MOVIE NEWS – Neither The Neverending Story’s visual designs nor the story’s changing was forgivable for the author of the original novel, Michael Ende…
Now that The Neverending Story is being remade – following a licensing battle ten years ago when the Kennedy/Marshall Company and Appian Way Productions (owned by Leonardo DiCaprio) wanted to adapt the film – it’s time to dust off the first adaptation. The remake’s difficulties are because Ende hated the 1984 version and forbade further adaptations.
As we know, the book published in 1979 was only partially adapted into a film directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Literally half of it: The second half of the book, much darker than the first, in which Bastian enters the book to save Fantasia and gradually forgets his identity as an inhabitant of his original reality, was omitted. The film remained a simple children’s adventure, with the designs and settings of which Ende was unsatisfied.
Not least because the book, which became a bestseller (it sold a million copies in Germany and was translated into 27 languages at the time), was licensed for just $50,000 at the time.
Originally, Ende would have written the screenplay together with Wolfgang Petersen. This is where the disagreements between the two opposing ideas began. Ende did not want to accept that the book had to be compressed to fit into a two-hour film. In an oral history published by Entertainment Weekly, Petersen said that “the story was sacred to him (…). As I tried to work with him on the script, it was difficult to make changes. If I had to cut something, he didn’t understand. Lots of things were something that we couldn’t technically do at the time. Maybe it would be different today.”
The disagreement eventually became insurmountable. “I wrote the final version of the script with Herman Weigel, not with him. We sent it to him, and he hated it. We told him we weren’t interested, and that’s what we were going to shoot. Later, he got so angry that he wanted to take us to court, if I remember correctly. He wanted to go to court to stop the film, but of course, he didn’t succeed. You can’t look at a novel made into a film and think that nothing will change. Ende was only able to see the final script five days before the premiere.”
What were Michael Ende’s main problems with the film?
It is no wonder that Ende was dissatisfied. Despite its generous budget of 25 million dollars (the highest in German film history), Petersen’s film lacks all the genius and boundless imagination of the original work. Captivating scenes like the one at the gate of the sphinxes are horribly trivialized. The design of the inhabitants of Fantasia (with the possible exception of the rock eater) is very unimaginative.
In addition, by not sacrificing a part of Bastian to rebuild Fantasia, the novel’s message is betrayed.
As Ende said, “They changed the whole essence of the story. Fantasy reappears without Bastian’s creative power. For me, that was the essence of the book.” Result: Ende scolded the film from the beginning. He called The Neverending Story a “repulsive film” and sued the production company for removing his name from the cast list. He claimed that “the people responsible for the film understood nothing of the book. They were only interested in the money.”
It is indeed difficult to reconcile Ende’s imaginative work with the “complete kitsch orgy” that, in his opinion, became the film. Doubts surround the production even today. (Unless it becomes a series, it will remain as impossible as it was in the 1980s to cover the full extent of the original work.) But fans of the novel are cautiously hoping that the adaptation will be somewhat more consistent this time around. The realm of fantasy deserves it.
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