Actor Brendan Fraser had an advantage over every other actor trying out for the lead in the upcoming big-screen adapation of “Inkheart.” Author Cornelia Funke was inspired to create the character of Mo from an inspiration by Fraser.
“This book shows up, and it’s inscribed, “To Brendan, thank you for inspiring this character. I hope that you get a chance to read this to your kids one day..”” Frasier told SciFi Wire. “I have no idea who [Cornelia] is from a bar of soap, and I do a Google search, and there’s so much work—she’s prolific. I read the book and thought, “Wow, it’s original, for sure, and I got that it didn’t have an overt message that “Hey, kids, put down your video-game consoles, step away from the TV, and read a book” in a sort of eat-your-vegetables kind of way. She has been able to make this story compelling and keep it down to the essentials, which is about a family being united, and that’s what I got from it. All of the fantastical elements aside, that’s the thrust of it, and that’s I think what gives it its heart.”
That put the actor firmly at the top of the list when it came time to bring the novel to the big-screen, though according to director Iain Softley, the studio wanted a bigger name in the role.
“There was nobody else I could think of who would do it better, and it was such a no-brainer, really. If you’ve got the guy who inspired the role, I was delighted that he wanted to do it,” Softley told SciFi Wire.
“Inkheart”, which opens tomorrow in theaters, is a fantasy story about a girl and her father. Years ago, the father Mo stopped reading aloud from books when he accidentally brought characters from the novel, “Inkheart” to life. Three villians escaped from the book and Mo lost his wife to the pages of the story. Now Mo and his daughter are on the run, trying to avoid the evil Capricorn and his men who were set loose from the novel. Capricorn wants to either return to the pages from which he escaped or have more villains set loose on our unsuspecting world.
The story requires that characters from various novels come to life and spring off the printed page and into real life. Softley said that when he sat down to think about how to bring that effect to life on screen, one idea occured to him.
“We talked about what kind of effects would occur when guys come out of the book, and I just had the idea that it’s like something out of the corner of my eye—did I miss that person arrive, or have they been there all along?” he said. “I thought of something that had some connection with the way people might experience everyday life, so that it wasn’t a totally fantastical environment with stars appearing or something.”
Softley said the magical world interacting with our world was one of the elements that attracted him to “Inkheart.”
“I just think the idea of this magical environment that existed in present day—the idea that you can go to these places and you can image medieval brigands,” he said. “I think that’s what’s fun about going to those places, and that’s what’s fun in the movie when you go somewhere. I think there’s a couple of messages, and one of the messages is that people from different backgrounds can find a common goal and pool their resources and achieve more than they would individually. But I think that there’s also the idea that the world of literature and storytelling is a world that you can kind of go into and experience it as an equally real, parallel but different reality from our own.”
“Inkheart” opens in theaters on Friday.
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