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Tag: Gavin Hood

VIDEO: Gavin Hood Talks Ender’s Game for Blu-ray Release

Gavin Hood spoke with The Movie Interview about Blu-ray release and sadly dashes our hopes for a director’s cut of Ender’s Game.

“The tricky thing with director’s cuts when you’ve got a huge visual effects movie is that in order to have those cuts you need the shots and the shots require an enormous amount of money to make the shot. So if you haven’t made the shots…”

Big bummer there because you can hardly argue against that. There’s one deleted scene in the car between Valentine and Graff that had very basic VFX done for the DVD (you could see green outlines around Val’s head), so you can imagine that anything that included the Battle Room would end up looking like a terrible mess, which is such a shame.

Don’t forget to pre-order your copy of Ender’s Game!

Watch the entire video below:

February 4, 2014
Grantland Documents the Incredible Development Journey of ‘Ender’s Game’

If you’re a longtime fan of Ender’s Game like me, watching hopefully and wistfully from the sidelines as the years and decades went by, you’ve probably wondered just what in the world was going on that it took nearly 30 years for NovEnder 1st to arrive. Even with my involvement as a fansite, I’ve never known exactly how it all went down and I’ve always wanted to know.

Today, Grantland’s Matt Patches posted an incredibly insightful piece documenting the long journey Ender’s Game took through the Hollywood circuit and why all the right pieces had to fall into place in order for them to make the film that I saw (and loved) just two days ago.

Ender’s Game was published in 1985. The film adaptation Hood was told would never happen arrives in theaters this week. What happened in between makes Ender’s Game a rare Hollywood miracle. Sifting through the timeline, Card’s cynicism had merit — Hood wasn’t the first guy to try his hand at adapting the sci-fi book into a blockbuster. He wasn’t even the fifth. Producers and studios have been trying ever since Card’s book was published.

The piece then goes on to describe all the reasons why it never worked out in the end with studios, directors, producers, writers, and executives. They even had D.B. Weiss and David Benioff working on it at one point!

In May 2002, Chartoff made a deal with Warner Bros. to finance and release Ender’s Game. Almost instantly, their team found “the guy”: Wolfgang Petersen, just off his hit adaptation of The Perfect Storm. Warner Bros. hoped to combine Ender’s Game andEnder’s Shadow into one film. At first, Card was the intended screenwriter, but as time passed and Petersen took on one film (2004’s Troy) and then another (2006’s Poseidon), Petersen’s interest waned. Other writers were brought onboard to stoke that interest: Hot off X2 in 2004, Dan Harris and Michael Dougherty took a first pass at adapting the book. Then in 2005, future Game of Thrones writer-producers D.B. Weiss and David Benioff (also a writer of Troy) worked with Petersen to develop another take. Two years later, Card announced he was taking over scripting duties once again.

Patches continues to document Card’s involvement and frustration over the development and writing process and just when Card had basically given up, things finally began to come together.

When Gavin Hood told Orson Scott Card that he planned to adapt Card’s science-fiction classic Ender’s Game for the big screen, the author replied with a familiar refrain: “Good luck, kid.” Card was done trying to bring his book to the screen. If someone else wanted to spend years of his life spinning in circles, so be it. But before removing himself from the development process, he left Hood with a bit of wisdom, one the director would hear over and over again throughout his journey: Ender’s Game was an utterly unfilmable book.

The second half of the article gives fans an incredible look into how OddLot founder Gigi Pritzker assembled her team of “Ender’s Game Avengers” including Bob Orci, Gavin Hood, and eventually star Asa Butterfield.

With the reset button pressed and Card all but out of the picture, Pritzker and OddLot set out to find a team that understood the treasured tome. The key was finding a writer-director who could build the movie from the ground up and carry it to the end, their very own Ender. Pritzker found him in Hood, a South African filmmaker who brought his memories of apartheid and life in the military to the project. After a turbulent experience on the ill-fated X-Men Origins: Wolverine, where multiple writers tinkered with the script on a daily basis in the middle of shooting, Hood craved the immersion required for Ender’s Game. He had a vision: a script that would allow a preteen actor to engage with challenging, emotionally raw material. That was all Pritzker needed to hear.

