As everyone knows, video game motion pictures are cursed. Silent Hill could be the one good one and even that isn’t precisely Oscar materials. The Prince of Persia film starring Jake Gyllenhaal was significantly duff, nevertheless, and the GameLab chat with screenplay author Jordan Mechner may maintain the reply as to why.
Mechner can also be a game developer and is the person liable for each the unique PoP game and The Sands of Time. He additionally has a background in motion pictures, so he seems to be the proper individual to put in writing the screenplay for a film adaptation, then. Unfortunately, it seems that the supply materials is what held it again.
“The movie screenplay was a challenge because that was the one time it was a direct adaptation,” Mechner defined. “The Sands of Time – the game – wasn’t adapting the story of the original Prince of Persia, it was creating a new story that was custom tailored to that game. The rewind, the parkour, we knew that was the gameplay and then it was a matter of coming up with a story that would put that gameplay in the best possible… that would highlight its strengths.”
In the game, the Prince and his companion, Farah, are the one two human characters, which clearly wouldn’t work for a movie. In-game this was a symptom of the game engine’s incapability to render crowds. As a consequence, the one different individuals you meet aren’t really individuals – they’re sand monsters who wish to stab you to demise.
“The fact the palace was destroyed worked well because what’s the point being able to do parkour and run on walls if you can just take the stairs?” Mechner laughed. “So the staircase has been destroyed by an earthquake and all of the sudden you must discover a artistic method to rise up that damaged flight of stairs.
“In that case the storytelling was a pleasure, it was straightforward as a result of it’s a narrative that works finest for the game. Adapting that right into a film was an enormous problem. So that is going to be a Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer film – it’s not going to be a narrative about two individuals going by way of a destroyed palace. Resident Evil was a horror film, that was high quality, however we weren’t making a low price range horror film, we have been making this big factor.”
Because it was an enormous cope with an enormous price range, it needed to be suitably epic. It needed to depict Ancient Persia, there wanted to be armies and big caravans. The story needed to assist all of that.
“So how do we create a story that takes advantage of what movies can do and somehow still tell the story of the game in such a way that it still feels somehow Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time?” Mechner requested. “You’ve got a dagger that can turn back time, but what could be more undramatic in a movie than a hero who goes through the movie and any time something happens that’s bad, he can just press a button and undo it? It’s nice to have in a game, but in a movie you can only do so much of that.”
That’s why within the film the dagger is powered by a restricted provide of sands and solely has a set quantity of makes use of.
“The movie evolved a lot from the first screenplay I wrote, which you can read on my website if you’re interested, but it still kept the same basic structure of the story,” Mechner mentioned. “Adapting a game story for a linear two hour movie was a challenge.”
You can learn Mechner’s unique Sands of Time screenplay on his website. Mechner additionally mentioned he’d like to revive Prince of Persia.
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