‘A long and difficult process:’ ‘Ready Player One’ author Ernest Cline on turning his sci-fi bestseller into a movie

DUBAI: Ernest Cline never really thought that his 2011 sci-fi novel, “Ready Player One,” could be turned into a movie.
The book, set in 2045, tells the story of Wade Watts, a boy who — like the majority of the population — spends most of his time inside a virtual reality called the OASIS, built by a man obsessed with the 1980s. Much of the novel involves Wade acting out “Dungeons and Dragons” or playing arcade games— not necessarily the stuff of big-budget cinema.
Seven years after its release, though, the book — which turned into a global pop-culture phenomenon — has been adapted for the big screen by legendary director Steven Spielberg. How did this happen?
“It was a long and difficult process,” Cline admitted to Arab News.
“When I started writing my drafts of the screenplay, it was before the book was even published. That was even more difficult because it was not a bestseller yet and I didn’t have as much leverage to keep things the same. I could see that there would need to be major changes, because the whole time that I was writing the novel I assumed it could never be a movie, because of all the pop-culture references, and the way that I wanted to weave them into the story and mash them up and pay tribute to it in this virtual world,” Cline said.
“There’s a lot of things that would work in the book but would not work in the movie. Before (co-writer) Zak Penn or Steven Spielberg came on board, I was making changes to the story myself in an attempt to make the set pieces more cinematic, but in a way that still paid tribute to my novel.”
Once the writing of the film became a team effort, things really started to click, according to Cline.
“When Zak came on board he was a huge help and a great collaborator, and brought fresh eyes to the story to help restructure it, to help it move better, and to tell it in a much-abbreviated fashion.
“Zak and I had become friends before we started working on the script. We had already bonded over our shared love of movies and video games, and so it was like getting to work with one of my friends to develop the story,” he continued.
“Once Steven came on board, that was just the best collaborative experience I’ve ever had. I got to work with one of my friends and one of my heroes to reimagine my story. We all worked on it together, and every change we made I got to help make. I feel good about those changes. Now having seen the finished film I wouldn’t change anything or question any of the choices that Steven made.”
The director said he immediately fell in love with the book.
“They sent me the book, as well as the script, which I read first. I became completely enthralled with the idea of this juxtaposition of two worlds. Then I read the book and it really spun me out because it was so deep and so layered. It was esoteric; it was scary; it was accessible... I was hooked!” Spielberg said.
“It’s a huge, sprawling adventure that intercuts between two completely different worlds,” he continued. “I think Ernest Cline is a visionary who wrote of a future that’s actually not so far away from where we’re heading with the evolution of virtual reality.”
While much changed from Cline’s novel, Spielberg might have been the one most loyal to the book itself.
“Steven was such a huge fan of my book and brought a paperback copy filled with Post-it notes and highlighted passages that he carried around on set, and would refer to, and have the costume department and the production designer referring to my novel. Things that were in my book that were never in any draft of the script ended up making it into the film because he had everyone using my novel as a reference,” said Cline.
“He’s such an amazing collaborator and is so respectful to creators as a creator himself. He also wants to help you reimagine your story and bring it to the big screen. He brought his amazing storytelling sensibility and his unique visual style to my story, which is a perfect marriage. He’s one of the people that inspired me to become a storyteller in the first place. Themes and storytelling tricks that I learned from him were already woven into ‘Ready Player One.’ It was the perfect marriage of source material and director.”
While “Armada,” Cline’s second novel, was not the hit that “Ready Player One” was, Cline is hard at work on “Ready Player Two,” a direct sequel. The filmmaking process has greatly affected how he’s approaching the second book in the series, and beyond.
“I worked hard to map out the sequels and finish a rough first draft of my sequel before I saw this film completed, even though, having worked on the script and been on the set, I knew what the sequel was. I wanted to write a sequel novel that would serve as a sequel for my book, but also serve as the basis for a potential movie sequel,” Cline explained.
“I felt like I learned to start with some more cinematic set pieces that wouldn’t get cut. Now I know there’s a good chance this book could be a movie — whereas the first book I assume could never be a movie — I think, ‘How could this translate to the big screen?’ With ‘Ready Player One,’ I did not,” he continued. “I still think there are things I will do in the sequel novel that will probably not translate to the big screen because novels and movies are two different media with different strengths and weaknesses, so I approach the blank page for a novel very differently, with a different set of tools.”