Andrew Stanton Offers 'John Carter Of Mars' Update

The actors who play the characters in John Carter of Mars have long since left the Red Planet but Oscar-winning director Andrew Stanton is still hard at work. The Disney/Pixar sci-fi action film based on the books by Edgar Rice Burroughs is scheduled for release March 12, 2012 and Stanton recently gave a few updates as to what we can expect the film to look like, how much more work has to be done and more. Watch a video and read the quotes after the jump.

Thanks to MTV for this video. If you can't watch it, the quotes are highlighted below.

First, Stanton commented on the status of the production since principal photography finished a while ago.

I'm not in post-production — I'm in digital principal photography now, which goes on for the rest of 2011, so I'm only halfway through the movie.

He then discusses what it was like shooting this film coming from an animation background.

When you've made animated movies your whole life, it was pretty exciting to be outside for a day, let alone for months. For as cold and as hot and as hard as it was, which I knew it would be, I was up for it and it was a blast. It was the hardest thing I'll ever have done, but man, it was a great adventure. It was like sailing across the ocean, you know, everything that goes with that.

Next, he commented on Taylor Kitsch, the star of the film.

Hopefully he'll be another great face on the big screen, and hopefully he'll be John Carter to people and nobody else if we've done it right.

Finally, when asked about the look of the film, Stanton was understandably coy.

I didn't try to make it look like anything else. I really tried to make it its own thing. I tried to make a very historically accurate Martian film if that makes sense, so I'll let you decipher that.

A very historically accurate Martian film? What the heck could that mean? Does that mean it's going to look more like Avatar and less like a Pixar film? What do you think?

John Carter of Mars is about a Civil War solider who is transplanted to Mars and is drawn into an epic struggle. It stars Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Mark Strong, Domenic West, Willem Dafoe, Thomas Hayden Church and many others. Co-written by Michael Chabon and directed by Andrew Stanton, it's scheduled for 3D release March 12, 2012.