The feature film adaptation of the Uncharted
video game series has been stuck in development hell for quite some time. However,
now that a director has been found the project, which is being developed over
at Sony, can finally get off the ground.
Speaking
to Collider, screenwriter Joe Carnahan ("The A-Team," "The
Grey") explains the key to unlock the secret behind translating video
games to the big screen, which, if we are honest, have been mostly subpar,
especially when in comparison to other movies in the same genre (Warcraft is no
Lord of the Rings).
"I think that, it’s
gonna need to be something that exceeds the sum of its parts, you know what I’m
saying? It just doesn’t function as a straight lift of the video game. I sat
down with Amy [Hening, director of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune]
and sat down with [Drake voice actor] Nolan North and sat down with Neil
[Druckmann, writer of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune],
who created this thing, and took them through what I was doing and what I was
thinking of and they loved it. She loved it. She understands too that you can’t
be so slavish and devoted to the source material. They could’ve just altered
certain things about Watchmen, Zack
Snyder’s film. I thought it was so much better than what it was–and I really
enjoyed it–I thought God, there’s some really great movie in there that I felt
got held back because we gotta check these boxes or these fans are gonna get on
our ass. And I’m a big believer that the fanboy element or the fan lobbies are
massively overrepresented in Hollywood and don’t have nearly the lobbying power
that we think they do.
We gotta sometimes cut
loose of those, because it shackles you. You’re gonna have Nate do this and
you’re gonna say Kitty got wet and gonna do this, and you say, “Listen, we’re
gonna do as much of it as we can,” but I remember the late great Stephen
Cannell [creator of The A-Team] say to me,
listen, if you wanna make B.A. Baracus a white woman, you should do that. He
didn’t have this sense of, no I think that’d probably have exploded in my face,
but this is the guy that created him and he understood that you need to break
with tradition sometimes to tell compelling stories. It’s just making a great
movie and trying to put as much of the game in as you can and the sensibilities
of making Drake and Sullivan and so on, and beyond that, just do something
original and fun. Roll the dice, like we have to do on anything. There are no
assurances, and there certainly are very few hedging your bets when it comes to
making movies. So I really believe that. Just be original. Do your best. Try to
check the boxes you can, but beyond that don’t get wrapped up."
However, some things will definitely make
their way into the film, including Drake's lineage, and growing up an orphan.
"Certainly the signet
ring. The harvest magnet, the whole Francis Drake legend, and his parentage,
his lineage. I thought that was important. You’re dealing with a guy who’s an
orphan, and I came at it that way—what’s some of the things that are important
to someone who’s an orphan? In the fourth game they dispelled all that, but I
thought it’s still kind of an interesting. What excuses would you make about
your character if you held to this notion that you were the heir to this great explorer?
Your ancestor’s this great dubious, nefarious explorer? If you believed somehow
that was your birthright. Were you conning yourself? There’s some interesting
character stuff you can do there. That and the insane, the big action stuff. I
kept some characters I like and kind of reset them within that world so
there’ll be names and familiar faces and so on, but they won’t necessarily be
what they were in the game, which I think is important, you have to do that,
create amalgams. I can’t imagine fans of Uncharted will
be unhappy, at least with the screenplay. And I do think there’s some
interesting, again, anti-Indiana Jones stuff going on, looting and pillaging
these UNESCO sites and world heritage sites and also these uncharted realms.
There’s 3 million shipwrecks all over the world that have never been seen. That
to me is fascinating. So there’s a lot of that stuff, and a lot of that’s kinda
new and improved, for lack of a better phrase. I think people will dig it, but
I can’t imagine. But I’m sure someone’ll hate my guts, but that’s okay, a lot
of people hate my guts."
To be directed by Shawn Levy ("Night
at the Museum" franchise), Uncharted doesn't yet have a release date.
Source - Collider
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