From filmmaker Steven Spielberg and adapted from the book by Ernest Cline, the sci-fi action adventure epic Ready Player One is set in the year 2045 and follows Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), as he escapes real life inside of the OASIS, an immersive virtual universe where most of humanity spends their days, living as any avatar they so choose and with only your own imagination as a limitation. When the OASIS was created by the brilliant and eccentric James Halliday (Mark Rylance), he embedded a three-part contest into it to find a worthy heir for his immense fortune and total control of this virtual world, and as Wade and his friends, called the High Five, take on the challenge, they put themselves directly into the path of danger.

At the film’s Los Angeles press day, Collider got the opportunity to sit down with Ernest Cline, who also co-wrote the screenplay, to chat 1-on-1 about creating his own avatar, that he was always planning on writing two more parts of this story (and calling them Ready Player Two and Ready Player Three), whether he’s talked to Spielberg about doing a sequel movie, how much better this experience was from what he went through with Fanboys, what it’s like to have one of your favorite directors bring a world you created to life, and what he learned about Spielberg from working with him.

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Image via Warner Bros.

Collider: This movie is just so delightful and fun! You created this whole world, but if you got to create your own avatar for a virtual world, what would you want it to look like? Would it be something human-like, or would you want something totally not human?

ERNEST CLINE: It would be interesting to be something inhuman. That was a design change that Steven [Spielberg] made in the movie. He, at some point, decided that all the characters would look slightly inhuman. Art3mis has almost catlike features, Aech is half-human, half-machine, and Parzival is almost anime, stylized with snake-like bands on his skin. I don’t know, I think I would want to change a lot. I think I would try out different things. I explore this in the book, but it would be interesting to walk around as a person of a different gender or a different race, and see how people respond to you differently, or to be something completely inhuman and see people would react to that. It would be interesting. But, I’m not sure what I would be.

Were you always planning to write a sequel to this book?

CLINE: Yeah! And I had actually mapped out, with outlines, what I thought Parts 2 and 3 would be. When I first wrote Ready Player One and I registered the domain name online, I also registered Ready Player Two and Ready Player Three because I knew that someday I might want to tell more stories. I did so much work creating the OASIS and setting up in the first story, and it seemed to have so much potential to tell so many other stories, beyond just this contest, that I knew I would want to return to it someday. Luckily, I ended up being involved in making the movie, and going and visiting the set, and helping collaborate on the screenplay. That was while I was starting to work on Ready Player Two, which was good because it was returning to that universe, so I was switching back and forth between the Ready Player One movie and Ready Player Two. I worked very hard. I wanted to have a first draft of the story, before I saw the movie, so that the movie wouldn’t influence me too much. Even though I worked on it and I knew what was happening in the movie, I wanted to write a sequel that would please fans of the book, who would feel like it was a sequel to the book, but also have the story be something that could also be a film sequel. It was a tricky process.

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Image via Warner Bros.

Has Steven Spielberg given you any notes on the sequel?

CLINE: You know, he has. We talked about it, a little bit. I told him what I had planned and bounced that idea off of him. When that was happening, he was still focused on this movie and he more wanted to know what I had planned, as it relates to the ending of this film, but what I have planned is set up very nicely, by the end of this movie. I’m really happy.

Have you talked about possibly doing a sequel with him?

CLINE: No, not directly. He was like, “I want to finish this movie first.” But I think there’s a good chance that, if this one does well, Warner Bros. will want to make a sequel. I don’t know if Steven would want to dive back in, because he would know what he is getting into. He’s said that it’s the third hardest film he’s made, out of dozens and dozens of movies. He said Jaws will always be the worst. Saving Private Ryan was just brutal ‘cause he was recreating D-Day, day by day. And with this, it was like making two different movies at once – making a completely CGI movie, which ILM did all the special effects for, and then making this movie in the real world, and having them be parallel and cut back and forth. That was why it was astounding to me that he stopped, while we were doing post-production, and went off and made The Post. He was like, “Oh, that was so much easier. There were no special effects. I was just working with actors and setting up shots. That was a cake walk, compared to Ready Player One.” So, I don’t know if he would want to dive right back in, but maybe in a couple years, he might have recovered enough. I really hope that, if we do make another one, that he would do it. Michael Crichton, the novelist, is the only one to get that lucky and have two of his books made into movies by Steven, but maybe I’ll get lucky, too.

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Image via Warner Bros.

Before you jumped into doing a script for this, did you have to have a conversation with yourself about how the movie couldn’t be an exact adaptation, and that some things would have to change and go?

