Walden Media and Fox had two special retro Pullman cars set up chock full of gear and footage from the upcoming film City Of Ember, and packed some lucky press sardines inside to get a peek on the way down to Comic-Con. While the Amtrak train I took wasn’t quite as cool, I was able to catch up with director Gil Kenan and talk to him about the movie, his passion for sci-fi “without laser beams”, and what he’s added to the source material to aesthetically flesh out the novel’s “steampunk” world.
Gil Kenan: So, yeah. Comic-Con is crazy…
Spout: Comic-Con is crazier every year. Have you been before?
No, this is my first one.
This is like 10, I think, for me. (Yes, cue the violin strings…)
It is? Wow!
It didn’t start like this. And now it’s just insane.
With all these people with ear buds and security detail…
Yeah. They’re like the Comic-Con CIA…
It is a little silly, actually. But it was really great to see all the fans on the way in.
How was the train that you guys set up?
Amazing. It’s a shame you weren’t on it.
I know, there were only limited seats on it…
Oh, right. Well, we got two train cars from the golden age of rail travel, like Pullman cars. One of them was a lounge car, and then the other one we converted into a mobile screening room, and I showed 20 minutes of film, and it was actually really cool. I loved it.
Now, when did you get involved with the film? I’m a longtime fan of the Ember series.
I got involved kind of on the ground floor. I got out of UCLA film school, and basically got kind of discovered based on my thesis film.
The Lark film?
Yeah. Yeah. And then just started making the rounds. I was like totally green, totally “Aw, shucks.” And I got sent around, and one of my first meetings was at Tom Hanks’s company, at Playtone. And I sat down, and the whole thing was such a whirlwind that I didn’t even have a script, like a lot of people do. I just knew what kind of movies I wanted to make.
Right.
And I sat down, and I gave this kind of vague description [laughs] of a movie. “It’s like a science fiction film without laser beams, without intergalactic travel.” It takes place in a controlled environment where the place was a character in the story.
Okay.
And the people in the room sort of looked at each other and said, “You know, we just got this manuscript in for an unpublished novel. We think you should read it.” So I went home that night and pitched them like a three hour version of the movie. [laughs] And that’s how I began my journey
That’s awesome. Now, have you worked with Jeanne DuPrau, the author of the book?
Well, we’ve kept in touch. When I read the book, I had a great experience reading it the first time. It was like, everyone always says that they kind of see a movie in their head when they read a book, but I had like opening titles and everything. [laughs] It was a full experience.
And I learned, later on, that the way that movie played in my head was really close to what I’m putting into theaters in October, but it’s taken some steps away from the novel, in ways that are really necessary. It’s sort of moving away from a kind of text-based puzzle to something that is really cinematic, and it kind of becomes a visual puzzle.
Right.
And to me, it was all part of making the city a character in the story. I loved the kind of core metaphor of a city with a beating heart as a generator. To me, that was something I could really sink my teeth into. So I built on that.
Right. Now, are you guys leaving it open-ended? Because there’s more books in the series. There are two more books, right, in the series?
Yeah. Yeah. That’s right. The film stays purely within the world of “Ember.” So I didn’t bring anything in from the other books.
Right.
But the ending is satisfying, as a standalone, and also could leave the door open.
As a possibility.
Right.
I mean, like you said, you graduated not too long ago, and you’ve already worked with Zemeckis, Spielberg, and Tom Hanks.
Right.
Where do you go from there? [laughs]
[laughs] I’m screwed. Yeah, yeah. It’s all downhill from here. No. I can’t talk yet about it, because there are things that are still being worked out, but the stuff that I’m working on next is a pure, original concept.
OK.
And I still can’t believe I get to make movies. So I’m sort of still kind of coasting on this high that I’m in, that I got this break, and I’m going to keep doing it until I’m not allowed to anymore. [laughs]
That’s always a good plan.
Gil: [laughs]
What was the hardest part of adapting this for the screen, like visually?
Well, like I said, the easiest part was the city, because I saw that the first time I read the book. But the hardest thing was creating a sort of complex, interwoven puzzle into the design of the city itself. And that was a real challenge. It created set pieces. It created whole scenes that, in the novel, are maybe two lines of text, here take up real, kind of bigscreen adventure moments. It was a challenge, but it was a very enjoyable challenge.
Yeah. Where did you guys shoot it? In Hollywood?
No. We actually shot it halfway across the world. We were in Belfast.
Oh, in the Titanic area.
In Northern Ireland, that’s right.
Now, the book is set in a world far in our future. So, it’s kind of built on top of our world, but years of where…
That’s right.
Things from our world have become almost strange artifacts to the people of Ember. You guys have kept that in?
Yeah, of course. I mean, we’ve got some great, old contraptions that have sort of been deconstructed and given a new lease on life. I’ve worked in things that weren’t really in the book but that are natural extensions of it. Like, for instance, Lina, to put her sister Poppy to sleep at night, plays a pedal-driven answering machine that’s almost like a phonograph. The pedals power a set of pulleys that run the old answering tape around, and you can listen to messages from your childhood. Things like that that I feel like, if Jeanne had written a screenplay, she would’ve worked in. They felt to me like organic extensions of the coolness of this world.
Now, this is a Playtone production. How involved is Tom Hanks in something like this? Because he has so many things going on at once.
Tom was really involved in the development of the thing. He really loved the novel. He worked with me to create the screenplay and et cetera. So he was really hands on in terms of getting this off the ground. And in terms of getting me the green light, getting me to make this film, he was instrumental.
Marketing-wise, like are they planning City of Ember action figures and toys and things like that? Have they talked about that?
I don’t know. We’ll have to ask them. [laughs] I’m sort of focused on making the movie and getting it out. I think they’ve got some crafty things up their sleeves. I’m just not sure what they are.
The whole City of Ember world is set in that sort of steampunk type of era, which I guess is why they did the train. So who did you use for set design and art direction?
Well, I hired a really brilliant designer, named Martin Laing, whose portfolio just knocked my socks off. He had come from the [James] Cameron camp. He was an art director for many of Cameron’s films, and Ember is his first production design credit, but I knew he was someone who could take my vision of what this city would look like and put it onscreen. And he had a lot of really ingenious ideas that really informed the look of this thing.
City of Ember stars Bill Murray, Tom Robbins and Saorsie Ronan. It’s scheduled to come out in theaters on October 10.
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