Terry Manier
In Ender's Game, the Nebula Award-winning 1985 novel by Orson Scott Card, a 6-year-old boy is taken from his family on Earth to an orbital military academy to be molded into a soldier for a looming extraterrestrial war. For Ender, a misfit genius among some of the world's scariest adolescent prodigies, surviving the other cadets is a violent affair in itself—from maiming fellow students in the shower to orchestrating zero-gravity battles.
This month, the classic book comes to the big screen after decades in development purgatory—including at least half a dozen scripts rejected and the studio rights changing hands. Warner Bros.' rights expired. OddLot Entertainment stepped in and partnered with Summit (a division of Lionsgate) to produce the movie. X-Men Origins: Wolverine director Gavin Hood was chosen to write and direct. Asa Butterfield (Hugo) was cast as Ender and Harrison Ford as Colonel Graff. But then Ender's Game stumbled again: Last summer, activists called for the movie's boycott, angered by Card's intolerant views on homosexuality. (Card has campaigned against gay marriage for many years.)
A lifelong Mormon and a hyperbolic political columnist, Card has written religio-political essays that at times suggest things like, say, overthrowing the US government. Yet paradoxically, what we got from him in Ender's Game was a deeply humanist story of the perils of war and prejudice, a tale so moving we turned the pages of the book until they fell out. WIRED grabbed a rare audience with the author, now 62 (and having written about as many novels and recovered from a stroke in 2011), to talk about the saga behind the movie that will also, hopefully, transcend his politics.
WIRED: Of all your work over the past three decades, why has Ender endured so well?
Orson Scott Card: If I knew, I would do it again. I don't, but I have some ideas.
What works with Ender's Game is Ender's community-building. There's a disparate group of kids who could be rivals, and he's able to bind them together through his personal service to them, through his loyalty, his trustworthiness. They know he'll never waste them, that he's not exploiting them for his own gain.
I certainly was not conscious of it as I was writing him—I'm not much of a follower, and I'm not a good team player—and yet I created the kind of guy that I would follow.
How many scripts did you end up writing before Hollywood picked it up?
Starting from the beginning, starting over again with a whole new concept, I did it about six times. So believe me, I am more sick of Ender's Game than anybody.
What was so hard about it?
As it's written, Ender's Game is unadaptable. The book takes place entirely inside Ender's head. If you don't know what Ender is thinking, he's just an incredibly violent little kid and not terribly interesting. You have to find ways to externalize what he's thinking. But he can't be the kind of person who explains himself to other people. That would weaken him.
With all my scripts, if you had read Ender's Game you would say, wow, he nailed it. But if you hadn't read the book, then you would have no idea what all the fuss was about.
I finally wrote a script that worked for people who had never read the book, and it was a buddy-movie approach—bringing the character of Bean, Ender's friend and sidekick, to the front and making him a foil, somebody Ender can talk to as an equal. That was proof of concept.
Screenwriter-director Gavin Hood, however, went with Petra (a female classmate who becomes one of Ender's lieutenants) as a major character. Those were his decisions to make.
Why were you so adamant that Ender be played by an actual child, rather than a teenager?
If he's older, puberty has hit, so it would be tempting to try to give him a love interest. But that is not the version that is being used, for which I'm deeply grateful. Maybe the people at Lionsgate have understood that turning this into a teen romance movie would really kill the story.
And yet they ended up with an older kid, not a 6-year-old, right?
Well, the stuff these kids were required to do—they're flying on wires—in order to keep the budget within line, they had to work with older kids. So though there are things that I wish had gone a different way in the abstract, given the realities of Hollywood, I couldn't be happier.
How did they end up shooting the iconic, omnidirectional battleroom scenes?
It was a wild combination of wire work and computer graphics. It follows the rules of physics, though there was a little bit of a problem early on: The computer graphics people did not understand that in zero g, when two things collide there's no such thing as a glancing blow. At least one of the objects will go into a spin. That's all been fixed.
Were there other challenges with the battleroom?
There were two. One, it's a lot of people moving around on the screen. It's the Quidditch problem: The games were great on paper, terrible when you're watching them.
Two, there's a problem in computer graphics that people are well aware of, which is that walking never looks real. Nobody's managed to solve it yet, and that means all impacts against the walls, for example, look fake, fake, fake. It can't be done with computer graphics, and yet we couldn't take it up and film in space. So how do you reconcile that?
Well, they brought in Cirque du Soleil performers, superb athletes and dancers, and they got them to teach the kids how to do the wire work with a very cleverly designed frame that allowed them free movement in every direction. The kids suffered. The skills they had to acquire in order to play these parts and the esprit de corps were really analogous to Battle School.
Gibson didn't anticipate cell phones when he wrote Neuromancer. What do you look back to the 1985 novel and shake your head about?
The most obvious thing that I got wrong is that in the original draft of Ender's Game, I have them get into a shuttle and say that there was never an accident in the history of the shuttle program. Well, that was true when I wrote it. One of the most trivial things about the Challenger explosion was that I then had to go in and revise that statement in the novel.
People give me a lot of credit for having predicted the Internet. If you look at the first copyright date, I wasn't really predicting. However, my one prediction was that as soon as the web became open to the public, networks would become politically important. It took a while before they were, but that one I got right.
Photofest
You've gotten a lot of criticism on the web for your personal and political views about gay marriage. How do you feel about the backlash?
I hope that people will realize that they are not getting a true picture of me from these comments, and they're certainly not getting anything to do with Ender's Game, which was written long ago and has nothing whatsoever to do with gay marriage. I'll just trust the audience to decide for themselves what the movie actually is, not what other people are saying about me.
But you've got to address that there's controversy around your views ...
I issued an official statement. That's really all I have to say about it.
Much of your work is edgy for Mormons, yet the fact that you're a Mormon is edgy for a lot of other people. What's it like being in the middle?
In a way, being a Mormon prepares you to deal with science fiction, because we live simultaneously in two very different cultures. The result is that we all know what it's like to be strangers in a strange land. It's not just a coincidence that there are so many effective Mormon science fiction writers. We don't regard being an alien as an alien experience. But it also means that we're not surprised when people don't understand what we're saying or what we think. It's easy to misinterpret us. I understand it. So, you know, I don't get upset by that.
How's life been since your stroke?
If you're going to have a stroke, have the one I had. Exercise is harder now; I tend to lurch a little bit to the left. If that stroke had been a fatal one, I would have left my wife to pay back some pretty big advances on books, so I'm working my way through the existing contracts as quickly as I can. If another one carries me off, I'm intending not to leave my family in debt. That's a very practical thing. Then there's "Wow, I'm going to die." But that, actually, I went through when one of our five children died at birth in 1997, and then again when our 17-year-old son died of cerebral palsy in 2000. We had already faced the fact that people we loved could die. That was really my wake-up call.
This is a terrible segue to my next question ...
That's fine.
... but after the movie happens—it's been 28 years in the making—is Ender's Game finally over for you?
No, I still have a sequel that I'm working on. In terms of film, Ender's Game is actually the beginning, not the end. No one will touch anything else of mine until they see how Ender's Game does. Unless the film absolutely tanks, which I'm not expecting, then the floodgates could open. I have probably a dozen books that are much, much more doable on film than Ender's Game.
But, you know, whether that happens or not, my career is in books. There I have an unlimited special effects budget. And I can cast however I want.
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