Still missing was Hendee’s keystone, a fan who grew up with the novel, a person who would flock to the movie if they weren’t involved. Essentially, a visible champion and guide. They found him in writer Roberto Orci (Transformers, Star Trek), who boarded the movie as a producer after regaling Pritzker with his memories of reading Ender’s Game at 12 years old. Orci became the movie’s Card proxy — a devout fan without a preservationist instinct. When the team felt it couldn’t make changes to aspects of the book, Orci would say, “Sure we can — I’m the guy who blew up Vulcan! I know what we can do and can’t do.”

[…]

Genuine support begat money begat production on a real-life movie, the kind that needed a cast and crew and cameras and sets and lighting and props and wasn’t just a promise forwarded around in email. There were more hurdles to jump; finding an Ender was always a frightening prospect for Hood.

“We had a script, we were hoping to make it, but no one was going to green-light us until the right kid was onboard,” he said. The director auditioned hundreds of boy leads for the role, some as young as 8 years old, before landing on Hugo’s Asa Butterfield.

People say all the time that things happen for a reason and with Ender’s Game, that certainly seems to apply. Having seen the film and loved what they did while still staying ultimately loyal to the story, I’m genuinely glad that this is what it took for it to finally be in theaters.

To read the entire piece, head over to Grantland.

Ender’s Game hits theaters tomorrow at 8 PM in advance of the official release date of November 1, 2013.

October 30, 2013
Another “Ender’s Game” Review – Too Much, Too Quick

(Review by EnderWiggin.net staffer Liz Spencer)

So Crystal has posted her official review, and it’s good stuff. I was the lucky tag-along who got to have the experience of a lifetime and attend this red carpet premiere with our famous webmaster. We made it home in the wee hours of the morning, but were absolutely too wired to sleep. So I present to you now my 3AM ramblings, the unedited review that created itself as I just couldn’t lie down without writing it all out. I’ll be seeing the movie again tonight, as Summit Entertainment has been kind enough to provide us with quite a few tickets to an advanced screening here in Honolulu (if you haven’t asked Crystal for tickets, there’s still time!). So it’s quite possible that my opinions might change, as tends to happen any second time ’round. But here is my initial reaction for your review.

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I’ll start right off by saying that I was not as horribly disappointed by this film as I feared I would be. However, I was also not as pleasantly surprised as I hoped I would be, especially after reading reviews from several fellow fans who kindled in my mind a small fire of hope that all my worries would be for naught.

It was a good film, but it was not a great film, and what makes it so frustrating is that all the elements were in place to create what truly could have been a marvelous adaptation.

It was just too dang fast. All the key plot pieces were there, and they were actually done rather well. But it didn’t matter, because the story took off at a sprint and never realized that it should have been pacing itself for a marathon. Or at least a 5K.

If I had not read the book, and went into this story completely blind, I would be asking several very important questions right now. First, I would not for a minute buy the plot. So we’re training kids to command our entire international fleet, protect our civilization from imminent destruction, and somehow they are both capable and qualified to do this after about six months in space playing laser tag?

Condensing the timeline was a killer. It took away from the authenticity of the story. To those naysayers who have complained over the years that the story was totally impractical anyway (and I bite my thumb at them) it was at least more plausible under the original terms. Taking children – real children, not adolescents – removing them from their homes, and conditioning them under the strictest of environments for half their natural lives, one can appreciate the depth of their training, their study, and their practice.

Of course this was also the biggest plot element that had to be revised. And this is entirely understandable, and why I have always known that any film adaptation of this book will never do it justice. Because unless they make a 20-episode miniseries (which I think would actually work fantastically) there is no way to chart the time and the growth that must occur. But I guess I was just hoping that Gavin Hood would have made it work better.

It’s not good when even I didn’t believe that Ender was capable of what they were asking him to do. From what I saw, he showed up at Battle School, spent two days as a launchie, got transferred to Salamander, was in one battle, got promoted to commander, was in another battle, fought Bonzo, quit, decided to come back the next day, flew to Command School, met his army, and was ready to conquer the home planet in like a week. While there are several “Dear Valentine”letters that are meant to inform us of the true passage of time, we just don’t see enough of his teaching, his training, and his tactical leadership to understand why Graff seems to think he’s that big of a deal.