CLINE: Yeah, well, the crazy thing is that I started out as a screenwriter. Before I had my novel published I had a screenplay produced for this movie, Fanboys, that I wrote, which was a disaster. I tell people that I’ve made two movies. The first one was one of the worst experiences you can have. It was a miracle that it came out. It was based on these five characters from Ohio who go on this road trip. I’m from Ohio, and those characters were based on my and my friends that I grew up with. To create something that’s very pure and comes from my own life, and then to have those characters taken away from me and changed against my will, without any input, that was what motivated me to want to try to write a novel. I was like, “Oh, if this is what being a screenwriter is, maybe I don’t want to be a screenwriter. I wanna protect my characters and have a say in what happens to them.” When your screenplay gets rewritten, very few people end up reading what your original intention was, but you still get the blame for the end product. Whereas with a novel, at least your intention for the story always exists. And so, because I was going to just try to write a novel, and it was my first novel, and because the story that I had concocted was to mash up all of pop culture and pay tribute to all the pop culture that I love, in this virtual world, I assumed it could never be a movie, from the beginning. I was like, “You could never clear all this stuff.” But, that was freeing to me and exciting.

The fact that it could never be a movie just let me take my imagination off the leash, whatever I could imagine. I didn’t have to worry about budget or casting, or it ever becoming a movie. I could just tell whatever story I wanted. It wasn’t until I sold the book, and then the bidding war over the book got everybody in Hollywood interested, that I thought it could become a movie. The very next day, there was a bidding war for the screenplay with me attached to write the screenplay. I was already in the Writer’s Guild and that was part of the deal, if you want to buy the film rights, which I didn’t think anybody would, but everybody did. So, they had to let me write the first few drafts of the screenplay, which I did, but I did it before the book was published. I couldn’t point to it being a best-seller much less a global best-seller. I couldn’t say, “My fans are gonna be so angry [if you change that],” ‘cause I didn’t really have any fans yet, outside of the people at the publishing house. I knew, just from what I had written, that serious changes would have to be made, not just to the references, but to the structure because things that will work in a novel, don’t work in a movie. In a book, you can have somebody stop and play a perfect game of Pacman for six hours, and make it so exciting and engaging, but in a movie, that’s not cinematic and it would just stop the story dead.

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Image via Warner Bros.

Changing things was part of the fun for me. I got to create new challenges that were in the spirit of the ones in the book, but would surprise fans of the book, which is one of the reasons I love [the inclusion of] The Shining so much. It’s all about a book to film adaptation that the author of the book hates, even though it’s his most celebrated adaptation. It was so much fun have a challenge be about Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick, while Steven and I have the opposite relationship, where I adore everything that he did.

How would kid you, who was a fan of Steven Spielberg, have reacted to finding out that this would be the position you would be in?

CLINE: I often think about that. He wouldn’t believe it. He wouldn’t believe any of it. If I went back and told 13-year-old Ernie that any of this would happen, and if I showed him proof then, his head would probably explode. It’s just too much. It’s almost a cliché. If you dream of making movies or dream of coming out to Hollywood, you joke and say, “I’ve got Spielberg on the line.” And I really did get Spielberg on the line. I’ve tried to write about it and articulate it. It’s been three years since I knew he was going to make this movie, and I’ve had this amazing, life-changing experience, but even now it’s still hard to wrap my head around it. I know it’s real and I know it’s really happening, and I’m just so grateful. It’s so gratifying. It’s almost too much. I just assume it’s all downhill, from here on out. What is ever gonna top this? I’m a creative person. I have a great imagination. I cannot imagine anything being better than this. George Lucas isn’t gonna come out of retirement and direct my second novel, so it’s all gonna be downhill from here, and I’m fine with that. Nobody deserves any more good fortune than this. I’m happy with just this experience.

What did you learn about Steven Spielberg that you couldn’t have possibly known until you were collaborating with him?

CLINE: That he’s a huge geek, and a video game geek. He’s a film geek, but he’s also a serious gamer since, and a gamer from before I was playing video games. He told me this great story about how he had a little arcade at Amblin because he loved video games so much, and he took his Missile Command cabinet out into the forest when he was shooting E.T. and hooked it up to the generator, so he could play Missile Command in between shots. He was trying to break a million points, and he broke a million points while he was out there in the forest. I was like, “Wow, that’s the greatest story I ever heard!” That was the biggest surprise for me.

Ready Player One is now playing in theaters.

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Image via Warner Bros.