We’ve brought you all the casting updates for director Gavin Hood‘s forthcoming big-screen adaptation of Orson Scott Card‘s Hugo and Nebula Award-winning sci-fi novel Ender’s Game, which is set to hit theaters early next year.
Now, thanks to the official production blog we bring you the first few images from the production with their attached comments. Check them out below!
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 team to bring it to the screen, nor did we realize the novel’s description of our world would be so prescient that its vision would still be unfolding before our very eyes today. And now, watching Asa bring a character to life who has been on our minds since our youth, we realize things happen for a reason. We were waiting for him. Make yourself comfortable, Ender!
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. Movie making can become overly reliant on digital worlds, and nothing can replace a well-built set that you can see and touch and stand in the middle of, fooling you into thinking you are really there. Enjoy this small taste of Ender’s big world. We’ll see a lot more in the weeks to come.
“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.
About Ender’s Game:
Set in Earth’s future, the novel presents an imperiled humankind who have barely survived two conflicts with the Formics (an insectoid alien race also known as the “Buggers”). In preparation for an anticipated third invasion, an international fleet maintains a school to find and train future fleet commanders. The world’s most talented children, including the novel’s protagonist, Ender Wiggin, are taken at a very young age to a training center known as the Battle School. There, teachers train them in the arts of war through increasingly difficult games including ones undertaken in zero gravity in the Battle Room where Ender’s tactical genius is revealed.
Ender’s Game starring Asa Butterfield, Abigail Breslin, Brendan Meyer, Harrison Ford, Viola Davis and Hailee Steinfeld is slated to hit theaters on November 1st, 2013.
