Tintin movie scribe talks "reverent" adaptation

Tintin, the bequiffed young dog-loving explorer, will be hitting cinema screens later this year in his first CGI movie, The Adventures Of Tintin: The Secret Of The Unicorn .

With tantalising images all circling the net with increasing rapidity, Total Film sat down with co-writer Joe Cornish to discuss his involvement in the project.

“My involvement compared to the number of amazing, enormous brains involved in that production is fractional,” he tells us.

“Edgar Wright and I did a few passes on the script, and then I did a few passes on my own, but it really is a huge collaboration.”

On the film’s tone, the writer calms fears that the term 'CGI update' equals ' Yogi Bear -like mess', stating: “It’s not tongue in cheek, it’s a proper adventure, it’s like the Hergé books were proper adventures.

“Tintin will honour and stay very close to the spirit of the books, everyone involved is an enormous and very reverent Hergé fanatic. The intention is to honour the books, not modernise.”

With the first Tintin film being steered by master filmmaker Steven Spielberg, Cornish of course had to meet the big man himself; something that the writer admits was “daunting”.

“Edgar and I sat round a table with Mr Spielberg and Mr [ Peter ] Jackson a little while ago,” he says. “The first thing you say to them is certainly quite scary. But it gets easy very quickly because they’re very down to Earth.

“At the end of the day it’s about the work, so you just focus on the work. Though every now and then you have a little flash of the history of the people you’re working with and it can make your mind go blank with astonishment.”

The Adventures Of Tintin: The Secret Of The Unicorn opens 26 October.