Here is an article from the Washinton Post about the upcoming film version of His Dark Materials:
____________________________________________________ 'Dark Materials,' Bright Promise Bored of 'The Rings'? Hollywood Bets Not -- And It's Got Another Lush Literary Fantasy to Share By Bob Thompson Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, December 14, 2003; Page N01
Now that "The Lord of the Rings" has proven it can be done, now that we know that a three-part, nine-hour plunge into a multilayered fantasy world dreamed up by a onetime Oxford academic can become not just box office manna but also an International Cultural Happening -- and now that this Happening is poised to culminate with New Line Cinema's release, this Wednesday, of "Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" -- it's time to ask the inevitable question: When's the next epic three-part fantasy dreamed up by a onetime Oxford academic going to hit the big screen?
The answer: maybe in 2005, more likely in 2006.
The heir apparent is Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy. It's not the catchiest title, perhaps -- most readers are more familiar with the books' individual titles, especially "The Golden Compass" -- but it shows how high the author has set his sights: He borrowed it from Milton's "Paradise Lost." And although Pullman fans will tell you that their man's work is entirely original and un-Tolkienesque, one of the things he clearly shares with the creator of Middle-earth is ambition.
Executives at New Line and Scholastic Entertainment, who joined forces last year on the Pullman project, have plenty of ambition, too, though they're careful to play down the "Rings" comparison.
"I want to make it clear that we're not expecting the first movie to gross $860 million worldwide," says Mark Ordesky, executive vice president and chief operating officer of New Line Productions, who watched in astonishment as his company's first Tolkien adaptation did just that. To tag "His Dark Materials" as "Lord of the Rings" revisited would be a disservice to Pullman, he says. It's the kind of thing only some "Hollywood huckster" would do.
But he does think the project has potential, right?
"It has huge potential," Ordesky says.
As for Pullman, he is keeping his distance from the film version of his work. He turned down an offer to write the screenplay -- the job went to celebrated playwright Tom Stoppard -- because after spending seven years writing the 1,300-page trilogy, "the last thing I want to do is take it apart and put it together again," he says. Still, he's happy to talk to the adapters when they seek his advice, and he was pleased to hear that the New Line people were involved. He's not much of a Tolkien fan, but he admired what they did with the first "Rings" film.
Besides -- and here a hint of laughter slips into his voice -- "they're used to telling stories in three parts."
Philip Pullman makes his home a couple of miles outside Oxford, where he taught in a middle school and then in a teacher-training college for many years. He moved out of the city after grinning fans began showing up at his door with stacks of books for him to sign. There are 6.5 million copies of "The Golden Compass," "The Subtle Knife" and "The Amber Spyglass" in print, not counting those translated into 37 foreign languages. Earlier this year, the trilogy was broadcast as a BBC radio play, and Britain's prestigious National Theatre will soon premiere a two-part, six-hour adaptation. Meanwhile, "Lyra's Oxford," a slim stocking-stuffer that serves as a tantalizing postscript to the trilogy, has been appearing on British bestseller lists.
All this because, a decade or so ago, Pullman had a vision of a 12-year-old girl overhearing some grown-up talk she wasn't meant to hear.
Lyra Belacqua -- half-wild, fearless and endlessly resourceful -- is one of the most compelling pre-adolescents in English literature. Known also as Lyra Silvertongue for her ability to spin mesmerizing falsehoods, she inhabits a world that appears to overlap with ours while being distinct in disorienting ways. She's a bit like a female version of Kipling's Anglo Indian charmer Kim, though Pullman thinks she derives in part from pen-and-ink drawings of a French girl in a story he read as a boy: "a tough-looking character wearing a big black leather jacket and a short skirt." Wherever she came from, she makes Frodo Baggins seem a dull plodder indeed.
