An interview with John Carter of Mars script writer Michael Chabon

Award-winning science fiction author Michael Chabon was recently interviewed by Zack Smith over at Newsarama.com. In a wide-ranging discussion, Chabon touched upon the long-awaited Disney/Pixar film John Carter of Mars (2012), which will star actor Taylor Kitsch as John Carter, actress Lynn Collins as princess Dejah Thoris, and actor Willem Dafoe as Tars Tarkas:

I was brought in by the director, Andrew Stanton, to do a revision of the script that he wrote with Mark Andrews. Andrew and I had met a few times over the years, and he had heard I was a big fan of the ERB Mars books, and that I had written an original screenplay many years ago (The Martian Agent) that was in development for a while at Fox/ILM.

So he asked me to take a whack at it. That was a huge thrill. I was impressed by the way he and Mark had found ways to honor the source material, be true to the romance and the spirit and the wild invention, not to mention the characters' natures, while constructing a tight (yet still faithful) film narrative out of a pretty loose and rangy pulp-serial seat-of-the-pants plot. I just tried to do the things that Andrew thought the script still needed.

I wonder if Michael Chabon plans to purchase Princess of Mars (2009), The Asylum’s forthcoming low-budget, direct-to-DVD film featuring actress and former porn star Traci Lords as Martian princess Dejah Thoris and Antonio Sabàto, Jr. as Confederate Civil War veteran John Carter. The film, classified as science fiction, is scheduled to be released later this month.