I was a major fan of Artemis Fowl growing up, so I have to ask about the major changes you made while adapting the film. The biggest having to do with the characterization of Artemis, who is more of a traditional hero and less the redemptive villain/anti-hero than he was in the books. Why did you choose to go this route?
It was a decision based on a sort of inverse take on what I saw in the books, which was Eoin introducing Artemis gathering a sense of morality across the books. He said that he had him preformed as an 11-year-old Bond villain. It seemed to me that for the audiences who were not familiar with the books, this would be a hard, a hard kind of thing to accept. And that one-way of mirroring what he did in the books, was to simply in one film — and to some extent I had some experiences with this with Thor, in the infinite number of possibilities of presenting him — in order to have sufficient people root for him, because Eoin manages to do that the books but it's very hard if you don't have context, we meet him in a story arc that resembles something like the Michael Corleone in The Godfather. Where someone has to, in the context of the first story, arrive where the story begins with in the novels. So the origin story of it, like Thor, was one in which we saw the character come from something more raw, in this case more familiar: going to a school, a bit like some of our audience might be familiar with. And I was less interested in presenting the story from the get-go, of a character who was marooned in a privileged life. I wanted us to find the humanity inside the character, before going on a journey which might be the opposite to the books but sort of integral in the sense of what I was looking for, which was a journey that maybe took our Artemis which he arrives at the end of the movie ready to go to the dark side.
So we see him acquire those characteristics, and it seems to me that that is a way of potentially introducing a much wider audience who didn't know the books to the characters so that the great landscape that Eoin has in the rest of the books, we can hopefully, perhaps, go through, but traveling in the different direction.
