In response to Chico's Journal re: Legend of Zelda" movie

First, good luck re: Jeopardy! Give me a heads up to watch for it, and don't commit a Tom Hanks!

Don't know if you saw it, but here's IGN's fake Legend of Zelda live-action trailer.

On casting: likeness-wise, I recommend Li Kovaks (seen in my photos) as Link but I can't vouch for her actress-ness. Or at the very least being open to the Peter Pan-ness of casting Link, that a female might work to play a male.

Dig Jean Reno, and if you haven't seen "Outlander," check it out for Sophia Myles playing a kick-ass princess. I don't know if you can get away with a damsel-in-distress these days anyway.

There also need to be some other characters Link meets along his quest (I'm imagining more Inigo Montaya and Fezzick than anything from LOTR at the moment, but I know stylistically that might not work), people in a world we want to meet and encounter.

I have to admit my ignorance of Legend of Zelda, even though I had the game as a kid, I never got far with it and I don't know much of the story. But from what my understanding, it's a pretty simple story: rescue the Princess, get the Triforce, stop the bad guy, and ideally have some time constraint with no room for failure. Basic hero's journey stuff. The simplest plots always work the best, Have you seen "Up" yet? Same thinking there: The house has to get from ONE side of the mountain to the other, and they have three days to do it. Then there are all these obstacles thrown at them.

I'm sure you've seen all the photos on here of PikminLink, well right before I took them I had been checking out all these amazing statues and dioramas made by Weta Workshop for LOTR so they were fresh in my mind, I was picturing in my mind exactly what you're picturing, I guarantee it.

The Lord of the Rings approach, outside of shooing in beautiful New Zealand, also works in regards to how the subject mater should be approached, if you remember, when they made the LOTR, they disassembled the book and put it back together again, and the complexities of Zelda requires the same (though it doesn't always work, look at "Watchmen.") And a "Supreme Court" collaboration like "Star Trek" had, where you have people ranging the gamut from hard-core fan to "the idiot test"

My only concern is if you give it the Lord of the Rings treatment, how do you discern it from the Lord of the Rings? Especially considering that's a movie that did just about everything RIGHT.

Christopher Doyle for cinematographer... that would guarantee a different look, in fact, going into the style of Hero or House of Flying Daggers might be interesting (without the wire-fu), but would that be too grandiose?

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Lemme throw the ball back by saying I'd been thinking of an Evangelion movie recently. Basically the first of the films would follow the plot of the first Rebuild movie, with a few different scenes, including the Antarctica security camera footage from the second animated movie (I think it was in the second). I know it's not a GIANT story, but it's enough considering the subject material and the fact it's a very unusual pitch. The important thing is that the film works perfectly by itself instead of a first chapter, you know? It's so annoying when you have movies like the Golden Compass which are meant to be trilogies that are never made. This should be more like The Matrix, where it doesn't matter if the other movies get made or not.

My only casting thoughts at this time are Nathan Kress as Shinji (Sean Icarus?) and Maggie Gylenhaal as Misato, but Misato is written in the voice of Bruce Willis (or rather the Bruce Willis as described by Kevin Smith "everyone loves me, I'm Bruce Willis! Waahaauagh!") The presence of the American Military Industrial Complex in Japan to build NERV and the EVA project would easily explain why all there's all these Americans in the cast and yet it still takes place in Japan.
Being in Tokyo-3 feels a bit like Children of Men and I Am Legend, I like the idea of someone pathetic like Shinji actually bringing a little glimmer of hope, sort of a "your first million dollars is the hardest," once there's a little glimpse of hope, the thought that humanity might ACTUALLY survive, that's huge, I think that'd be the emotional subplot running through the movie.

I got three songs for the soundtrack thus far (thanks again for getting me into that habit with the Sonic V soundtrack by the way, it actually is a great help with writing and it's a trick I recommend for other writers), the first is Highway to Hell for the first act when Misato and Shinji barrel away from the war zone (it's perfectly over the top for Misato's introduction, IMO). Second song is another bit on the nose, Baba O'Rielly for the end where Shinji pulls Ayanami out of the plug and they're covered with LCL like it's Jell-O (that stuff solidifies a bit, I picture it being a little like placenta), I just like the idea of it being visceral, keeping that idea that this isn't a clean, sleek robot movie. The third song is for the end credits and it's "Sunday Bloody Sunday" by U2.

Check out the trailer for District 9 to see a possible Eva director at work (he did the HALO shorts as well), though I wouldn't think of Eva being done in this documentary style.