W W W.SCI FI N OW.CO.U K |^063
I AM NOT...
MY CLASSIFICATION
(The Darkest Minds)
Every child who survives the
outbreak has abilities, from
intelligence (green), telekinesis
(blue) through to mind control
(orange). Orange and reds
are classifi ed as extremely
dangerous, but no one can be
judged by one aspect.
I AM NOT...
MY HOUSE
(Harry Potter)
Okay, so the Hogwarts Houses
are not necessarily something
to rebel against, but you have
to admit that there have been
some notable exceptions to the
general rules, proving that,
for example, not all Slytherins
are evil.I AM NOT...
MY DISTRICT
(The Hunger Games)
Every year, one boy and one
girl between the ages of 18
and 12 from each district in
Panem is chosen and sent to
compete in the Hunger Games.
All they need is a leader to
unite the districts against
the Capitol...I AM NOT...
MY FACTION
(Divergent)
The evil government wants
to divide everyone according
to their personality type. But
what if you are not so easily
defi ned? Well then, you’re
going to have to go on the run
and bring the system down,
aren’t you?I AM NOT...
MY ROLE
(The Giver)
In the future of Lois Lowry’s
famous tale, every member of
society is given a role by the
elders. The most important is
the Receiver Of Memory, who
bears the burden of knowing
exactly how they’ve reached
this point...Working on live-action cinematography and
a cast on set was a new experience for Nelson,
who made her live-action debut with this fi lm.
As the director of all three Kung Fu Panda
movies (as well as working in the art department
on fi lms like Dark City and Spawn), she’s had
incredible success in animation but was itching
to make the jump. “I loved working on the Kung
Fu Panda movies but I’ve been wanting to do
live-action since I was a kid, and the producer
of the three Kung Fu Panda movies told me: ‘It’s
time. You’re done with the Pandas, you gotta go
do what you want to do.’
“There were some similarities as far as script
and character and look development, all that
stuff is the same because you have to make
sure the story works and all that, so all that was
familiar but the actual shooting was a whole
different animal,” she continues. “I usually spent
most of my days in animation in a dark offi ce in
front of my computer screen. In live-action you’re
running around at 3 o’clock at night in a
mud-bug trying to fend off insects and also
deal with fi re and fl amethrowers and stuff! So,
it’s kind of a different beast! But it was so much
more fun, I gotta say, than being in a dark
room. And to see things actually happening
around you, to experiment in the moment
visually with the things that’s happening around
you, when you’ve got all the actors together... it
was shockingly fun.”
While it’s easy to imagine that there’s a fair
amount of pressure on The Darkest Minds to
revive the YA movie market, Nelson tells us
that she never thought about the fi lm in those
terms. “I actually don’t think of genre at all,”
she explains. “I just focus on making sure the
characters feel real. It’s the same on everything
I work on. You’ve got to make something that’s
heartfelt no matter what the medium, and
that’s true to the characters no matter what the
medium is. I’m not hugely versed in YA, it’s one
of the things I said to the studio when I was fi rst
meeting them, I said: ‘I don’t watch YA movies.
Super violent bad action movies, that’s what I
watch, or anime or something! But I don’t watch
a lot of YA movies,’ and they said: ‘That’s great
because we don’t want to have a stereotypical
YA movie, we want something different and we
want to approach it in a very different way.’ I
wasn’t setting out to make a YA movie. I was
setting out to make a movie.”The Darkest Minds is released on 10 August.IT’S ABOUT
THE WORLD
BEING
BEAUTIFUL IN
SPITE OF IT ALL
JENNIFER YUH NELSON