Mar 23, 2009 07:30 AM
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Even as his current movie tops the weekend box office, director Alex Proyas is talking about his next project, a big-screen version of SF classic novel series, The Tripods... including which character gets Starbucked.
Proyas told Digital Spy that the script for the first movie (adapting The White Mountains, the first novel in John Christopher's trilogy) is currently being written by himself and Knowing writer Stuart Hazeldine, both big fans of the books (and the 1980s BBC TV adaptation), but that they're not going to be 100% faithful to what's on the page:
There are some additions to the books that we've made. For example, there is a kind of religious cult that revolves around the Tripods. They have priests in every village and their place of worship is a church with a triangle on its peak, because that's the symbol of the Tripods. So there are a few surreal oddities at first, but until you see the first Tripod and the first capping - very much as it was in the TV series - you don't really know where you are. You're in some weird mythical place and then suddenly you realise you're in a science fiction hybrid and throughout he course of the story you realise it's set in the future and they took over the Earth at some point and subjugated humanity... [Also,] we've actually changed Beanpole [one of the novels' three male leads] to a girl. That was a pretty significant change, because I really just didn't get the notion that there'd be these three boys travelling around the countryside and they just really wanted to have a girl in the mix. Eloise is still there, the red tower is still there, all the beats from the book are still there, but I hope we've added a layer of character development that the books don't In all honesty, as big a fan as I am, the characters are pretty sketchy in the books. So we've tried to give them a level of depth that will hopefully sustain three movies.
According to the director, although he hopes to make adapt all three original novels, the first movie will be produced as a stand-alone story in case it's not successful enough for a sequel:
Well I can't promise to make all three because it's really about the first one! But 'The White Mountains' holds up really, really well as a single story and we've made the script obviously so that it works as a single story. But what I can guarantee is that if I get to make two, then I will absolutely make three. It's just getting to number two, because you just never know.
As someone who loved the TV series and was distraught when they cancelled it without any resolution, I'm keeping fingers crossed that this comes to pass.
The Tripods Are Back [Digital Spy]
Send an email to Graeme McMillan, the author of this post, at graeme@io9.com.
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