The most memorable moment from Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game novel is easily the zero gravity training that the child genius must endure. But how in the hell will the movie version include this? We asked producer Roberto Orci.
In Card's novel, the young prodigies learn about the art of war in giant zero gravity rooms. Armed with with stun guns, the kids break off into teams and fight each other in one giant weightless battle after the next. It's during these battles that Ender (the runt of the genius litter besides Bean) begins to stand out.
We're still not sure how Alex Kurtzman and Bob Orci plan on shooting these moments, so we asked Orci while he was doing press for Cowboys & Aliens.
Are you going to include the zero-G training sequences and how will you shoot them?
You've got to have zero G training sequences. Are you kidding? We're talking about shooting it every way you can: using tanks, using motion capture, using amazing acrobats, using an amazing space. But you have to have it, that's part of the movie.
Is [the film] a commentary on the X-Box generation?
Reality... and are video games good for you or not? Our own military is now training on video games, and they can pilot remote weaponry from anywhere in the United States or anywhere in the world. So already the idea of we're already controlling weapons of war through games and how that's desensitizing people... [That] is one of the themes of the book, it was way ahead of its time. I read it in '85 there's internet in it, there's blogging, there's ipads. It's a really advanced book, and it's still relevant.
Is there anything you'd like to tell the readers about [Ender's Game]?
The hardest part is adapting a classic novel faithfully. And I think before, people were trying to get too clever with it and change things that didn't need to be changed. Gavin Hood wrote an amazing script that is extremely faithful to the book, including the twists in it and the themes in it. And I think that will be the difference to getting it made.