SPOILERS START
MC: What had to be adapted from the book to the screenplay?
JO: In the book – Kludd (the protagonist’s brother) actually kicks Sorren (the protagonist) out of the nest (instead of them both falling out together in the movie.) Sorren was actually kicked out of the nest by his mean old brother.
Also, Kludd is Metal Beak (the leader of the villains), but in the movie he’s a different character. What we eventually learn in the books is in the time that it takes Soren escapes from St. Aggies and find the Guardians, Kludd became Metal Beak. In the movie we didn’t have time to show all that, so Kludd emerges wounded and takes the mask from the dead Metal Beak, sort of saying that he’s going to become him in the next movie.
I pitched that to Kathryn Lasky, the author of the book, and she liked it.
MC: So you were talking to Kathryn while you wrote the screenplay?
JO: Yeah, we talked on the phone because she was really, really open to the idea that – and not all novelists are – that cinema is different than literature, and you have to make changes to make it work. We both agreed that the most important part of the movie was keeping the characters and the spirit of the book rather than the literal book. Two big changes are when Soren is kidnapped he is taken to St. Aggies, which is like a dark, concentration camp kind of place. In the book St. Aggies is completely different from the Pure Ones (the group of villains who run St. Aggies). I asked her, “What if the concentration at St. Aggies? What if that was run by the Pure Ones? There was a long pause, and she said, “Oh I wish I thought of that.”
I did the same thing with Stephen Ambrose with Band of Brothers Mariane Pearl with A Mighty Heart. I think it’s important to honor the source material. I think if you keep the communication lines open it’s good. The more you keep an author in the process, the more happy they’ll be with the end result.
END SPOILERS
[youtube id =”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7FNaD44OEc”%5D
MC: Who was your favorite character to write?
JO: Ezylryb, the grizzled old former warrior who is also a poet. I just thought he was a really, really interesting character. I loved this idea that Soren had been told these stories of a mythic warrior who is an enormous owl, and he meets him and he’s this small screech owl, and he’s also a poet.
Again, I wish I could have had 20 more minutes. I love that character. It doesn’t matter now. We don’t need to go into that. I would have spent more time with Ezylryb and Soren and their relationship, but the reality of the movie business is we had to make a certain length. Unlike lord of the rings where you can make a 4-hour directors cut because you shot it, in animation you only render and spend on the stuff that you’re going to use.
MC: Did the fact that it was animated change how you approached the script?
JO: I never thought of it as an animated feature. When I think of an animated feature, I think of the wonderful films of Pixar, which happen in a very exaggerated universe. The characters have bigger eyes than they would in real life.
We always set out to make the film we made. I don’t know how we would get people in owl costumes or train birds. It was always making as real a movie as possible.
One of the things I really liked was having a live action director (Zach Snyder, who) would give the movie a 3D feel – and I don’t mean 3D with the glasses. I mean where he put the camera in the screen. He would make a tracking shot; he would make a wide shot. He would do things an animation director wouldn’t do because an animated director doesn’t think of that.
We started making this movie almost 4 years ago way before Avatar came out. This idea was an incredibly different idea of photo real animation. We talked a while how we could take advantage of a fact that we could make this animated owl do things that we couldn’t with trained owls. How do you make owls have had to hand combat in the air? You can’t.