ENDER'S GAME Will Be a Distilled Version of the Book and Blog Update

Producer Alex Kurtzman sat down with MTV recently to talk about the highly anticipated adaptation of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. This is something fanboys and fangirls have been waiting to see happen for years, and it's actually in production! We can only hope that it gets the film treatment it deserves. During the interview Kurtzman talked about bring the book to life saying,

I’m really proud of the work everybody’s done on 'Ender’s.' Particularly because it’s a very complicated sprawling book that a lot of people have tried for a very long time to figure out how to make. 

He goes on to discuss the changes that were made and how those changes keeps the essence of the book,

[Director] Gavin Hood, the minute that we read his script we realized that in a miraculous way he’d managed to distill down the essence of the book and the big moves to a very understandable clear format. He had made changes that were I think totally protective of the novel, he hasn’t changed any of the plot, it’s just about not being able to put all of it in one movie. He really distills it down to its essence in a beautiful way and that was an amazing thing to see. It’s an amazing thing to see the movie come to life because it’s such a special and different movie.

He goes on to talk about the the cast of the film saying,

Asa [Butterfield] is unbelievable in it. Hailee [Steinfeld] and Abigail [Breslin] are incredible. Harrison [Ford] and Viola [Davis] are just, they’re weirdly exactly what you imagined when you read the book, or at least I did. It’s really going to be a special movie. We’re about halfway through it, maybe close to halfway but it’s been a wonderful shoot so far.

Kurtzman concludes the interview with the following statement:

We’re just happy to support the vision of the book. It’s such a treasured novel and it’s very rare that you get an opportunity to work on something like that so we were very psyched.

I'm nervously excited about this movie. I'm not the biggest fan of the director, but maybe he'll be able to pull it off in a way that fans of the book will love. According to Kurtzman, he's done that, but we'll just have to wait and see. I'm looking forward to seeing any footage released, bu in the mean time here's a new image from the Ender's Game production blog featuring some of the young cast members prepping for space travel at NASA's Space Camp in Huntsville Alabama.

Here's the blog entry that goes along with the photo,

“Houston, we have a problem.  We don’t know how to land the Shuttle.” Good thing it’s just a simulator safely on the ground at SPACE CAMP in Huntsville, Alabama.  Aramis, Moises, Asa & Suraj (pictured above from a monitor in the MISSION CONTROL ROOM ) and the rest of our cast agreed that to do Ender’s Game right, they had to train as though they were really headed into ZERO G.  And this wasn’t just an afternoon spent taking a vanity tour. From the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU), which simulates extra-vehicular shuttle ­missions in Earth’s orbit, to the microgravity training chair that prepared astronauts for moonwalks during the Apollo program, the week at Space Camp was genuine prep for the feeling of reality that this movie deserves. And after all, the army that trains together stays together.