does it box you in or create the risk that "John Carter" will feel derivative to audiences that don't know or don't care about the chronology of the heritage?
AS: I'm just as much a fan of all that stuff as anyone, so I didn't want to repeat anything and I didn't want to go exactly to where other people had gone. And I certainly recognize the influences coming directly or indirectly from people like Edgar Rice Burroughs. But I haven't felt the satisfaction [from the other works] that the thumbprint or the identity of the Barsoom books … [gave me] as a kid. I still felt like there was a flavor or a shading or a color that could still feel fresh or special. None of this is in reaction to those other movies. I want to come to everything honestly. If at the end of the day the dust settles and it's very similar to another movie, then I can live with that if it came there honestly. But my big thing is this: There were so many personal fantasies that were fulfilled or cathartically found by fans through those books — in other words, they used the books as a conduit to their own fantasies and the things in their own head. I've never had to answer this before so I'm stumbling around a bit, but the thing is that because I know this book was so much the source material, directly or indirectly, for so many things, I got intrigued by the idea of treating it as if it really was the source material in the historical sense of the term. What if this really happened? That kind of opened my eyes. I suddenly had a fresh way to see it. And it goes back, in a way, to the way we take things in when [we were young readers]. When I was a kid I really wanted to imagine it as if it was a real sequence of events that took place on the surface of Mars in another century.
John Carter, Warlord of Mars stars Taylor Kitsch (Gambit) as the title character, Willem Dafoe, Mark Strong, Thomas Haden Church, James Purefoy, Dominic West and Samantha Morton.
John Carter, Warlord of Mars has a March 9, 2012 release date.
Recommended reading:
John Carter of Mars: The Collection
John Carter of Mars: Warlord of Mars
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