Author of Ready Player One a visionary: Spielberg

THREE-TIME ACADEMY AWARD winner Steven Spielberg says author Ernest Cline is a visionary. Spielberg is happy that he has brought Cline’s vision for the future as narrated in the author’s book Ready Player One on the big screen with his sci-fi action adventure film of the same name.

“Ready Player One is a huge, sprawling adventure that intercuts between two completely different worlds. 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,” Spielberg said in a statement.

“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,” he added.

The Warner Bros Pictures project takes its audiences on journey to a future where the population spends most of its time in an interconnected virtual space called OASIS.

Set in 2045, Ready Player One centres on a quest for a digital Easter Egg left behind by James Halliday, the creator of virtual reality world OASIS. When he dies, he releases a video challenging its users to find his egg, which will give the finder his fortune.

Spielberg says when he read the book, 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! Every book has to go through a process of adaptation when it goes from a literary work to a cinematic one. I think we ended up with just the right elements to tell a truly wonderful story,” he added.

Ready Player

One features Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, T.J. Miller, Simon Pegg and Oscar winner Mark Rylance.

The book was esoteric; it was scary; it was accessible... I was hooked!”

Steven Spielberg