Updates on JOHN CARTER OF MARS

From MTV Movie Blog:

"In an exclusive interview with MTV News, WALL-E writer/director Andrew Stanton dished the most details yet about the progress of his next feature, John Carter of Mars, an adaptation of a nearly hundred-year-old serialized novel about a Civil War vet mysteriously transported to the Red Planet, where he encounters all manner of alien adventures.

'It’s real,' Stanton assured us. 'We’re full bore on it right now. We’re over the hump of the writing phase, and we’re certainly far from rewrites.' Before he could even get to that point, Stanton had to solve a problem that had stymied filmmakers for eighty years: How do you turn the six separate installments of the novel into a coherent whole? 'I don’t want to be dissing it,' he said, 'but it almost had an absence of a story for a feature film because it was very episodic. In its day it was a comic book. I mean, this book was written in 1912. It was the comic book you got in the time before there was such thing as comic books. So, it was really just about the next fight, the next adventure, the next romance.'

'The key was putting a story into it and creating characters that had to grow and real basic stuff that we all know a movie needs,' he explained. Messing with a classic of the fantasy genre is always risky, but Stanton believes the passage of time is on his side. 'Fortunately it’s an old enough story,' he said. 'There isn’t such huge allegiance to it that people won’t mind that we muck with it a bit to hopefully amplify the essence of what made me interested in it as a young kid and hopefully will keep me interested in it as an .' Another vital realization, Stanton told us, was that John Carter of Mars could not be a strictly computer animated feature like past creations Finding Nemo and Monsters, Inc.

'There’s so much in it that can’t be real,' he said. 'It’s the perfect definition of a hybrid movie,' utilizing both live actors and computer-based animation [as he did on WALL-E, a first for Pixar]."

Also from MTV Movie Blog:

"From the sound of things, Disney's adaptation of the nearly hundred-year-old sci-fi series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Carter of Mars, is going to start as early as January of next year. The start had previously been pushed back from November. Pre-production continues to move steadily forward nonetheless on the hybrid live action/CGI film.

As co-star Lynn Collins told MTV's Josh Horowitz last week on the New York red carpet for The Burning Plain, she's already seen workups of fight sequences she'll have to film and, last week, some initial effects work kicked into gear. 'We're actually getting into some hair and makeup tests this week to see what the look is like,' said Collins, who plays the humanoid Martian princess Dejah Thoris. 'It's really collaborative and really creative and I'm really excited about it.'

The preliminary idea is not to bury Collins under prosthetics and heavy-duty makeup but to create a look that would not be out of place on a tropical island. 'I think they're going more like a really great tan, like the best-tan-you-can-ever-imagine type of thing,' she said. 'I've yet to find it. Maybe the makeup team will be able to.' There's no word yet how the rest of the cast will end up looking. Joining Collins in John Carter is her X-Men Origins: Wolverine co-star Taylor Kitsch as the title character, a Civil War vet inexplicably transported to the Red Planet, where he stumbles upon all manner of alien adventures.

'Taylor is so amazing,' Collins said. 'We went to Pixar and saw some of the workups of some of the fighting that we have to do. I was like, 'Oh my god, there's just no guy better for the job. He's so athletic and wonderful and such a great actor and so positive.'"

Calling her character 'a priestess of science and letters,' Collins extolled co-writer/director Andrew Stanton's (WALL-E, Finding Nemo) vision for John Carter. 'Edgar Rice Burroughs was a really smart writer, so smart that some of the stuff I can hardly wrap my head around, so that's up to Pixar to see if they can put in visually to life,' the actress said, adding, 'It's completely satirical and politically on point, I'd say.'"

I thought the movie was all Disney. Apparently not, now that Pixar is on the list.