For screenwriter Zak Penn, working with Steven Spielberg on the impressive adaptation of Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One” was clearly heaven. During our conversation regarding the expected blockbuster you can hear the enthusiasm in his voice. Penn has contributed to popular projects in the past. He’s credited in different capacities on “X2” and “The Avengers,” but this is clearly something special to him.
“Ready Player One” is set in the year 2045 and follows Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) as he explores the OASIS, a virtual reality world that has grabbed most of the world’s attention. As his avatar Parzival, Wade is on the hunt to win “Anorak’s Quest,” the contest one of the creators of OASIS, James Halliday (Mark Rylance), implemented upon his passing. Find the three keys and you’ll have control of OASIS and, more importantly, its valuable stock worth $500 billion (basically, you’ll get rich quick). Attempting to win the game on a corporate level is OASIS’ competitor, Innovative Online Industries (IOI), and it’s CEO Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn). Sorrento is willing to do whatever is necessary both in the virtual and real world to make it happen, even if lives are at stake.
Like Cline’s novel, the film features hundreds of pop culture references from the worlds of film, television, video games and toys that mostly appear in the OASIS. Spielberg and his producing partners were able to secure almost everything they asked for, but there were some high profile requests that were turned down. The pros and cons of that legal endeavor became a focal part in our conversation.
Please note: There are some minor spoilers ahead.
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Gregory Ellwood: How many years did you work on this particular screenplay?
Zak Penn: Well, I’ve been working on this movie for…I think this has been four years. I got hired four years ago. I mean, we stopped working on the screenplay about eight months ago I guess, but it’s been a long time.
Can you think of how many revisions you’ve actually done on this one?
Oh my God. I mean if you look at the folder I have we were in like third magenta or something last time. There were so many drafts. You know Steven really works hard on his scripts and we were constantly revising and coming up with new things and tightening and expanding. It really was an amazing experience. [With] Steven you send him pages and you start hearing back from him 45 minutes later. You know what I mean? Like, he’s that fast. It was the right kind of rewriting though. It was honing and fixing and not panicked. And a lot of it was in pre-production.
You had crafted a completed script and a whole sort of treatment before Steven came on board, right?
Yeah, I wrote a draft of the script that they then sent to Steven.
What was the biggest change to the script after Steven signed on?
I would say mostly that he accelerated the timeframe in the movie. I mean I had done the same thing. I has set it over the course of maybe a month rather than what it is in the book. Steven said, “Mo, we’re going to make it even tighter,” which necessitated a number of changes because he wanted it to be over the course of a number of days or a week. Weirdly that caused a ripple effect with a lot of different things. Other than that a lot of the big changes from the book had already been made, it was more that…Well, actually, here’s another thing that he did. Steven had this idea that he wanted to intercut the real world and the OASIS far more than we had seen in a movie like this before, for a variety of reasons. That really dictated a lot of the writing because it became a lot more intricate. A lot of that is due to Steven.
I’m assuming the scene where Parzival [ Sheridan] appears in a hologram in front of Sorrento…
That’s a good one. That was Steven. That was all him.
Was there anything in the book you wanted to put into the movie that once you guys made these changes it was simply too hard to do?
Honestly, some of the things that were in the book just couldn’t go into the movie and so I wasn’t trying to get them in because it would have required totally changing the structure of the movie which we had finally arrived at. There was a couple licensing things that fans wanted, but honestly I wasn’t that sad that we didn’t get Ultra Man. Other people might be, but I’m not. For the most part, no, not really.