And here’s where this all really sucks. Because all of these individual plot segments were actually done pretty well. If I was just watching them as clips, I’d think, “Oh, that was cool, I can’t wait to see the rest of it.” But there is no rest of it. There was no pacing, no waiting, no ten seconds to catch your breath and actually establish a scene. I didn’t have time to grow to care about Ender, really care about him. And again, if I hadn’t read the book, I don’t think I would have appreciated his internal struggle. I knew what he was supposed to be thinking because I KNEW what he was supposed to be thinking.

And again, this sucks. Because the performances were great. I actually have no qualms with any of the actors. Asa Butterfield was magnificent. Once I accepted a 15-year old Ender (who could legitimately pass for 13) he did embody the character. If he had been given more time, more TIME to reflect and study, watch those Bugger vids and monologue a little, I would have been able to truly appreciate and believe in his story. Harrison Ford was also good, and had several excellent lines, but also suffered from a sheer lack of time. Ben Kingsley was great (I don’t know what some of those reviewers are whining about), and all the other kids were good, but given so little to do they seemed merely extraneous. They tried to build up Bean, but he never got a chance to do more than act as comedic relief (which he did very well). Moises Arias (who I was terribly, terribly worried would bring down this entire thing himself) actually made a convincing Bonzo. Unfortunately, the theater was laughing every time he was on screen. Because it WAS funny that he was so little and trying to be so tough, and while he did a good job, you never felt that Ender was in any danger at all because all he would have to do is stiff-arm the guy and he’d never get near him.

Time. It needed more time. I’m hoping for an extended edition DVD release, but even that won’t fix some of the intrinsic rushing of these scenes. So in the end, I give it a passing grade. Of course the visuals were awesome (I just realized that I haven’t even mentioned them), but what I wanted was the story. The struggle. The journey. This cast and crew took on a most difficult project and performed admirably, and I freely acknowledge the near-impossibility of making it work just right. I guess I just hoped for a miracle. Thank you, Gavin, for all that you did. Your heart was truly in it– our visions just differ is all.

October 30, 2013
VIDEO: Ender’s Game Cast and Crew Visit Westminster Academy

During their promotion of Ender’s Game in London in the beginning of October, Asa Butterfield, Hailee Steinfeld, Harrison Ford, Sir Ben Kingsley, Gavin Hood and Bob Orci visited Film Club kids at Westminster Academy to talk about making movies. FilmClubUK just released a vid from the event.

Source: FilmClubUK’s Youtube (thanks to Tumblr user toothle55 for pointing it out)

October 26, 2013
VIDEOS: Ender’s Game Press Junket London
As you remember, some of the cast and crew of Ender’s Game did a press tour through Europe earlier this month. While in London, they gave a number of interviews, some of which have now surfaced online. Since they all have the same sort of setup, it can be quite confusing and hard to tell which interview is which just by looking at it, so here is a comprehensive list of all London press junket interview vids I could find. Enjoy!

1. Joe Michalczuk for Sky News Entertainment

Joe basically asks all interviewees very similar questions, so the real treat here is how much they sometimes differ in their answers. Asa, Hailee, Harrison and Bob, Sir Ben and Gavin talk about
- Ender’s Game being an independent movie
- the book, the script, and the movie
- the potential of SciFi and the themes of the movie
- working with the greats/being greats working with kids
- sequels
Watch the other interviewees here:

Hailee Steinfeld…………Harrison Ford and Bob Orci…………Sir Ben Kingsley

2. Rory Cashin for Entertainment.ie

Now, these are probably the best ones of the lot. The Interviewer asks interesting and insightful questions and you can actually tell that the interviewees enjoy not having to talk about the same things over and over again for once. Unfortunately, these are not on Youtube, and there is no embed code available on the site. So you’ll just have to do with links!
- Asa and Hailee on their chemistry, reading the source material when doing adaptations, physical challenges and Harrison Ford: HERE
- Harrison and Bob on the book, SciFi, Harrison returning to space, models for Graff, the younger actors and upcoming projects: HERE
- Sir Ben on what attracted him to the role, parallels between the story and the shooting experience, Asa, and telling stories: HERE
- Gavin on his history with the novel, Graff vs. Anderson, challenges of adaptation, and how he works with different actors: HERE
3. James Kleinmann for HeyUGuysUK and NerdyUK

These are run-of-the-mill interviews with some interesting tidbits. Gavin Hood, for instance, talks about why he decided to play the Giant in the Ender’s Game video game sequences.

