IGN Interviews “Here, There Be Dragons” producer David Goyer

Last Friday, IGN had the opportunity to interview producer/screenwriter David Goyer, where he spoke at length about the novel “Here, There Be Dragons.” The rights for the novel have been snapped up by Warner Brothers, pushing the book up the sales charts very quickly. For example, Amazon pre-sales ranked the book around 5,000. On September 29th, with word spreading of the movie news, “Dragons” was ranking at 644. As of this writing, it is sitting at 1,493.

The book takes place in two worlds, our world (In London, during World War I) and a fantasy world, and features three characters that go on adventures. The three adventurers turn out to be real life authors J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams.

Here are three questions extracted from the interview:

IGN: Does this story focus on these characters when they’re in their twenties at Oxford? I’m just wondering what the age range is for these characters.

Goyer: They were all slightly different in age. C.S. Lewis would be the youngest, probably his early twenties. Tolkien a little older, the mid-twenties or later twenties. Charles Williams was at least a good ten years older than the two of them and sort of functioned as a mentor. We liked that as well because for casting possibilities. We can pull from these different age groups.

IGN: It’d be funny to see if Here, There Be Dragons and Peter Jackson’s Temeraire end up going head-to-head in cinemas. The end of this decade will be all dragons onscreen.

Goyer: They both have dragons. Dragons is in the title of the first and the seventh books. Ours is not… yes, there happens to be a dragon in this first book but there are many, many other creatures and characters and things. So it’s not exactly a head-to-head dragon fest.

IGN: So how does one actually refer to the property since we can’t really call it the Dragons franchise?

Goyer: The franchise is actually called The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica. For instance, the second book is called The Children’s Crusade. The Imaginarium Geographica is actually the fictional almanac of that other world. It’s kind of the almanac that maps all of these mythical lands and I guess it is what you would call the MacGuffin for the series. James’ studio is actually producing for Simon & Schuster an actual Imaginarium Geographica. It’s just this big book of maps of all these fantasy worlds.

[Read the rest at IGN]