March 2013
2 posts
1 tag
3 tags
Update From Director Gavin Hood
Hello fellow Ender’s Game fans. It’s been four years since I first began writing a screenplay based on the classic novel. I love the book. And I especially love the character of Ender Wiggin. I was drafted into an army myself at 17, and Ender’s journey of self discovery - his battles with authority figures he does not trust and his development as a leader - are themes I...
June 2012
2 posts
As we’ve now reached the end of principal photography on ENDER’S GAME, it seems fitting to take a step back and acknowledge the two people responsible for giving such vivid life to the imaginary world in which we’ve spent the past many months immersed.
And when we say immersed, we truly mean it.
Ben Procter and Sean Haworth — our amazing Production Designer duo — were tasked...
You think your job is tough? Try having to dress an entire imaginary, future-world.
That responsibility fell to Christine Bieselin-Clark, our wonderful costume designer. She was tasked with making the future look — and even feel — real and tangible.
With science fiction, there’s a danger in creating a look that seems so foreign it becomes alienating. For ENDER’S GAME,...
May 2012
4 posts
Ccspatriot35 asks:
How militaristic will the environment be? Will we be seeing the children treated like the soldiers they are meant to portray? For all intents and purposes they are in boot camp for most of their adolescence. Will we see the characters being broken down?
Funny you should ask. We had a great visit with some online press who visited the set, and they got to talk to our...
Valentine asks:
As fans of the book, what is your favorite scene from the book? Do you have a different favorite scene from the movie?
I always loved the scenes within the Mind Game that Ender believes he plays for recreation in the orbiting battle school. Part video game, part psychological test, and if you know the book, part something extraordinary that shouldn’t be given away for...
“I need you to be clever, Bean. I need you to think of solutions to problems we haven’t seen yet.” In Dragon Army, Ender encourages input. So do we. That’s why we’re opening this blog up to you, the readers. Ask us a question about ENDER’S GAME — something you’ve been dying to know. We’ll select our favorites (or as many as we can) from...
You think your school was clique-ish? In Battle School, you are part of an army, each represented by its own iconic symbol. Lately, Dragon Army has come to be known as a repository of misfits and failures. As a member of this unit, you’re supposed to live, breathe (fire?) and fight as one cohesive and selfless unit. Success as one. Defeat as one. Unfortunately for Dragon Army, their...
April 2012
4 posts
Let’s just hang the kids from bungee chords, roll camera for ten hours and see what we get!” That was plan A. Which is why we are not directing the movie and instead Gavin Hood is. We never thought we would find a bigger fan of the novel than all of us until Gavin walked in the room. Going back to his roots, Gavin decided to take on the challenge of adapting the novel himself,...
Though Ender’s world is one worth saving, it sometimes comes with a price. The novel was amazingly prescient about a great many things: remote controlled drone wars, the internet, the influence of blogging, hand held computing tablets like the I-Pad, and of course, electronic surveillance implants. Implanted tracking and monitoring chips are no longer a science fiction concept. They...
Ender's World
The more futuristic the world, the more invisible its technology. So why shouldn’t Ender’s room look just like any normal kid’s room? And not every future is a dark dystopia. The world that Ender lives in is a world worth saving. That’s why he is willing to leave his family to go into an orbiting Battle School and risk not seeing his sister, Valentine, again until they...
Ender's Days
“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...
March 2012
2 posts
Ender's World
If you think regular school is tough, try it in a rotating space station. And by the way, do you have a hall pass for hall number 0058? Because if you don’t, you could end up scrubbing the showers. When you first arrive at Battle School, all you perceive is its utility, its functionality… that is until you enter the BATTLE ROOM, where there is no up, no down, and ZERO G’s....
A BIG CHAIR TO FILL
It took us all a second to realize Asa was right when he said Ender’s Game was an amazing book from “the late 1900s.” We use that phrase all the time now, like, “Clinton was President in the late nineteen hundreds!” Most of us read Ender’s Game when we were young and wondered when it would become a movie. We never dreamed then that we would all be part of the...