The talk Lyra overhears among the scholars at Oxford's Jordan College, where she has been running free in the absence of her ambitious parents, involves a mysterious substance called Dust. Associated somehow with the Aurora Borealis, it is linked as well to the transition from childhood to adulthood, and the study of it appears to threaten the authority of the all-powerful established church. Before either Lyra or the reader can begin to figure all this out, however, one of her friends is kidnapped, and she finds herself headed for the Arctic, along with a band of fen-dwelling "gyptians," to rescue him and other missing children. Along the way, she learns to read a rare, truth-telling instrument called an alethiometer and acquires a new identity: a girl with a preordained mission, a child about whom "the witches have talked . . . for centuries past."
The richness of the story that Pullman created around his initial vision is, like any fully realized alternative universe, impossible to convey by simply listing characters and plot elements. One of his most striking inventions -- "the best idea I've ever had, really," he says -- is the notion that humans in Lyra's world are accompanied everywhere by "daemons," individual soul mates in animal form without whom they are not whole. At first, he wasn't sure the idea would work; if daemons came off as "talking pets," they'd only clutter up the story. Then he saw that he could use his characters' relationships with their daemons to bring psychological insights to life.
Psychology is far from the only complex or "grown-up" element Pullman layers into his tale. You don't have to probe very deeply to see that he is, among other things, reworking John Milton's epic about a cataclysmic war in Heaven while at the same time reimagining the temptation of Eve. Pullman is famously cranky about being pigeonholed as a children's author -- "His Dark Materials" has been marketed both to kids and to adults -- and it is obvious that he's not afraid to challenge younger readers. But his imagery is so vivid, his prose so clean and his storytelling so breathtakingly paced that there's no need to grapple with the Big Ideas to love his work.
All of this appeals to would-be filmmakers as well. And why not? Who wouldn't be attracted to a thrilling adventure story stocked with wonderfully drawn scenes, heart-tugging characters and a spicy stew of intellectual themes to be digested or not, as the audience desires? Especially when you throw in the cosmic rebel Lord Asriel and his lethal paramour, Mrs. Coulter. And a knife that cuts through air to reveal parallel worlds. And 12-year-old Will Parry, a male lead almost as compelling as Lyra, whom she meets in the second book. And. . . .
Just think about the visuals here . . .
An armored bear.
"If you had asked me what totally sold me on making this movie," says New Line Productions President Toby Emmerich, "it was two words: Iorek Byrnison."
Emmerich, who's on the phone from Southern California, doesn't have much time to think about "His Dark Materials" these days. He has just flown back from Wellington, New Zealand, where 100,000 people hit the streets to celebrate the world premiere of "The Return of the King," and like his colleague, Ordesky, he worries about the expectations a hasty comparison might raise. Trying to replicate the Tolkien phenomenon would be "a fool's errand," he says.
Still, he has fallen in love with Iorek, whom he calls "an insanely awesome character."
Pullman, who readily acknowledges his many borrowings, says this particular beast came straight out of his own imagination. "It was the phrase first, 'the armored bear,' " he says and then he had to make something of it. Helped along by polar lore gleaned from "Arctic Dreams," a "wonderful, wonderful" nonfiction book by Barry Lopez, he came up with the notion of great white bears with superior metal-working skills who fight in armor, like ursine knights, and of one such creature in particular, the deposed bear king Iorek Byrnison. Iorek bounds onstage halfway through "The Golden Compass" -- that's him on the cover of the best-known American edition, with Lyra on his back -- and by sheer force of personality achieves instant star billing. In the films, his creator likes to imagine, he'll have the voice of James Earl Jones.
When those films are made, they will owe their existence in no small part to Deborah Forte, the president of Scholastic Entertainment, who read "The Golden Compass" in manuscript form (it was published in the U.K. as "Northern Lights" in 1995) and promptly went after the movie rights. "I said, wherever this book is going, I want to go with it," recalls Forte, who is to produce the film project. She had a moment of wanting to make a movie right away, but after the second volume appeared, she knew she had to wait to see where the story was going. New Line sought her out after "The Amber Spyglass" won the Whitbread Book of the Year prize in 2001, and together they agreed to ask Stoppard to write an initial screenplay.
