‘DRAGON’ AUTHOR PLEASED WITH CHANGES IN FILM VERSION
Source: statesman.com
It’s really a writer’s dream – to write a book that a major studio wants to make into a movie.
Though Cressida Cowell’s series “How to Train Your Dragon” is certainly not going to rival fellow Brit J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter,” she has done pretty well, with her first book making it to movie screens this weekend via Dreamworks.
Perhaps known best for satire and its Shrek franchise, Dreamworks has dropped the snarkiness in favor of action, plot and wonderful 3-D animation. The story is compelling despite the great liberties the writers took with the Cowell’s plot (Essentially the book and movie are the same in name only, plus a few characters that share the same name. For example, Hiccup is a teen, not 10 years old, the dragon Toothless does in fact have teeth, and Toothless is fairly large, dark and dangerous, instead of a relatively benign creature the size of a small dog as written in Cowell’s book.)
Even with all the changes Cowell is effusive about the efforts of co-directors Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois.
“I’m just really pleased,” she said in a phone interview from her London home, with her three kids bouncing around in the background. “I think the film is very beautiful, and I just loved the cinematography. It’s also very moving, which I was very pleased with. You engage with the characters and mind what happened to them.”
Her own children, ages 11, 9 and 6, were able to view it with her in August. And they gave it a thumbs-up as well.
And all those changes?
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MARSHALL FINE: INTERVIEW : CONOR McPHERSON AND THE ECLIPSE
Source: huffingtonpost.com
The Irish have a fascination with ghosts and writer-director Colin McPherson has an idea about why.
“I have a theory about Ireland, being at the edge of Europe,” says the playwright and filmmaker in a telephone interview. “For 1,000 years, people didn’t know what was beyond. But we thought about it – a lot. And that ‘beyond’ became internalized in our psyche. And then Catholicism took hold – and it was a superstitious religion with ghostly imagery. There’s something in our culture that makes us connect with that.”
From that notion springs The Eclipse, the newest film by the author of such plays as Shining City and The Seafarer. The film, which opens in limited release today (3/26/10), is a romantic drama about a high-school woodworking teacher, Michael Farr (played by Ciaran Hinds), who works as a volunteer at the annual literary festival in his small Irish town of Cobh. But on the weekend of the festival, Michael, a widower with an ailing father-in-law, finds that he’s seeing things – ghosts? spirits? – in his house and elsewhere, even as he finds himself caught up in an unexpected triangle involving two writers at the festival (Aidan Quinn and Iben Hjejle).
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LATEST HOLLYWOOD SCRIPT DEALS
Source: reuters.com
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – Bold Films has acquired “Blank Slate,” an action thriller spec script from Doug Cook and David Weisberg, the writing team behind “The Rock” and “Double Jeopardy.”
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Have you seen ‘How to train your Dragon” yet? What did you think? The Eclipse sounds great – but, truth be known, I’m a little biased when things come out of Ireland and Scotland – I usually automatically am fascinated by them. What do you think of the premise of ‘Blank State’?
Join us in the forum to discuss!
