Steven Spielberg is sitting on a dais for a press conference with some of his creative collaborators from “Ready Player One,” the long in the works big screen adaption of Ernest Cline’s best selling novel. The movie, which earned a euphoric response at its SXSW premiere, centers on Wade (Tye Sheridan), a teenager from 2045 who spends most of his time in the OASIS, a virtual reality world where players spend most of their day escaping the real world while also attempting to win “Anorak’s Quest,” a contest that will give the winner control of the entire realm. Since anything you can imagine is possible in the OASIS Cline and Spielberg have peppered the world with hundreds of pop culture references from the 80’s onward, a number of which have been revealed in the film’s promotional materials. There is one, however, that is a huge secret and the fact someone asks about it early on during the media event makes the almost always upbeat Oscar winner slightly terse.
“Oh, great we are just gonna give that away [already]? I don’t want to talk too much about it,” Spielberg says. “I just want to honor the kind of some of the Easter eggs that we would we’d like to keep hidden in the high grass. That’s a post release question I’d love to answer.”
Steven Spielberg returns to pure pop escapism with “Ready Player One” [Review]
Needless to say, the attempts to keep the surprise a real secret from moviegoers are admirable. And it will pose a ton of questions when Spielberg is willing to talk about it. As for why the 71-year-old filmmaker decided to tackle one of the most difficult films of his career, his answer was quite obvious.
“I think anybody who read the book that was connected at all to the industry would have loved to make this into a movie,” Spielberg say. “The book had seven movies in it. Maybe 12. It was just a matter of trying to figure out how to tell a story about this competition, both of these worlds and to make it both a sort of an express train racing toward the third act and, at the same time, make it a little cautionary tale of leaving us a choice. Where do we want to exist? In reality? Or, do we want exist in an escapist universe” Those themes were so profound to me and when I read the book that theme is so consistent, but there are so many places we could have taken the book.”
Production began three years ago and filming commenced in July 2016. It was an extremely long post production for the prolific director, but he calls it his “great escape movie.”
“This was a film for me that fulfilled all my fantasied of the places I go in my imagination when I get out of town,” Spielberg says. “So, I got to live this for three years. I got to actually escape into the imagination of Ernest Cline and Zack Penn for three years, but I came back to earth a couple of times. I made ‘Bridges of Spies’ and ‘The Post’ while I was making ‘Ready Player One’ so I got that whiplash effect of going from social reality to total escapist entertainment. I’m feeling it. It’s a great felling but it also makes my wife and kids crazy because you don’t know who dad is gonna be when he comes home.”
He also credits a “passionate and amazing cast” for fueling his enthusiasm.
“I think their combined ages all together they are all younger than me,” Spielberg says laughing. “I kind of fed off that energy. I’d come to work in the morning and Olivia [Cooke] would be saying, ‘What are we going to do now? I can’t wait.’ And Lena [Waithe] would say, ‘Hey, throw anything at me. I’m ready for it.’ And every cast member, except for Ben Mendehlson who was a complete screw up.”
As the assembled press laugh, Spielberg continues, “Ernie gave us a playground to basically be kids again and we did. Even though I was working with really young actors in their early 20’s if that, except for Ben who’s way over. That’s where the energy came from. We made the movie in an abstract set. The only way the cast had a chance to understand where they were [was] we all had virtual reality Oculus goggles. Inside the goggles was a complete build of the set you saw in the movie, but when you took the goggles off it was a big, white space. It was a 4,000 foot empty space called a volume. When you put the goggles on it was H’s basement or H’s workshop. So the actors had to chance to say, ‘If I walk over there, there’s the door or there’s the DJ.’ It was really a out of body experience to make this movie. It’s really hard to express what that was like.”
Spielberg wasn’t willing to go into all the details of how imagery rights from everything from Hello Kitty to “Chucky” to “Battlestar Galactica” were secured, but he does say producer Kristie Macosko Krieger was key in making it happen. He notes, “Kristie spent three years with all the Warner Bros. legal people and we couldn’t get all of them. We couldn’t get any ‘Star Wars’ rights. It took three years. Weekly phone calls.”
Perhaps looking to zing Spielberg back, Mendehson cracks, “You could have called me on that, Steve. I have access to the Death Star.”
[Cue a hearty laugh from everyone in the room.]
Nostalgia is an important aspect of Spielberg’s life. He discussed how every year he has a piece edited of all the videos he’s taken of his family the previous 12 months. That nostalgia is a big part of “Ready Player One,” but he’s learned a lesson about trying to revisit your past too intimately.
“When ‘E.T.’ was re-released I digitized five shots where E.T went from begging a puppet to a digital puppet. And I also replaced the gun when the FBI runs up on the vans now they have walkie talkies,” Spielberg recalls noting he got in “trouble” for it. “So, there is a really bad version of ‘E.T.’ where I took all my cues from ‘Star Wars’ and all the digital enhancements of ‘A New Hope’ that George [Lucas] put in and I went ahead because the marketing of Universal thought we needed something for an audience to come see the movie. So, I did a few touch ups and in those days social media wasn’t as profound as it is today but what was just beginning erupted in a loud negative voice about ‘How could you ruin our childhood film by taking the guns away and putting walkie talkies in their hands,’ among other things. So, I learned a big lesson. That’s the last time I ever decided to mess with the past. I’ll never go back and make a change to a movie I made and have control over.”
“Ready Player One” opens nationwide on Thursday, March 29.
