Development and casting (far left) and
Ernest Cline with the cast of
Ready Player One at
San Diego Comic-Con. From third of left:
Tye Sheridan,
Olivia Cooke,
T.J. Miller, and
Ben Mendelsohn.
Warner Bros. bought the film rights for producers Dan Farah and
Donald De Line in June 2010, one year before the book was published.
Ernest Cline was set to write the script for the film, which De Line and Farah would produce.
Eric Eason rewrote Cline's script, and
Zak Penn was hired to rewrite the previous drafts by Cline and Eason (who became uncredited for the final draft), along with
Village Roadshow Pictures coming aboard. Warner Bros. attempted to convince
Christopher Nolan to direct the film as his next project after
Interstellar (2014), but he declined. Afterwards the studio made a shortlist of potential directors including
Robert Zemeckis,
Edgar Wright,
Matthew Vaughn, and
Peter Jackson. A directorial offer was also sent to
Josh Trank, who turned it down twice. Steven Spielberg finally signed on to direct and produce the film, which
Kristie Macosko Krieger also produced, along with De Line and Farah. Cline and Penn made several revisions while adapting the novel to film. Most of these changes were to eliminate scenes that would be uninteresting in a visual format, such as when Wade beats a high score in
Pac-Man, or recites all the lines from the film
WarGames (1983). In 2016, American musician
Moby said he had tried to make the book into a movie, but discovered that Spielberg had taken the role before him.
Elle Fanning,
Olivia Cooke and
Lola Kirke were the frontrunners for the role of Art3mis; with Cooke announced as having been cast in the role by September 2015.
Barry Keoghan screen-tested for the part.
Simon Pegg was added to the cast in March,
Filming Production was slated to begin in July 2016, but on July 1, 2016, screenwriter Zak Penn confirmed that the first week of filming had already been completed, meaning that
principal photography began on June 24, 2016. In August and September 2016, filming took place in
Birmingham, England, standing in for
Columbus, Ohio. Birmingham filming included on Livery Street in the
Jewellery Quarter area of the city, which was used for multiple scenes in the film. Ludgate Hill Car Park on Lionel Street, in which caravan homes were partially built, was also used, and a planned explosion there caused some local businesses and residents to call emergency services as no prior notice was given by the production team. Other locations in the city included the former industrial area of
Digbeth, and some of the city's landmarks were erased and replaced with CGI buildings to create a dystopian future Ohio. Outside of Birmingham, filming also took place at
Warner Bros. Studios, Leavesden and at Solaris House, the former
Sun Microsystems headquarters in
Surrey. Principal photography
wrapped on September 27, 2016.
Visual effects Industrial Light & Magic (ILM),
Digital Domain, and
Territory Studio developed the visual effects, with some pre-visualization work done by
The Third Floor. For three hours three days a week, Spielberg met with ILM, which was in charge of the OASIS segments and produced the bulk of the visual effects shots, with 900 in total; Spielberg remarked that "this is the most difficult movie I've done since
Saving Private Ryan", as three 3-hour long meetings a week were necessitated to discuss the visual effects. Part of the film takes place in a virtual space based on the
Overlook hotel in
Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film
The Shining. It was mostly a digital recreation using high-quality
telecine of the original film, allowing new camera angles and shots that did not appear in the original. Some original footage from
The Shining was also used, with ILM's modifications. Only a few scenes involved real actors (such as the appearance of the Grady twins) and required reproduction of
The Shinings physical sets. The
Shining sequence was post-processed with
film grain and other aging effects to make the new footage closely resemble the original. The VFX team built the Overlook Hotel sequence in the digital realm, consulting Kubrick's blueprints. ILM also produced digital versions of
Ready Player One's many cultural references, including the
DeLorean time machine from the
Back to the Future films; the
Iron Giant;
Chucky; and
King Kong, modeled after
the 1933 film version. The
Tyrannosaurus rex from
Jurassic Park was created from the base model ILM had created. Digital Domain facilitated
pre-visualization (with The Third Floor),
motion capture, and
virtual sets, and also created 300 visual effects shots for the primarily live-action portions of the film. The virtual sets were powered by game engines and were used congruently with the motion-capture process, with previsualization supervisor Scott Meadows explaining that in real time Spielberg would "put on a
headset and scout the sets and make adjustments." ==Soundtrack==