HDM Movie

[Kathy Li]

Alla: I was holding my breath there for a while, since Henson had optioned The Dark is Rising sequence and Denise DiNovi was starting development on it, but the whole thing fell through. I'm wondering how Henson's coming along with Five Children and It...

PM: Yes, they've been done, just not well... I'd actually have added Gormenghast to that list. Whoever made the BBC version completely missed what makes the books fun: the fact that Gormenghast was all Maxfield Parrishy-bright and pretty was a big sign they had no clue.

I'd love to see Discworld done by Cosgrove-Hall's stop-motion group or maybe Aardman, rather than the drawn animation. Death would be a hoot, ala Nick Park.

YW, definitely, but only if DD's conditions were met: i.e., she does the screenplay and produces. And in that situation, I'd actually prefer a tv series to a series of feature films.

Hmmm.. what about Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain? Or Garth Nix's Sabriel series? OOoo... Robin McKinley's Damar books! Or George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire?

[Ankaa]

I wanted to be Hermionie, too; I looked a lot like her (but not Emma Watson; my hair's darker) and acted like her a lot without meaning to. Except for my blatant American accent...
I think the Abhorsen trilogy would make good movies...it would be amazing to be Sabriel...

[Kathy Li]

The interesting thing with the Old Kingdom/Sabriel series is how you'd get across the significance and names of the bells/pipes and the distinction of Necromancy from Magic. That's something that works great in writing, but doesn't necessarily work that well visually. I suppose you could do FX differently, light vs. dark for the good/bad magic split. And for the bells, I suppose half of it would depend on the score composer and sound FX guy you chose. But I'm not sure how you could get around the bells without a big heaping lump of exposition.

In comparison, HDM's daemons and panzerbears are easy--what they are is explained through events.

[alla]

Originally posted by kli6:
The interesting thing with the Old Kingdom/Sabriel series is how you'd get across the significance and names of the bells/pipes and the distinction of Necromancy from Magic. That's something that works great in writing, but doesn't necessarily work that well visually. I suppose you could do FX differently, light vs. dark for the good/bad magic split. And for the bells, I suppose half of it would depend on the score composer and sound FX guy you chose. But I'm not sure how you could get around the bells without a big heaping lump of exposition.

You could do it throught a sort of prologue thingy - like how the Last Alliance of Men and Elves and Smeagol finding the ring was done in LOTR - just a sort of general explaination of how the bells came to be and maybe a young Sabriel learning about them from her father and sort of reciting them. But the problem there is those conservative readers who think Harry Potter is bad, are not going to like a movie made on a book about necromancy.

ohhh. I have been looking through my bookshelves and just thought of something. The Riddle of the Treesong, by Alison Croggon would be awesome. Or the [Bitterbynde, by Cecilia Dart-Thornton would be good too .

[Kathy Li]

That's what I meant by the great whacking lump of exposition. It's the least-elegant solution: it's kind of boring, and it takes too long, and an audience will only sit still for it for so long. It's better if you can do it through dialogue/action.

It's like that bit at the beginning of Romancing the Stone, where someone says, "It must be so terrible for your sister, losing her husband that way. Did they ever find the body?" "Just the one... piece."

And the entire backstory is right there. That's good unlumpy exposition. I just wonder how you could do the bells that way. Say, the name of each bell on its place in the bandolero, and one character explaining to another, why s/he's going to use one bell over another.

[Agent M]

http://imdb.com/title/tt0385752/board/nest/13833876
ARGH!!! NO!! The movie is gonna be DESTROYED!!! They're taking the whole anti-god and bad church thing out of the movies!! And worst of all Pullman decided that since the movie was just gonna be one horrible big.... *words that aren't allowed on this site* flop, he's seperating himself from the movies!!! This is going to be an absolute disaster....
and by the way, Diego feels the same way and he wants to be mentioned or he thinks he'll be "forgotten" lol

[Peter Murray]

*sigh*
Scroll up a bit. (Ok, back a page, then.) All those posts on IMDB are reacting to the same 8 December story mentioned above. Philip Pullman has denied that there's any truth in the story. Some of the posts I read, like the one saying he's separated himself from the movies, are just speculation.

He wrote the books, don't you trust him to mean what he says?

On a different note, I couldn't find any DD books in two bookshops I went to today (not even her Star Trek books), and the Pullman books were in a 3 for 2 sale, so I got those at last. Don't ask me when I'll get round to reading them, though .