Artemis Fowl Director Explains Film's Biggest Change

Artemis Fowl's director decided to reveal why the biggest change to the movie took place. A lot of fans were probably expecting the tale of a miniature villain when they booted up the movie on Disney+. Well, that's not the case as the titular character comes across as much more of a hero. But, to hear director Kenneth Branagh tell it, this was a decision that had to be made. Eoin Colfer wrote the novels the movie is based on, and in those books, Artemis is a bit of a supervillain. The discovering the fairies is the same, but a lot of the other details deviate from that foundation. Artemis Fowl Sr. is a bit of a gentleman thief in the adaptation as opposed to a cruel businessman. The director sat down with Slash Film to talk about why that change was necessary.

"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...

"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."

Comicbook.com's Brandon Davis had the chance to sit down with Branagh as well and they talked about the issue of adapting a story in that conversation.

"Well, you know they're eight books, they get increasingly exotic. Amazing imagination Eoin Colfer has," Branagh offered. "Some of the twist and turns, and incidents are so out there. The first book has a relative simplicity, Eoin calls it "Diehard" with fairies. It's a siege movie and inside that, what fell to us to be inside all of that action would be the emotional backbone that you could get, would be if we could just take the minimum, just one basic incident from the second book, Artemis Fowl in the Arctic Incident, which is the kidnap of his father, and lace that into the first story, so that the emotional drive was there, that maybe allows our audience to connect to Artemis emotionally."

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