CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 2/15/08

Finding Hidden Wonders:
The Spiderwick Chronicles' Karey Kirkpatrick

By peter clines

The screenwriter of Over the Hedge explains how he helped bring a new series of children's fantasy books to the silver screen.

With credits like James and the Giant Peach, Chicken Run, and Charlotte's Web, it's no surprise that executives turned to screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick to help polish the adaptation of The Spiderwick Chronicles. After initially turning down an offer to work on the project because of other commitments, he found himself drawn into the deep and elaborate world of beasts and fairies that existed in tandem with the world all of us know.

Sullen Jared (Freddie Highmore), his animal-loving twin brother Simon (also Highmore), and their older sister Mallory (Sarah Bolger) move away from New York with their mother after their parents' divorce to live in the huge old family house that belonged to their eccentric (and now committed) great-aunt, Lucinda Spiderwick (Joan Plowright). After a few days, Jared discovers that the culprit behind a number of pranks and petty thefts is actually a brownie named Thimbletack (voiced by Martin Short), the former assistant of Lucinda's late father, Arthur. In his great-great uncle's hidden workshop, Jared discovers his relative's great work, Arthur Spiderwick's Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You, a book that details the hundreds of invisible, supposedly mythical creatures that actually live hidden right alongside the real world. However, a powerful, nightmarish ogre named Mulgarath wants the information in the field guide, and Jared and his siblings come to realize that Arthur Spiderwick's home is a fortress designed to protect the book from the invisible army of goblins, trolls, and other creatures that will do anything to get it.

With The Spiderwick Chronicles about to be revealed across the country, Kirkpatrick took some time to speak with CS Weekly about heroic quests, designing monsters, and why Pinocchio creeped him out as a kid.

You do a lot of screenplays that would be considered kids' stories or young adult material. Is this by choice or is it typecasting, so to speak? Do you have a great unproduced romance/horror/action-adventure movie in your desk?
Sort of yes, yes, and yes (chuckles). Being a writer is not much different than being an actor in that you get known for doing a certain thing. It's not an exact science, obviously, and when people are spending money, they would like to try to make it as exact a science as possible. So they have a movie like this, you've had success in this arena, they want you to come bring that skill to whatever it is that they're doing. So typecasting does happen. One of the things that I've gotten known for among the executive community is being able to take movies that have a fantasy element, which usually comes with a set of complicated rules, and being able to sort that out. I must get unknown for it (chuckles), because it's a tremendous amount of work. In the early part of my career my criteria for "Will you write this?" was "You'll pay me? Sure." Now I'm getting fortunate enough to be a little more discerning and selective. The movie I'm directing right now is a father-daughter story with Eddie Murphy, but there's no overt fantasy element. It's an adult story, but appropriate for the whole family. I started shooting in September, then the strike happened in November, I finished in December, and I'm editing now.

The Spiderwick Chronicles has a dream team of writers on it. How did you all end up on board?
David [Berenbaum] was the first writer on. My understanding of it is, there's five books and they asked David to come and do a couple drafts of just books one and two. And then they decided, no, we should take all five books and make a story out of that. I think some other writers took a crack and they brought John Sayles in. And John came up with pretty much the structure of the movie as is. Then I came in and did a fairly substantial rewrite. Our act ones are very similar and it follows a similar course, but then I changed all of the events. There's a tunnel sequence that I came up with and a griffin-flying sequence. My take when I came in on this was just really beefing up this idea of this kid who sees his family situation one way, and through the course of going out and seeing the unseen world, it's sort of a coming of age, getting mature or man enough to see his family situation now for what it really is. That's one of the things that appealed to me about doing this, was this little family drama in the midst of all this fantasy stuff. When I read the scripts I said, the thing that's missing is—here we are, we have these people, they're displaced, they're moving from New York into this new house, and it's all because of the divorce. I think we can play up on that, and how unsettled it's made them, and how it's made Jared this way, and how each of the kids has reacted a different way. Going on this journey needs to have some bearing on the situation. If he's going to learn a lesson and be a hero, it needs to have a practical, real-life application. And everybody went, "Yeah, that's what it needs. Go do that."

