Wall-E director Andrew Stanton was able to speak to MTV about his much-talked about Disney (not Pixar) project, John Carter of Mars.
He confirmed that the movie was still happening and that it was past the writing stages and into pre-production and is even casting at the moment, though no official names yet.
John Carter of Mars is more about a character than a story, spanning nearly a century and appearing in many books stories and comics. Because of this, Stanton was able to work with the characters and mythology to work his own story. While this gave him a lot of freedom, it was also a big complication, as they had no idea where to go with it at first.
Stanton was able to explain the situation in detail …
I don’t want to be dissing it, but it almost had an absence of a story for a feature film because it was very episodic. In its day it was a comic book. I mean, this book was written in 1912. It was the comic book you got in the time before there was such thing as comic books. So, it was really just about the next fight, the next adventure, the next romance.
The key was putting a story into it and creating characters that had to grow and real basic stuff that we all know a movie needs.
Fortunately it’s an old enough story. There isn’t such huge allegiance to it that people won’t mind that we muck with it a bit to hopefully amplify the essence of what made me interested in it as a young kid and hopefully will keep me interested in it as an adult.
Stanton went on to talk about the finished product, which he calls the “…perfect definition of a hybrid movie,” where so much will be real and so much will have to be CGI.
I guess if you have to do CGI work, you want a pure-bred Pixarian handling the duties. I’m hoping/thinking the finished product will be somewhere in between the live-action/CGI work in Lord of the Rings and maybe the Narnia work. Though this time, it will likely be on Mars with all kinds of crazy animated martian beasties running around.
I hope this movie is good. I’ve always been smitten with Burroughs’ Martian stories, and John Carter is a good hero. The CGI is quite necessary to effectively portray the race of green Martians. I’m not sure if I like the statement by Stanton about “muck with it” but I can still hope.
Since this is a Disney production, I assume that they will be clothing the characters instead of having them run naked upon Mars as they do in the books.
Of course it was episodic, it was a serial cliffhanger. This guy is a duffus and will ruin the character.