The director, Bob Zemeckis, said to me, “You know, Chris, I want to film this just like the book.” Usually, that’s something that a director will say as a way of reducing the anxieties on the part of an author; or even to say it kind of metaphorically, that “this is going to be a film which is like the book” as much as a film can be.
But he meant it almost literally, which is that he wanted the quality of the film to be like a drawing not like a photograph. Because the standard for filmmaking is a moving picture a moving photograph. But he wanted to make something that looked more like a moving drawing, instead of a moving photograph. So, that’s why this has all been done digitally, and has a very complicated software that tries to reconsider the world as if it had not been created in a computer by the kind of hardcore, hard-edged digital animation, but appears as if it was a world that was created in the mind of an artist who used pastel, crayons, and watercolor and the other things that I used to make The Polar Express
The experience with Jumanji
Any artist or author who sells their rights to filmmakers unless they’re extraordinarily naïve about the process has to understand that they’ll lose control. You can’t keep control of the project, because you aren’t the captain anymore. You’re just someone who provided somebody else an idea. And their contracts fairly explicitly spell out just how much control you have, which is not much. You have influence, and even the influence you have is really contingent on the willingness of the filmmakers to hear you out.
