Orson Scott Card talks ‘Ender’s Game,’ adapting the novel, zero gravity and gay marriage controversy
The award-winning novel becomes a major motion picture as Orson Scott Card’s famous 1985 novel comes to the big screen in a big way. Harrison Ford, Ben Kingsley headline a cast which has Asa Butterfield as the titular character and Card spoke with Wired Magazine about the project.
When asked why the book was such a huge success, even Card confesses that he can’t explain it.
“If I knew, I would do it again,” the writer began in the interview published in the Nov. 2013 issue of Wired (issue 21.11)
“What works with Ender’s Game is Ender’s community building. There’s a disparate group of kids who could be rivals, and he’s able to bind them together through his personal service to them, through his loyalty, his trustworthiness. They know he’ll never waste them, that he’s not exploiting them for his own gain.”
Adapting the book was an extremely challenging process and Card details that in the interview noting how the project eventually moved ahead.
“I finally wrote a script that worked for people who had never read the book, and it was a buddy-movie approach,” Card explained before noting director Gavin Hood took that in a different direction. “…Hood, however, went with Petra (as opposed to Bean) as a major character. Those were his decisions to make.”
Card points to the battleroom as problematic.
“It’s the Quidditch problem: The games were great on paper, terrible when you’re watching them,” and then adds that the zero gravity effects were challenging for computer graphic techs.
“…all impact against walls, for example, look fake, fake, fake. It can’t be done with computer graphics, and yet we couldn’t take it up and film in space,” Card explained.
“Well, they brought in Cirque du Soleil performers, superb atheletes and dancers, and they got them to teach the kids how to do the wire work with a very cleverly designed frame that allowed them free movement in every direction.”
Card can’t escape the controversy and backlash from the gay community over his pro-traditional marriage stance.
“I hope that people will realize that they are not getting a true picture of me from these comments, and they’re certainly not getting anything to do with Ender’s Game, which was written long ago and has nothing whatsoever to do with gay marriage.”
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Ender’s Game arrives in theaters November 1, 2013
