Asimov Foundation trilogy in 3D?
- 26 January 2010
- John Howell
The last we heard about Roland Emmerich’s Foundation trilogy adaptation was that Oscar nominated writer Robert Rodat, the screenwriter of Saving Private Ryan and The Patriot, had been hired to write a screenplay. Now it appears that Emmerich is toying with the idea of adding 3D to the mix.
Emmerich recently spoke to ScifiNow and revealed that Sony Pictures, the studio behind the adaptations, wants the first Foundation film out as soon as possible.
“It’s a very big and ambitious project,” he said. “I actually wanted to wait for Avatar, to see if the (3D) technology is already advanced enough.”
Presumably if he likes the 3D in Avatar, he'll create the Foundation movies in 3D too.
Emmerich is also excited to see what director Ridley Scott is doing with 3D in his upcoming adaptation of Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, especially if Scott can produce better 3D than what he has experienced so far. "It’s not quite there yet," Emmerich said about 3D, "it’s always looked too bland, it looks too far (in perspective), there’s no atmosphere, and I know that Ridley will be more innovative when it comes to the look of the film than James Cameron will be, because he’s more into camera angles, and he’ll know how to use the 3D effect”.
He also admitted that he is “not a big fan of 3D”, but knows that he’ll have to do a 3D film someday because the studio will ask for it.
Since the ScifiNow article, Avatar has been released (which you probably know!), and I’ve just heard that it’s now the highest grossing film of all time, beating Cameron’s own Titanic for the top spot, so perhaps now Emmerich will jump onboard the 3D bandwagon? If he liked the look of Avatar of course. Certainly studios seem to be hypnotised by the possibilities of the massive profits 3D films can extract from a willing film going public. The recent Robocop remake dispute between MGM and Darren Aronofsky is a case in point.
Whether Emmerich will go 3D or not, however, appears to be the least of his worries, as he and screen writer Rodat have been wrestling with how to transform Asimov’s epic science fiction tale that spans 15 novels and 1,000 years into a set of three feature films.
“I’m waiting every day for my script to arrive,” he said. “I worked very intensely with Rob Rodat… and he had the best take on it. He read all the books four or five times, he knew every character, and he had a really good idea of how to solve it. Foundation is difficult, because Asimov wrote them as short stories for magazines like Amazing Stories, and because of that, only in the second or third book he started to realise that he’s writing a science fiction epic, so it’s very, very hard. But we’ve figured out a way to write this movie.”
I’m not too concerned if they don’t go 3D for Foundation, but I hope and pray they manage to create a reasonable screenplay. Asimov's works are some of the most outstanding science fiction novels of all time. Perhaps the longer we wait the more time they’ll spend on the script? Here’s hoping.
Next up for Roland Emmerich (before Foundation) is a pet project of his about the life of William Shakespeare called Anonymous.
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