"I thought he had the most wonderful imagination," Stoppard says of his reaction to reading Pullman, which he did before agreeing to take on the adaptation. The trilogy's narrative architecture gave him some trouble, as might be expected with what he calls "a wild toboggan ride" of a story in which time is a bit elastic. But he found Pullman generous and "not at all defensive" when consulted, which made him less nervous about making the necessary changes.
Stoppard has completed a screenplay based on "The Golden Compass" -- it took three drafts, he says, and he was asked to lose some of the theoretical physics behind Pullman's concept of parallel universes, which he'd found fascinating -- and has started on a treatment of the next two books. Among other changes, he brings Will into the story at the end of the first film and he introduces a major villain, Father MacPhail, much earlier than Pullman did.
Does he have a favorite scene?
"I personally love the first time Iorek and Lyra meet," Stoppard says, explaining how the camera will draw viewers toward the conjunction of girl and bear. In his mind, it's a movie poster.
New Line's Emmerich isn't thinking posters yet, however. He says he's happy with Stoppard's work, but "I would be really shocked if a director said, 'Yup, I want to shoot this screenplay as is.' I've never seen it happen." He and Forte have done "a global list" of directors, but neither will say where the hiring process stands. They don't know yet whether "His Dark Materials" will end up as two movies or three, though Emmerich says the most likely scenario would be to shoot the first one and then, assuming it succeeds, shoot a second and third film simultaneously. As for those "Lord of the Rings" comparisons, he offers one more thought that might be a bit alarming to the Pullman faithful.
Unlike Tolkien's trilogy, Emmerich points out, Pullman's books haven't been around long enough to become classics, and his fan base isn't so big that New Line has to worry about offending it. That gives us "much more license to turn them into movies," he says.
And what of the hopes and fears of the fans themselves? One Pullman Internet site at least, DarkMaterials.com, appears to have a realistic take on their situation. An entry under the heading of "Grossly Distorted Rumors" reads: "New Line Cinema deeply cares about your opinions on the director/casting/plot/ending of the movies." The sad truth: "They don't."
Not that this stops the chatter, of course. Fans play the casting game (as Mrs. Coulter, Nicole Kidman! Catherine Zeta-Jones!). They speculate about 16-year-olds playing Will and Lyra, wrecking Pullman's innocence-to-experience motif. They follow every gossipy hint in the director sweepstakes as names such as Sam Mendes and Brett Ratner get tossed around.
Brett Ratner?
"Oh my God," wrote a 29-year-old blogger named Mimi Nguyen in response to this one. "Brett Ratner is the director of 'Rush Hour,' people. The director of 'Rush Hour' cannot possibly begin to comprehend what is necessary for 'His Dark Materials' to transition to the screen."
Nguyen is a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. She admires Pullman for many reasons, not least because, instead of condemning Eve as a sinner, he turns her into "the 'mother' of consciousness, creativity and intellectual possibility." She worries that Hollywood will strip away the books' dark edges, eliminate their harsh critique of organized religion and turn a morally complex universe into "adventure films for kids."
Pullman worries some, too. Changing Lyra's age would be a big mistake, he agrees, and he confesses to wondering how the filmmakers will deal with his religious themes. He's also concerned that Lyra's relationships might be sentimentalized: "There's a ferocity there that's absolutely vital," he says.
Still, he doesn't worry all that much. He thinks he may have something as big or bigger than "His Dark Materials" still to write, and getting too engaged with the film would be a distraction. If the script were "a coarse and unsubtle piece of work," he'd be alarmed, but that won't happen with Stoppard on the case. Also problematic would be a director who cared only about "shoot-'em-up action movies." But Pullman has faith, he says, that New Line and Scholastic will "do the right thing."
What scenes, then, does he look forward to seeing on film?
Pullman cites a couple of favorites from "The Amber Spyglass"; they're best left unmentioned, for fear of spoiling the ending. Then the creator of Iorek Byrnison throws out one more.
"I also really like," he says, "the meeting between Will and the armored bear."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company ******************************************************
Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell <i></i>
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