What were some of the adaptation issues you had to overcome with this story?
The issue in this was, once they decided to do all five books in one movie, obviously you have too much material. So it was deciding which characters, which creatures, which story are you going to focus on? Streamlining it became the biggest challenge here. The series of books have loads more characters from that whole fairy realm. There's a dwarf, there's a changeling. There's this whole sequence in the book where Simon gets kidnapped by goblins, which we kept pretty close, and then when he's going back and he has to cross this troll. It kind of slowed down. Once he gets kidnapped, the movie kicks into high gear, and stopping worked in the book but in a movie it becomes a little too episodic. So we took that idea and called it a mole troll, a troll that lives underground and digs tunnels. Then we came up with that sequence, which was more of an obstacle in the middle of the movie and a little bit more of a high-octane obstacle than a brain teaser.

How much do you get to fall back on, "Oh, everyone will just know that from the book…"? Does adapting a screenplay give you a bit more leeway in the actual character and plot development you have to put on the page?
I don't think any. It has to work on its own. I don't think you can take anything for granted, and in fact it's what makes it difficult. With all these books, I've been fortunate enough to adapt ones that people are really familiar with, and consequently have met some fairly rabid fans with movies like Hitchhiker's Guide, Charlotte's Web, to a certain extent, and this film. It's in the zeitgeist and has grown near and dear to people, and you hope that they understand that things have to change when it segues to a movie. I'm always very respectful of the original work, and in this case, this was the first book I've adapted where the authors were alive (chuckles). We were very collaborative throughout, and I used them as a resource because they know so much about this fairy world. It's kind of a blessing that some of the legwork has been done for you in terms of story-cracking and all that, but also a curse sometimes because there are things you feel beholden to in the book that, were you were to take the premise and start over, you might go a different direction.

This is a really dark and suspenseful film at points. How do you find that line of creepy/too creepy for the tone?
Well, for me it's easy. I have three kids, and I know they're going to be seeing it, and I'm pretty in tune for what's appropriate for them and what's not. I think this one certainly pushes it in terms of some pretty intense action, but I think it's okay. When I think about movies that I saw as a kid, they were way edgier. We've really become incredibly safe. Pinocchio just terrified me. People take it for granted now because it seems tame, but there's some bizarre concepts in Pinocchio. You know, your nose grows and you turn into a donkey and there's this place that's enslaving children and getting swallowed by a whale. It's just full of bizarreness, and all those things were creepy and scary to me. I remember seeing A Christmas Carol for the first time, the one that Albert Finney was in, as a kid. Hearing the chains of Jacob Marley and that Ghost of Christmas Future showing up and looking like some kind of Grim Reaper…I think kids go to movies to vicariously exorcise some of those fears and live through the hero. They come out feeling like, "I conquered that and I'll be okay." Even though the design of Mulgarath is pretty intense, I think after the initial shock of him on screen, there's no gore, there's nothing that is the sort of violence that psychiatrists have proven is detrimental to children. I think kids can handle it. It's certainly no less intense than anything in Harry Potter or Narnia or any of those kinds of movies. If anything, some people might be surprised, because the books skew a little bit younger than the movie skews. That's a little bit of economics. You make a movie that has this many creatures, it's going to come with a certain price tag attached, and the studio's going to say, "We have to cast a wider net." In the book, Jared is nine years old, and we cast Freddie, who is 13, and aged them up. So, the things that they're dealing with, in order to be true to that, are going to be a little more intense. I took my five-year-old. He sat on my lap and jumped at a couple places, but no nightmares. He's fine.

Peter Clines has had a lifelong love affair with the movies. He grew up in New England, where he studied English literature and education, and now lives and writes somewhere in Southern California. If anyone knows exactly where, he would appreciate a few hints.

The Spiderwick Chronicles courtesy Paramount Pictures

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