Roberto Orci Talks Zero-Gravity Training Sequences In 'Ender's Game'

Young stars. Graphic violence. Complicated, massive battle sequences. There's a laundry list of reasons why Orson Scott Card's seminal science fiction novel Ender's Game has yet to make it to the big screen. Wolfgang Petersen tried it, and now Gavin Hood (X-Men Origins: Wolverine) is taking a crack at the herculean task along with big action/franchise screenwriters and producers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci. The pair, who wrote Star Trek, Cowboys and Aliens and the first two Transformers films, are set to produce Ender's Game from a script by Hood and Orci recently talked to io9 about how exactly they plan on visualizing the essential, and complicated, zero-gravity battle sequences. Read his quotes after the break.

io9 caught up with Orci as he was promoting Cowboys and Aliens at WonderCon. The first question was about if they will include the zero-gravity sequences and how will they shoot them:

You've got to have zero G training sequences. Are you kidding? We're talking about shooting it every way you can: using tanks, using motion capture, using amazing acrobats, using an amazing space. But you have to have it, that's part of the movie.

The i09 reporter also asked what Orci would like fans to know about their film adaptation:

The hardest part is adapting a classic novel faithfully. And I think before, people were trying to get too clever with it and change things that didn't need to be changed. Gavin Hood wrote an amazing script that is extremely faithful to the book, including the twists in it and the themes in it. And I think that will be the difference to getting it made.

If you head over to io9, you can read what Orci had to say about the books relevance today and see him answer all these questions on video.

What I take out of this tidbit is not the fact that they're going to include the zero-gravity scenes. I never thought that was in question, they're simply too visual and too important to the story. What I take out of this is a warm and fuzzy feeling knowing that Kurtzman, Orci and Hood are still discussing things and that development remains active. Ender's Game is one of my favorite books of all time and it would be a blessing to see a faithful, bad ass film adaptation.

For anyone who might not know what Ender's Game is all about, here's the succinct Amazon.com review:

Intense is the word for Ender's Game. Aliens have attacked Earth twice and almost destroyed the human species. To make sure humans win the next encounter, the world government has taken to breeding military geniuses — and then training them in the arts of war... The early training, not surprisingly, takes the form of 'games'... Ender Wiggin is a genius among geniuses; he wins all the games... He is smart enough to know that time is running out. But is he smart enough to save the planet?

Do you think this film is actually going to see the light of day?