Austin’s Ernest Cline talks seeing his debut novel on-screen
From the screenwriting to the filming to the world premiere at the Paramount Theatre during South by Southwest, it would be difficult for Austin author Ernest Cline to be happier with Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of his 2011 novel, “Ready Player One.”
“What happened to me is what should happen to every novelist whose book is made into a movie,” Cline says from Los Angeles, where he attended the movie’s Hollywood premiere. He was just in London for a premiere there. It’s been quite a month.
“I had been watching it in pieces, slowly,” Cline says, “so it was a gradual process of freaking out and getting my bearings, like being a frog in water that was being slowly heated up.”
Cline says the first time he watched the finished picture, he immediately had to watch it a second time. “I was kind of overwhelmed with emotion,” he says
That being said, there is nothing like that screening at the Paramount. “I don’t feel like I saw it for real until I saw it in Austin, where I have lived since the mid’90s, at South by Southwest with an audience,” Cline says. “That was the moment I had been waiting for.”
Many readers, young and old, are familiar with Cline’s book “Ready Player One” — about a Willy Wonka-ish figure at the heart of a massive virtual reality creation called the OASIS in 2045, and the heroes who unlock the ’80s-pop-culture-fueled mystery therein. The book was and is a smash hit, a New York Times best-seller translated into more than 20 languages.
But what folks might not know is that Cline sold the book and movie rights within 48 hours of each other. The screenplay is ultimately credited to Cline and screenwriter Zak Penn.
“I did three drafts of the screenplay and started working on them before the book was even published,” Cline says. He started
his drafts in fall 2010, after the deal was locked, before anybody knew that the book was going to be a hit.
“I couldn’t point to it being a best-seller here or internationally, so I don’t think folks were as invested in keeping the story of the book intact,” he says. As the book grew in popularity, he wasn’t quite as worried that the movie would end up looking unlike the book.
Still, Cline says he was perfectly happy to make some changes from page to screen. “You can’t really have someone stand there and play ‘PacMan’ for six hours or re-enact a D&D module. That might work on the page, but not on the screen.”
And he felt he was in good hands when Penn came on board. “He and I had already met when he was working on a documentary he directed called ‘Atari: Game Over,’ a 2014 film about that company’s rise and fall,” Cline says. “So we were already friends when he started doing his rewrites. That was great.”
Then again, once Spielberg came on board, Cline says things shifted entirely.
Spielberg “read the latest draft and the novel and became a huge fan of the novel,” Cline says. “That’s when I stopped worrying how close it would be to my book and just started getting excited. Obviously, Steven has an incredible track record adapting work for the screen.” (Think “Jaws,” “The Color Purple,” “Jurassic Park” and “Lincoln.”)
Cline also got to weigh in on all sorts of aspects of production. “I got to be consulted as an expert regarding details, which was really wonderful,” Cline says. “Whether it was building sets or costuming, folks were always referring to the book.”
Cline was especially pleased with how the challenges were changed from the book to the movie. Instead of the aforementioned “PacMan” marathon, the film version of “Ready Player One” features a dazzling car race that puts all the pieces in place.
“That opening race was fantastic,” Cline says. “There was an Easter egg and a secret way to win, and we got to keep that but also introduce everything about the OASIS all at once: You can be anything and drive any vehicle you want through these environments that don’t need to obey the laws of physics. It’s a whirlwind tour of the OASIS and captures the spirit of the challenges in the books.”
But it was the second challenge, one that involves movies, that Cline really got excited about. In the book, players have to deal with environments based on different movies such as “WarGames” and shows such as “Monty Python.” This needed to be streamlined into one set piece with a very distinctive look for the film version of “Ready Player One.”
“We tried to get ‘Blade Runner,’” Cline says. “But there was a rights issue. So we made a big list of ’80s movies with unique visual styles.” When Spielberg saw one particular name on the list, Cline says, he got very excited.
“That was so fun for me, to create that sequence,” Cline says of the movie’s extended tribute to a film that we will not name here, to avoid spoilers. “Watching Steven geek out about one of his heroes the way that this movie let me geek out about mine, and watching him get to celebrate someone’s work whom he admired, was fantastic.”
Given the technological changes over the past few years, is there anything Cline would change about his book?
“Ha! Not a word,” he says, citing the book’s success.
But he does note that the Oculus VR company started about a year after the book was released. “Those guys at that company said they hand it out to new employees and that it influenced them greatly,” Cline says. “I like to think the book maybe changed the speed at which VR has evolved. But I also think the influence of the book will be minuscule compared to the influence of this movie. It’s a 2 1/2-hour commercial for the potential of VR, its uses and pitfalls and addictive qualities.”
As for now, once the publicity for “Ready Player One” is done, Cline is going back to what he has been working on for about a year: a novel called “Ready Player Two.”