Friday, June 17, 2011

LA Times exclusive interview with John Carter film director Andrew Stanton

Concept art for Disney film John Carter (2012)
The Los Angeles Times has an awesome exclusive interview with Hollywood director Andrew Stanton, who is directing John Carter (2012), the long-awaited Disney live-action film adaptation of the beloved Edgar Rice Burroughs science fiction novel A Princess of Mars (1917), starring Taylor Kitsch as John Carter, Lynn Collins as Dejah Thoris, and Willem Dafoe as Tars Tarkas. Here's an excerpt from the interview:
LA Times: That's very true, in reading Tolkien or Burroughs you get the sense that the story being told is the tip of the iceberg. The threads of the overall tapestry seem if they go well beyond the story presented...

Andrew Stanton: There was a book compiled—who knows how long it took to do it—but it was compiled in the early 1970s by a fan of those Barsoom books. This fan had gone through and pulled out all the names of places and people, all the rules of measurement, the terminology of society, all of it, and put it all together. It’s an encyclopedia called, I think, The Guide to Barsoom. I think everyone in the art department went out and we found every copy that was out there, and we used it as our bible. It was our rule book. It made things a lot easier. When we needed a name or anything, we tried to go with a history that had already been determined. Hey, someone had already done the work, why not leverage off of it? Having created universes from scratch before, that can consume all of your time and the character/plot child gets neglected. This allowed us not to sweat all that stuff and go straight to character.
John Carter is scheduled to land in movie theaters March 9, 2012.

3 comments:

  1. Yes, I own this book too: "A Guide to Barsoom" by John Flint Roy ;-)

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  2. Steffen: Great book! It is possible a fan or two has posted bits and pieces of it on the web.

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  3. I don't think it would be copyright infringement to scan two or tree pages!!??

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