Danny Boyle Wants to Animate Terry Pratchett

DreamWorks Animation, Director to Adapt Truckers For Film

Sep 10, 2008 Dominic von Riedemann

Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire) says he wants to adapt Terry Pratchett's Truckers for the silver screen. DreamWorks Animation will finance and produce the film.

Danny Boyle says he wants to make a movie based on Terry Pratchett's comic novel Truckers.

According to Coming Soon, the director - whose live-action film Slumdog Millionaire made a major splash at the Toronto International Film Festival - wants to reunite with Millions screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce in order to adapt the first book in Terry Pratchett's Bromeliad trilogy for the big screen.

Truckers First Novel in Pratchett's Bromeliad Series

The big question is whether Boyle - best known for edgy fare like the dark comedy Trainspotting, the zombie horror flick 28 Days Later and the sci-fi Sunshine - can handle the demands of CGI animation.

"It's a weird different discipline, it's very strange," Boyle told Coming Soon about working in the animated milieu. "You're more like a ringmaster, kind of organizing this huge army of illustrators who can change the movie. It's really weird. They often do scripts and they have no gags in them at all, but then you see the finished film and it's full of funny gags, and they say that it's not in the script, that all comes through the process of the animators. It's like learning the skill of letting certain ones of them off their leash to do the gags."

DreamWorks Animation had purchased the film rights to all three novels in Pratchett's Bromeliad trilogy in 2001. They originally wanted director Andrew Adamson (Shrek, Shrek 2) to direct a single movie covering all three books, but Adamson bailed to direct Walden Media/Walt Disney Company's The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe instead. At which point, the adaptation languished in Development Hell before Boyle expressed interest.

Pratchett One of Britain's Bestselling Authors

Author Terry Pratchett is better known for the 36 (and counting) novels that comprise his Discworld saga, a shotgun marriage of Tolkien fantasy and P.G. Wodehouse comedy. Despite being continually dismissed as a 'cult author,' Pratchett was Britain's bestselling fiction writer (before J.K. Rowling unleashed her Harry Potter series), and received the Order of the British Empire in 1998 for his 'services to literature.'

In typical Pratchett fashion, he later told the sci-fi newsletter Ansible that, "I suspect the 'services to literature' consisted of refraining from trying to write any."

On December 11, 2007, Pratchett announced that he was diagnosed with a rare form of Alzheimer's Disease, called posterior cortical atrophy, in which areas at the back of the brain start to shrink and shrivel. Despite this, the author still believes he is capable of writing "at least a few more books yet."

Truckers will hit theatres "sometime after Shrek 17," according to Pratchett.

The copyright of the article Danny Boyle Wants to Animate Terry Pratchett in Animated Films is owned by Dominic von Riedemann. Permission to republish Danny Boyle Wants to Animate Terry Pratchett in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Truckers novel cover art

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