Director Andy Fickman, who had just completed the hit comedy “The Game Plan” for Walt Disney Pictures, heard that Producer Andrew Gunn was contemplating a reworking of the “Witch Mountain” franchise.
“I loved ‘Escape to Witch Mountain’; it was one of my all-time favorite films as a kid,” says Fickman. ‘Nothing excited me more than the movie as well as reading the book it was based upon. So when I was given an opportunity after ‘The Game Plan’ to continue my relationship with Disney, I told them I wanted to make ‘Race to Witch Mountain’ as memorable for audiences today as it was for me in 1975.”
For Fickman, having a fascination for the unexplained and inexplicable began almost at birth–he was born in Roswell, New Mexico, a small town made infamous by a supposed crash of a UFO that the government and the military allegedly covered up. And in “Race to Witch Mountain,” that predilection for the mysterious (along with the Roswellian theme of the collision of two worlds) proves central to the plot of the high-octane story and highly enjoyable storyline.
It is, indeed, that element of the ordinary meeting the extraordinary that he found so compelling. “’Race to Witch Mountain’ is a great action-adventure story,” says Fickman. “It is a fantastic journey in which the most unlikely of heroes end up saving not one world, but two worlds.”
