CraveOnline: I ask the question because I was impressed how much the intellect of Ender’s Game remains in the film. My hesitation with any movie adaptation was: are they only going to make the battle movie? So was that a fight you had to have?
Gavin Hood: It was a fight, and not with everybody. There were significant producers who really wanted to do the film for the same reason that I wanted to, and it sounds like you want, which is the most important reason for making Ender’s Game for me is to deal with the fact that it’s morally complex. This is a kid who is not all good, who has the capacity for tremendous compassion but has the equal capacity for terrible violence and destruction. His journey and what’s most important about his journey is finally taking responsibility for his own morality, for defining his own morality and what kind of leader, person will he be? A violent warmonger or will he be more of a diplomat and negotiator in the future?
I think that one of the things that’s great about the book and I like to think we preserve in the movie is that Ender on the one hand is a victim of manipulation by adults, but at the same time, he’s a victim of his own ego because his ego desire to win is what Graff is able to manipulate. There’s a great scene that’s still in the movie where he gouges the giant’s eye out in the Mind Game and Alai says to him, “Why did you do that?” It’s an ugly, violent tendency revealing itself. “I don’t like that.” He backs off from Ender and Ender somewhat shame-facedly says, “Well, that’s what they want from us.”
Well, the real question by the end of the film is it doesn’t matter what they want from you. What do you want from you? So I do think that those important questions, moral questions and philosophical idea are preserved in the film even as it stands. As I say, there are a couple of other scenes on the DVD that involved him with a conversation with Dink and with Mick that further expand on those kinds of ideas if you like.
And one of the big ideas is that in order to understand an enemy well enough to defeat them, by understanding them that much you love them. Some people interpret that as you destroy what you love, but I see it as once you understand someone enough to destroy them and love them, how can you destroy them?
Exactly, I think that’s a really great interpretation and I’m totally with you on that. It means that you’re now able to negotiate with them, and why do I feel so strongly about that? Well, as you know I come from South Africa and as much as many people are cynical about whether conflict can be resolved through negotiation, the one thing growing up in that country that I learned thanks to Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk managing to sit down and negotiate was that actually compassion and understanding your enemy and learning to love them, which is absolutely a philosophy of Nelson Mandela’s writ large, works. So I totally support your interpretation of that and I think if you’re looking for a real world example where that approach was taken, it was taken by Mandela.
The way he did it was instead of saying to de Klerk, “Why are you doing this to me?” he framed the argument as, “What is it about me that you are afraid of?” That’s literally how he put it. What are you afraid of? Now, that racist person had to say, “Well, I’m scared this is what you’re going to do.” “Okay, well, let me see if I can allay those fears through compassion and understanding and conversation. Now are you really still so afraid of me?” That was really an incredible lesson if you like. It wasn’t theory. It really worked. We were pulled back from civil war by the negotiations of those two men. So I do believe in the theories that you just expounded and the interpretation you just expounded. I really do.
When Hugh Jackman was promoting The Wolverine over the summer, he admitted he felt he could have done better on X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Was that ever something he expressed to you or was it convenient that when he had a sequel to promote, he was taking stock?
No, I think that both Hugh and I feel we could have done better. I think the movie we set out to make, the story is simple. We had a David Benioff script that was a story about two brothers in conflict with each other, which was really Wolverine in conflict with his own nature which is very similar to Ender and it’s why Hugh asked me to do it, because he’d seen my film Tsotsi which is very much about a kid who has propensity for violence who finds a moral compass. So I guess directors tend to repeat their themes.
What happened, frankly, was that during the shooting of Wolverine, the studio decided that our film, which was initially a smaller film, was going to be the tentpole movie and if it was going to be the tentpole movie, they wanted more stuff in it. So they were rewriting the film while Hugh and I were shooting in Australia. We were getting pages that suddenly introduced Gambit and introduced funny jokes with Blob. For me, as a director, it was a very stressful time because where’s the tone of this movie going? It was my first big Hollywood movie and it was a very tricky time.
I think Hugh feels that as a producer on that film, he might have engaged with the studio more, but we were in the middle of shooting and you’re trying to keep a production together and you’re getting different pages every day. There’s much of that film that I’m very proud of. I think the relationship between Hugh and Liev Schreiber is the film we were trying to make, and I think at the same time there are bolted on story aspects that tonally are not quite where they should be. Hugh’s a wonderful guy, please, this is very important. Neither Hugh nor I want to be in conflict with each other. We were two guys trying to make a movie under a lot of pressure and as I say, there’s a lot of the movie we’re really proud of.
Very good, I just wanted to make sure he wasn’t throwing you under the bus there. And are you still staying with Ender whether the next one is Speaker for the Dead, another book or a complete original?
I have no idea. I would love to answer that question for you. We really have to see where this whole thing washes up once the DVD is released and what the studio decides it wants to do. Right now I’m just focused on promoting the Blu-ray and we’ll see.
I took an opportunity to ask Bob Orci that.
What did he say?
He said it might not be Speaker for the Dead because of the time jump. It could be another book that takes place in between, or an original script to stay with the cast.
The truth is, it will probably need considerable reinvention because the studio will want, and I think rightly, to move much of the cast that exists into the next film, all the young actors. Speaker for the Dead doesn’t do that because Ender’s 30 years older.
Yeah, we want to see Asa Butterfield and Hailee Steinfeld again too.
Exactly.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
