M. Night Shyamalan Talks A Bunch About AIRBENDER

I’m not gonna spend too much time on this because as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve never watched the series Avatar: The Last Airbender. My friend Sam has been pushing me to watch it for the longest time, even my roommates said it’s a great show but I still can’t get around to doing exactly that, mainly because I still need to catch up on Damages, Psyche, and Spartacus:Blood and Sand, I’m watching them online. So the following info is for Sam and those of you who thought the trailer for THE LAST AIRBENDER was about the coolest thing to ever hit the web. Master blogger Jordan Hoffman of UGO was one of the lucky online journalists who got to hear from M. Night Shyamalan about how he tried his best to stay faithful to the series. He’s a hardcore fan, so fans of the series will not be let down by his adaptation, you can read the rest OVER THERE, but here are some bullet points…

• The Last Airbender is very much the first in a planned trilogy. Night compares it to Lord of the Rings in that it is all one story not, “more adventures” with your favorite characters. The three films will mirror the three seasons of the series, with some tweaks.

• Night plans to direct all three, but before the second one he wants to bang out a smaller-budgeted thriller.

• Momo is absolutely in the movie. Night still hopes to find a moment where Momo does something really important and somehow saves the day, but for the first one he’s in there “just for fun.”

• That said, our expectations for the amount of comedy in the films has been managed. Night warns that “what works in the show won’t always work in the film” and some of the broad comedy has been cut. Prepare yourselves now – there will be no cabbage salesman in the film. The fate of Penguin Sledding remains inconclusive.
  

• During one enthusiastic moment discussing the CG effects, the phrase “Master Pakku using water like nun-chucks” was used. Everyone in the room responded, “Coooooool.”

• The writing in the film (in, say, the Waterbending Scroll or Aang’s “Wanted” poster) will not be Chinese calligraphy as in the show, but an Asian-inspired pictorial language created just for this movie.

Air, Water, Earth, Fire. Four nations tied by destiny when the Fire Nation launches a brutal war against the others. A century has passed with no hope in sight to change the path of this destruction. Caught between combat and courage, Aang (Noah Ringer) discovers he is the lone Avatar with the power to manipulate all four elements. Aang teams with Katara (Nicola Peltz), a Waterbender, and her brother, Sokka (Jackson Rathbone), to restore balance to their war-torn world.

THE LAST AIRBENDER opens July 2nd, 2010