I was able to attend a luncheon before the panel and sat with Tom McCarthy and Andrew Stanton. Of course John Carter of Mars had to come up. He also elaborated on the panel, but here’s what’s going on with JOHN CARTER OF MARS:
- It is live action.
- “It is huge, it is exciting, it scares the crap out of me. It’s either going to make me or break me.”
- It is NOT a Pixar movie, rather a Disney film. However Stanton’s creative team from Pixar are all still involved.
- The style is going to be very real, not highly stylized. He said that 20 some years ago that version could have been made, but since Star Wars and a whole glut of science fiction and fantasy films have ripped off giant portions of JCOM over the years the only option he sees is doing a straight up, realistic version of the story. He described it as if it was a National Geographic crew that stumbled across a preserved civilization while exploring a cave. Very real, but awe-inspiring.
- He is not planning nor wanting to shoot it 3-D (thank God… I love James Cameron, and I think AVATAR is going to be amazing, but I’m getting tired of every big event movie being 3-D), but thinks Disney might want to push him towards it.
- Stanton has been a fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs since he was a kid, so while he won’t have the same kind of development time on this one as he had on his animated movie he looks at it as him living with the story in his brain for 40 plus years instead of the 6-8 of his animated films.
- He has his second draft done and will be casting soon.
- John Carter WILL be a Civil War soldier.
He's got more on general screenwriting and like topics from the festival.
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3 comments:
I hope they are faithful to the book and have John Carter be a Confederate veteran from Virginia.
I think that's only slightly more likely to happen than Dejah Thoris being played by a woman with real, Frazetta-esque curves. Which is to say, extremely unlikely.
Damned stick-figure Hollywood starlettes...
- Brian
Thanks for the info on John Carter. The fact that he has been a fan of the series for many years gives me hope that it will turn out well. I really don't want 3-D.
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