Mortal Engines tells the story of a mysterious young woman, Hester Shaw (Hera Hilmar), who is the only one who can stop London – now a giant, predator city on wheels – from devouring everything in its path.
Yes, you read that right. “The biggest idea I could think of was a city on wheels but then I had to ask: why would you want a city on wheels?” says author and illustrator Philip Reeve, who wrote the eponymous book on which the film is based.
“It seemed arcane. But then I realised: you would want a city on wheels to chase a smaller city on wheels. And when I worked that out, everything fell into place.”
The acclaimed prize-winning Young Adult novel was the first of a quartet written by Reeve. His dystopian story unfolds centuries after civilisation was destroyed by a cataclysmic event known as the Sixty Minute War.
Humankind has had to adapt to its new environment. Gigantic moving cities now roam the Earth, ruthlessly preying upon smaller traction towns. Tom Natsworthy (Robert Sheehan) – who hails from a Lower Tier of the great traction city of London – finds himself fighting for his own survival after he encounters the dangerous fugitive Hester Shaw.
The two are opposites whose paths should never have crossed, but they forge an unlikely alliance that is destined to change the course of the future.
Although during his time at art college Reeve had experimented with a Super 8 camera, he decided it would be easier to illustrate and write novels than make movies.
It was just itching to be filmed
It took him seven years to write Mortal Engines, which was first published in 2001. Yet, he always had a clear vision of his story’s cinematic future.
“Mortal Engines always wanted to be a big action movie when it grew up,” Reeve says.
“It has a three-act structure and big set pieces. It was just itching to be filmed.”
Scholastic Media president and Mortal Engines producer Deborah Forte says: “There is a little bit of an actor in Philip, and a little bit of a director. So, when he writes it’s in a very cinematic way. You know what the world is, how it looks and sounds and what it feels like to be there.”
Forte, who had helped bring The Golden Compass to the big screen, immediately thought of the one film-maker with the extraordinary vision and peerless sensibility to adapt Mortal Engines into a blockbuster movie experience and bring it to the big screen: Peter Jackson.
Forte first approached Jackson and his frequent collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens with the idea in 2005. But, as Boyens explains: “There were a lot of projects coming at us after the Lord of the Rings films, and a lot of them were fantasy projects. I got an e-mail from Pete, asking me to take a read of this book. He didn’t tell me too much about it, because he wanted my honest opinion.
“And, from the very first sentence of the book I was hooked. I kept reading, hoping it was going to make me fall in love with the characters, hoping it would have an amazing ending, and it did, all along the way. So I wrote Pete back and said: ‘Hell, yeah. This is an extraordinary story.’”
Jackson was equally excited by the ideas and the imagery of Mortal Engines; and by the concept of Municipal Darwinism found in the story. “In its simplest form, the bigger cities eat the smaller ones,” Jackson says. “The smaller cities eat the smaller towns, and the smaller towns eat the tiny little towns. They see that as a very natural evolution.
“The trouble with Municipal Darwinism is that there is a limit to it,” he adds. “Eventually the big cities eat so many of the smaller cities that there are none left, so they have to either turn on each other or find something else to hunt.”
While Jackson clearly loved the concept of cities on wheels devouring each other, he was also struck by the tale’s narrative and emotional elements of love, compassion, vengeance, and liberation. “You are always looking for stories with humanity,” Jackson says. “And Mortal Engines has that.”
Mortal Engines also stars Hugo Weaving, Jihae, Ronan Raftery, Leila George, Patrick Malahide and Stephen Lang. The screenplay is written by Walsh, Boyens and Jackson, and the film is directed by Christian Rivers.