Andrew Stanton Talks 'John Carter of Mars'

by Elisabeth Rappe Jan 14th 2009 // 3:03PM

Filed under: Action, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Thrillers, Casting, Disney, Fandom, Scripts, Newsstand, Comic/Superhero/Geek

I nearly crammed this into a Geek Daily before deciding the quotes were just too long, and that some John Carter fans might read "Nick Fury" in the title of that and skip right over. We can't have that!

MTV caught up exclusively with Pixar's Andrew Stanton, who confirmed the film is real. "We're full bore on it right now. We're over the hump of the writing phase, and we're certainly far from rewrites." In fact, they're well into pre-production, and even looking at casting the hero. "I know everybody wanted Hugh Jackman forever. But he's only getting older and more exposed now, so it's a tough call. I'm your typical filmmaker, I want to find the next best unknown."

Penning a script out of an episodic story has been one of the major pitfalls of all movie attempts, but is a problem Stanton thinks he cracked. "It almost had an absence of a story for a feature film because it was very episodic. In its day it was a comic book. I mean, this book was written in 1912. It was the comic book you got in the time before there was such thing as comic books. So, 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."

But Stanton runs the risk of upsetting the devoted by admitting he's tweaked the story and characters. "Fortunately it's an old enough story. 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."

I'm not familiar enough with Carter to comment -- so I'll hand it over to the fans, who I'm eager to hear say yay, nay and "Who the heck wanted Hugh Jackman?"

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Tags: andrew stanton, AndrewStanton, Disney, John Carter of Mars, JohnCarterOfMars, pixar

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