For fans of Wall-E or Finding Nemo, it's almost too good to believe that director Andrew Stanton will be venturing into work with live action actors. For years he's been working on an adaptation of the classic serialized novel John Carter of Mars, and now that he's the toast of Pixar and a powerful guy on his own, he's finally got the resources to get the thing made.
Stanton talked to MTV Movies Blog about his plans for the movie, which he says is "over the hump of the writing phase"-- I guess that's a good thing. He was also open about the challenges of adapting a novel that was serialized, and never meant to be experienced in a big lump. "I don’t want to be dissing it, but it almost had an absence of a story for a feature film because it was very episodic [...] It was really just about the next fight, the next adventure, the next romance. The key was putting a story into it and creating characters that had to grow and real basic stuff that we all know a movie needs."
Stanton knows his way around movie storytelling better than just about anyone-- the scripts for Finding Nemo and Wall-E, not to mention every other Pixar movie, are damn near flawless. And Stanton is willing to tinker with the original source material if that means getting a better story out of it. "There isn’t such huge allegiance to it that people won’t mind that we muck with it a bit to hopefully amplify the essence of what made me interested in it as a young kid and hopefully will keep me interested in it as an adult.”
MTV also pressed him about other issues, including who to cast in the lead role, but you'll have to head over there to hear it. At this point I'll follow Andrew Stanton absolutely anywhere, particularly if it involves yet another visit to outer space. Thanks to MTV for reminding me of this exciting project.
