Orson Scott Card has revised the Ender’s Game material repeatedly over the years, for the multiple books in the series:
And then during the prep for the movie, I wrote 20 versions of the script myself. I was trying to figure out how to solve the problems. It’s a devilishly hard book to adapt for film. The biggest problem we had was that I would write draft after draft and people who already knew and loved the book would say, “This is it. You nailed it. This is great. This is even better than the last one.” And then (I) would hand the script to someone who had never read the book, and they would have no idea what all of it was about. So clearly it was still dependent on having read the book and already caring about the character, and that’s not what you want.
Probably one of the greatest adaptations of a classic novel to screen was “Sense and Sensibility,” Emma Thompson’s brilliant adaptation. You don’t have to have read the book to get every single nuance. Then when you do read the book, you realize she actually did a better job than the book did of delivering the story clearly and well. Jane Austen was inventing the novel form at the time and that was her first full-length novel, and so it’s not a surprise that Emma Thompson was able to clarify over what she did.
But adapting “Ender’s Game” was just so hard. But I finally found a way that worked, but unfortunately I did my last draft after (director) Gavin Hood had already started work on his first draft. As far as I know, he never read any of my drafts. There’s no reason he should have. You’re going to lose your job for filming the author-written script, so my scripts really served mostly as showing proof of concept, feasibility studies. That you could do a script even if this isn’t the one they intended to use.
You’ve got to realize that terrified executives in Hollywood always want to know what to say about a script, which means it has to look like it was a product of a film school, which means they have to be able to detect clearly and obviously the three-act structure, to see all the plot points, the formulaic things that they expect…. Nowadays, with anything they do, they’re going to be very leery of investing millions of dollars into a script that doesn’t look familiar to them. So that was Gavin Hood’s job, was to deliver a script that would look familiar to executives and make them comfortable. It was not really to deliver “Ender’s Game” itself. But that’s fine. I made strong changes to the script myself. I had arguments with people. In fact, in some respects, Gavin’s script is more faithful than mine…. He stuck to the structure of the novel in ways that I wouldn’t have and didn’t in any of my scripts.
So it’s not a matter of faithfulness. People who go there thinking they’re going to see a film of scene-by-scene novel of “Ender’s Game,” there’s no way we could deliver that. That would have been 5½ to six hours long anyway. Nobody would have sat still for it.
So they’re going to see a sort of a reduced, compressed, simplified version of “Ender’s Game” with older actors because it’s just so hard, so impossible to work with children — so many children. It wouldn’t have worked. So they had to age it up, and I gave consent for that.