Flash in the pantheon

Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. Photo / Supplied

As it centres around a young protagonist who discovers that he possesses mystical abilities, it's no wonder that next week's new film Percy Jackson has been compared to the adventures of a certain boy wizard. But according to director Chris Columbus, the American teenager has little in common with his English counterpart, if only because he is not an aspiring mage but the long-lost son of the Greek sea god Poseidon.

"It's nothing like Harry Potter," Columbus declares tetchily before he has barely sat down. "I just wanted to get that off my chest immediately." Having helmed the cinematic adaptations of the first two volumes of J.K. Rowling's much-loved children's series, The Philosopher's Stone and The Chamber of Secrets, and produced the third, The Prisoner of Azkaban, the 51-year-old Pennsylvania native should know better than most.

"Harry Potter is about wizardry and this is Greek mythology," he says. "All fantasy films in that particular genre are connected in some way, whether it be Spider-Man, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars or Potter. At their heart is a hero who is sometimes severely flawed and feels a kind of emptiness within themselves. They then go on a journey or a quest to find some answers. I wouldn't have gotten involved in a picture that was too similar to Potter. I hadn't seen a film like this before and that was the reason I wanted to do it."

According to Columbus, the standard of computer-graphics technology has improved significantly in recent years. "The first three Harry Potters were actually a graduate course in CGI filming for myself," he says. "If you notice in the first film, it's a little creaky but it's okay. As we went on to do the second and third pictures, the visual effects got better. I learned a lot on those pictures and I realised that ... you have to be obsessed with visual effects to get them to a certain point where they were seamless with what the actors were doing."

Like Harry Potter, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, to give the film its full title, is based on a popular children's novel. It is the first in a quintet of books by former Texan schoolteacher Rick Riordan, and it cleverly incorporates Greek mythology into contemporary urban landscapes.

"Percy Jackson started out as a bedtime story for my son," recalls Riordan. "He was about 9 years old and was having a tough time reading because he was dyslexic. He also had ADD so it was hard for him to focus and keep still in the classroom. He didn't enjoy reading but he liked Greek mythology so I began to tell him the stories at home. When I ran out of stories, I made one up, so Percy Jackson was born. I made him dyslexic and ADD like my son; he's not the best student in school but he's a good kid ... My son liked it and said that I should publish it, so I wrote it down and it went from there."

After a school trip to the Metropolitan Museum goes awry when a vicious Fury suddenly attacks him, Percy (Logan Lerman, who played Christian Bale's son in the western 3.10 To Yuma) is rescued by his disabled best friend Grover (a witty Brandon T. Jackson). He turns out to be a satyr, a half-man/ half-goat who has secretly been charged with protecting him. The pair are taken under the wing of their history teacher, Mr Brunner (a bearded, wheelchair-bound Pierce Brosnan). He is actually Chiron, a centaur who is the chief instructor at Camp Half-Blood, where young demi-gods learn to master their special talents. However, Riordan insists that it is no Hogwarts.

"It's more like an American summer camp, which is a very different environment," he explains. "For one thing, it's only held during the summer holidays. Summer camps are known for the pranks that people play and the crushes kids have on each other. It's a very different world and it's one that I was familiar with because I was a counsellor at a summer camp for several years, which gave me many funny stories to tell. Add demi-gods to that and it gets even crazier."

Columbus has mostly remained faithful to Riordan's vision, although he has aged Percy from 12 to 17, allowing him to intensify the character's burgeoning relationship with goddess Athena's precocious daughter, Annabeth (Alexandra Daddario).

"It was important that the character was a little older than what he was in the book because I couldn't envisage filming all the battle training with 11-year-olds with wooden swords," he says. "It needed to be edgier, a little grittier and dirtier - or as much as it could be with a PG [rated] film."

But despite some scary scenes such as those involving Medusa (a snake-haired Uma Thurman), Columbus mostly referred to the Classics Illustrated version of Greek mythology.

"It's certainly not an educational film, because that would send children running from the theatres, but it will hopefully lead them to develop some sort of interest in Greek mythology," he says. "But the film works on different levels, such as when Medusa says to Percy 'I used to date your Dad' - that refers to a very dark chapter."

If The Lightning Thief is a hit at the box office, Columbus hopes to quickly begin shooting the second instalment, Percy Jackson and the Sea Monsters. "I don't want to be presumptuous to say that it will be successful enough to make the other films," he says. "But if we are, I'd love to make another film almost immediately because I just loved working with the cast ... I love the enthusiasm and lack of cynicism you get when you work with young actors. They just feel lucky at the most basic level to have jobs and they're just happy to be there. It infuses me with the same sort of energy."

* Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief is in cinemas from this Thursday.