Here is the rest:
- Asa and Hailee on their characters and their relationship, the pressure of playing an iconic lead character, and what’s special about the movie: HERE
- Bob and Harrison on the book, what attracted Harrison, casting Ender, Asa, and their hopes for the movie: HERE
- Sir Ben on what he likes about the book, lead vs. supporting roles, and wearing the tattoo: HERE
4. The Showbiz 411

So far, they have only published their interview with Hailee and Asa. It’s refreshingly light-hearted and probably geared towards younger viewers. The two young stars talk about hitting it off right away, space camp, boot camp, fun on set, tight flash suits and their ideal planet.

5. Cel Spellman, CBBC Friday Download

And last but not least, the most fun video of them all. Kiddy program “Friday Download” (CBBC) presenter Cel not only interviewed Asa, Hailee, Sir Ben, Bob and Harrison, he also challenged them to a match of Rock-Paper-Scissors. The whole thing is hilarious!

Note: It’s out of sync, so if that bothers you, just download it and play it with an audio delay of 2,1 seconds in VLC or Windows Media Player. Thanks to Tumblr users ceolwaerc and toothle55 for making it available.

Sources: Youtube, Youku, Entertainment.ie
October 22, 2013
VIDEO: IGN’s Extended Interview with Gavin Hood and Bob Orci

Watch IGN’s extended 17 minute interview with Ender’s Game director Gavin Hood and producer Roberto Orci. A lot of what they talk about we’ve heard already, but it’s still a good interview to watch.

Gavin Hood talks a bit more about why he eliminated Locke and Demosthenes, explaining that writing on the computer isn’t visually exciting and early on he made the decision to make the entire movie about Ender and cutting away to an Earth storyline would create a disconnect between the audience and Ender.

They also get asked the question: Are you afraid the fans will hate the movie?

Source: IGN

October 21, 2013
Wireless Magazine Talks to the Cast of ‘Ender’s Game’

Wireless Magazine recently spoke to the cast and crew of Ender’s Game while they were in the UK and there are some interesting tidbits in the various conversations they had.

Gavin Hood: [T]his is really about a young boy trying to find his own moral centre in a world that is encouraging his more aggressive nature. From a technical point of view there’s all the great fun stuff we have with the battle room and with the simulations. In the book they are slightly different, I’d like to hope fans will feel we’ve made them more visual for the purpose of cinema.

Asa Butterfield: I think that relationship is quite important in the film. When Ender’s first taken away from his home, from everyone he loves, everyone he trusts and put into this completely alien world where almost immediately he’s alienated from his peers there’s no one that he can talk to about what’s going on so he doesn’t really know what he’s supposed to be doing. When he meets Petra as their relationship develops they start to realise they can trust each other. She almost fills the gap that his sister has left so it’s definitely not a love relationship in any sense I don’t think, I just think they’re really close friends. They don’t know anything about boyfriends or girlfriends, they’re just someone they can lean on, to help.

Ben Kingsley: Well, the ending is that one wonders whether or not, without giving too much away, the audience will be curious, intrigued and troubled to know, is this child’s soul going to be distorted forever? Or will he get back to his original self? That in spite of or because of that very taxing journey, adolescence to young adulthood, have they distorted him? I think the answer is in the film and I find it very uplifting.

Hailee Steinfeld: I think there are many, there’s everything from leadership, compassion, all these different things that are so relevant to today. I don’t know that there is a main message I think there are plenty and it will be interesting to see what the audience takes away from it because there is so much in there.

Check out full interviews here.

October 21, 2013
GALLERY: Ender’s Game Photo Call / Press Conference in Moscow

After the London Ender’s Game event Harrison Ford, Gavin Hood, and Bob Orci went on to Moscow for a photo call and press conference at the Ritz Carlton Hotel Moscow. Photographer Mikhail Pochuyev took some awesome photos at the event. See some of them below! (via Corbis)

Check out the entire gallery HERE at Corbis!

