The Andrew Stanton Interview File

5 comments

• Thanks Jake, I’ve got that. Just didn’t list it because these are just interviews.

• I don’t see the New Yorker article about Stanton listed there. I can e-mail you a copy if you need it.

• Thanks, Paladin — thats a good quote which is a little different from some of the others ones on the same subject…….

  Sending you an email with the other info…..

• Dotar-

  What awesome timing on your request.

  I am a charter member of an international space exploration advocacy group founded by Carl Sagan in 1980 called The Planetary Society. Our organization funds research (helped to keep SETI afloat), lobbies Congress and the President for space science, works with NASA, ESA, JAXA – all the various national space agencies – is the only private entity to have actually flown hardware on several Mars missions, including the last NASA Phoenix lander and Russian space agency Phobos sample return mission (unfortunately failed). Anyway, you get the idea – a very highly respected organization boarded by world-renowned scientists.

  So, I just received my latest copy of The Planetary Report – the society’s quarterly news magazine – and on the cover is an iconic Percival Lowell drawing/map of Mars overlaid on a global mosaic from the Viking 1 spacecraft, with the heading FASCINATING MARS [subtitled] Visionaries Who Inspired a Passion for Exploration.

  Inside is an interview with Andrew Stanton titled John Carter of Mars: Science Fiction Triggers a Love of Space, with screen capture pictures of Helium and Tars Tarkus, of a Frank Schoonover POM cover, with a sidebar about Carl Sagan’s love of ERB and another one on the Lowell/ERB/JC tie-in. It’s not a long article or very revealing, but still, to have it show up in The Planetary Report is really amazing.

  The Planetary Society is currently revamping their web design, though, so you can only get this magazine in hard copy right now. How can I get you a copy? I could get one mailed to you if I had your address (I deleted your email address, too), or if you want to call them yourself, I can give you their phone number. Their headquarters is in Pasadena.

  Some sample pulled quotes from Stanton: I fell into awareness of the book when I was 11… It might as well have been written in 1976, when I read it. I didn’t take it as science fiction – the way people interpret that term – but as a romantic adventure in undiscovered country. That was the biggest attraction to me and made me continue from one book to the next to find out more about another city, another culture, another creature, another character, another society on these new continents that existed on Mars. I tried to keep the romantic nature that was in the books, with parallel civilizations evolving on different planets that weren’t connected to each other.. I set the movie on turn-of –the-century Mars…. I felt I had complete license to stick with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ vision and make it as believable as possible…It’s my hope – and this is as a fan, not the film-maker – that this movie will do well enough that the whole series eventually will be made. I love the idea of seeing how much knowledge that we’ve gleaned from the actual Mars…. It is fun to look on my laptop…and get the elevations, the names of the locations, and I can apply all the Barsoomian titles and names and places that Edgar Rice Burroughs made up and try to align them…

• Here’s one, Michael:

  http://www.hdvideopro.com/display/features/martian-chronicles.html