“Films are like playing golf,” Gavin Hood tells me as I leave the room. “I don’t play golf, but I’m told you never play the perfect round. You keep fucking coming back because you want to make it perfect. From my point of view, I got as much as I could ask from my investors to do what we did. We did.”
I think he came pretty close to perfect with his adaptation of the sci-fi novel Ender’s Game, a novel I was required to read in school that stuck with me through the years. It was, obviously, a difficult adaptation, and I was concerned about any movie that might be made based on the material from the get-go. So I talked to writer/director Gavin Hood about the trickier parts of the novel that he either adapted, edited or cut completely from the movie. We also talked at length about the moral dilemma of the film’s ending, so consider this a MASSIVE SPOILER WARNING for those who haven’t seen the film or read the novel.
CraveOnline: I’ve been dreading this adaptation since they first started talking about it over a decade ago, because it’s a tough book.
Gavin Hood: No shit. [Laughs] I had days when I thought, “I am so fucking screwed here. What was I thinking?”
And honestly, I think you nailed it.
Thanks bud. I hope you’re not just making me feel good.
No, I just tweeted that actually.
Tweet it again!
Honestly, I was fearing the worst.
What were your worst fears?
My concerns were that it would be easy to overplay the seriousness, and the darkness, and easy to underplay it.
Wow. That’s interesting.
And it would be easy to reduce the film to simplistic messages.
Yes, you are nailing it. Yes, yes, yes. No, I agree. It’s terrifying.
You say there were times when you were worried about it. What were you worried the most about getting right?
Well, you’re absolutely right: reducing it to some simplistic moral tale, as opposed to leaving the audience to have some good argument and debate. “Preemptive war is right,” or “Ender has become a tree-hugger.” “No he hasn’t!” What I like the end is, is Ender’s argument purely a moral one or is it also a strategic one? He says to Graff, “Have you killed every last one of them? Because if you haven’t, fuck my moral argument… this is a strategic fuck up! Because now you’ve told the world that we’re genocidal maniacs, and that’s strategically stupid, asshole!” I mean, I didn’t quite give him that [particular dialogue], but I’m certainly hoping there’s that layer too because it’s easy to go, “Oh my god, I’ve committed a genocide,” but he says to Graff, “Are you sure you’ve killed every last one of them?”
Well, he can’t turn it off. He’s been turned into a strategy machine. Everything he says or does is designed to have certain reactions or impacts.
Right.
But honestly, I feel like this film handles two inherit conflicts really well. One, is the ongoing conflict between objective pragmatism and subjective sympathy. And the other one is the glory of battle and the tragedy of victory.
Beautifully put.
Thank you. Well, I’m a genius.
[Laughs] It’s nice to listen to someone else talk about your stuff, because…
Especially if they like it.
Yes, it’s horrible if they don’t.
But here’s the thing: it’s hard to make an anti-war movie, because war looks cool. In Ender’s Game you have the perfect device to separate the cast and the audience from the actual atrocities, and then you get to pull the rug out.
Dude, you don’t need me.
I’m sorry.
No, I couldn’t ask for more. I mean that, because that theme of the way we are seeing games is starting to emerge, and they way war is cool, because we watch it on TV, yet when you’re there it’s not cool. It’s kind of terrifying. And yet it seduces our young people, who we need to go fight our battles, and we don’t tell them you might suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder because that wouldn’t get them in there. There’s just no right answer. You’ve got to seduce. I think those themes of the duality of our nature, our capacity for great compassion versus our capacity for great violence and atrocities and aggression, those are present in us as a species! They are present in us as individuals. And sometimes we need that ugly violent thing. I’m not a total pacifist, and yet if we don’t temper it with compassion we make irrational decisions in moments of panic, which leads to us having a bad reputation, which is what Ender’s point is at the end of the movie.
“I will be seen as a killer. This is a fucking genocide, and that isn’t only a morally stupid thing, Graff, it’s a strategically stupid thing!”
