Director of Forthcoming John Carter of Mars Film Read the Book as a Youth

For Wall-E Director, Art Mixes Well with Commerce
Reuters, November 18, 2008
By Bob Tourtellotte

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) -- If there ever was a person meant to make a movie about a U.S. Civil War soldier from the Confederate States of America stranded on the planet Mars, it just may be Andrew Stanton, director of animated hit "Wall-E."

Why?

A soldier of the confederacy was a "rebel" in the 1860s when the United States fought its war between the states, and Stanton also comes from a pack of rebels -- the filmmakers at Disney-Pixar -- whose movies like "Wall-E" have time and again defied conventional Hollywood wisdom and become smash hits. ...

"To me it seems bass ackwards when you're asking yourself, 'Okay, what has the rest of the world accepted and what will they accept next?' That just seems weird. That's like looking at (movies) like a businessman," Stanton said about the way he and the filmmakers at Disney-Pixar approach story ideas. ...

As for that confederate soldier story, "John Carter of Mars" is Stanton's next animated feature project. It is based on a story written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, best known for his "Tarzan" books.

Stanton said he read "John Carter" as a boy and has been in love with it ever since. It is based on a simple idea, he said: "an ordinary person in an extraordinary world."

But audiences wanting to go there will have to wait several years before the movie hits theaters. But when it does, the betting is that like "Wall-E", it, too, will be a hit.

Read the entire article from Reuters.