After debuting the first trailer for Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation of Ready Player One, a few more people from the film’s creative team joined Spielberg and Ernest Cline on stage. Taken from the Comic Book Resource live blog, co-screenwriter Zak Penn has this to say about the movie:
“This was definitely the most complex movie I’ve ever worked on. There’s so much material. There’s so much stuff in the book you can use. To be honest with you, I thought, ‘Well, this will never happen, we’ll never be able to make this movie, because we need like, Steven Spielberg to direct it.’ That made everything a lot easier.”
Penn has writing credits for The Avengers, X-Men 2, X-Men The Last Stand, and Behind Enemy Lines so he has seen quite a bit across the film industry. The OASIS, Ready Player One’s virtual world, is riddled with pop culture items which is likely what Penn is referring to with “so much stuff in the book you can use”.
The book’s writer, Ernest Cline, echoed a similar sentiment when interviewing with Variety before the panel. “I knew none of this stuff could be cleared,” Cline said of the many pop culture references. “Which is what’s crazy about Steven Spielberg becoming the director. I don’t think anybody else could have gotten all the pop culture items that we got cleared to be in the movie. A few of them, including Back to the Future’s Delorean. can be seen in the film’s trailer.