Update: Ria Novosti has a few smaller, but not watermarked photos from the press conference HERE!

Sources: Corbis, Ria Novosti

October 12, 2013
GALLERY: Cast and Producers Present Ender’s Game in Berlin

Last Sunday, October 6th, Ender’s Game director Gavin Hood, producers Gigi Pritzker and Bob Orci, and cast members Asa Butterfield, Hailee Steinfeld, Harrison Ford and Ben Kingsley attended a photo call at Hotel Adlon, Berlin. The official German facebook page Ender’s Game – Das grosse Spiel released pictures from the event. Check some of them out below! See the rest HERE!

In addition, RedCarpetReports.de posted some higher resolution pictures from the photo call. See the best ones below! They have a little watermark in the lower right-hand corner, but since it’s pretty small and unobtrusive I’m sure you guys won’t mind.

Sources: Ender’s Game – Das grosse Spiel (Facebook page), RedCarpetReports.de

October 12, 2013
VIDEOS: Ender’s Game Cast and Crew at MCM London Comic Con
Before their presentation of Ender’s Game at the Odeon Leicester Square during MCM London Comic Con, Hailee Steinfeld, Sir Ben Kingsley, Harrison Ford, Asa Butterfield, and Gavin Hood talked to Entertainmentwise about Ender’s Game.

Not much new here, but I get some perverse enjoyment out of the reactions of Ben Kingsley, Asa Butterfield and, yes, Harrison Ford to being asked whether or not they would like to star/are starring in the next Star Wars movie. The Ben Kingsley one is cut off a bit in the beginning. If you’re interested in the whole Star Wars conversation, check it out HERE! Would someone please phone someone to get Ben Kingsley and Asa Butterfield into that movie. Look how excited they are at the prospect!

The fabulous five also talked to a couple of other news outlets prior to their London presentation. We already posted HeyUGuysUK’s interviews with Gavin Hood and Sir Ben Kingsley earlier this week. Their interviews with Asa Butterfield, Hailee Steinfeld, and Harrison Ford don’t reveal anything new, but we didn’t want to keep them from you either way, so here they are:
Finally, The MCM Buzz interviewed the cast and crew on the Comic Con red carpet. Here is a video that collects some tidbits of what Gavin Hood and the four cast members had to say:

You can check out the full interviews with Asa Butterfield, Hailee Steinfeld, Sir Ben Kingsley, and Gavin Hood on the TheMCMBuzz Youtube channel. I love the Hailee Steinfeld and Ben Kingsley ones especially.

They even posted a somewhat rarer interview with Gigi Pritzker and Bob Orci. Check it out below.

Sources: Entertainmentwise, HeyUGuysUK, TheMCMBuzz
October 10, 2013
Gavin Hood is the Mind Game’s Giant

Thanks to Ender’s Ansible and the soon-to-be-released making-of book for Ender’s Game (our own review to come later this week), we now know that the Giant in the mind game will be none other than director Gavin Hood!

[photo removed by request]

October 9, 2013
VIDEO: Gavin Hood on Why ‘Ender’s Game’ Could Be Made

Gavin Hood spoke to HeyUGuys UK on what drew him to the project of Ender’s Game.

I am not per say, a sci fi fan, for me, I love the fact that this is a story that’s set in the future which allows us to explore ideas that the story deals with in a way that would be perhaps too uncomfortable to deal with if we explored them in the modern context. So for me it doesn’t really matter if a story is set in the future or set in ancient Greece or set on one continent or another. What matters is that the environment is a helpful, visual way of telling what is essentially a timeless universal story about characters interacting with each other. Human beings have evolved their technology, but emotionally, we haven’t evolved that much.

Source: HeyUGuysUK

October 7, 2013
VIDEO: Ender’s Game Cast and Crew in Madrid

Several members of the Ender’s Game cast along with director Gavin Hood and producer Bob Orci were in Madrid on October 4th to promote El Juego de Ender. Watch video below from the photocall:

Here is another of better quality:

Thanks for Fernanda for the finds!

October 6, 2013