Gama­su­tra recently had a sit down talk with Prince of Per­sia cre­ator, Jor­dan Mech­ner. I’ve posted the major­ity of the inter­view here because it pro­vides a huge amount of insight into the devel­op­ment of the movie adap­ta­tion, and who am I to para­phrase Mr Mechner.

There’s been buzz about the Prince of Per­sia movie. Who’s pro­duc­ing? Who’s directing?

Jerry Bruck­heimer is pro­duc­ing for Walt Dis­ney Pic­tures. Mike Newell [ Don­nie Brasco, Harry Pot­ter and the Gob­let of Fire] is the director.

What’s it like work­ing with Jerry Bruckheimer?

I’ve only seen the tip of the ice­berg, but he is extremely focused, detail-oriented and com­pletely unflap­pable. Things that most peo­ple might con­sider a cri­sis — hur­ri­canes, strikes, what­ever — he han­dles very calmly and some­how it all works out. I can see why the stu­dios feel con­fi­dent entrust­ing him with hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars. If he’s mak­ing the movie, everything’s gonna be OK.

Is Ubisoft involved or does your license agree­ment allow you to do this separately?

They’re sep­a­rate deals. Ubisoft has the videogame rights to Prince of Per­sia and Dis­ney has the film rights.

How long has the script been in development?

I wrote the first draft and sev­eral revi­sions over a period of about a year and a half. Two more years of devel­op­ment fol­lowed, in which addi­tional revi­sions were done by (in this order): Jeff Nach­manoff, Boaz Yakin, Doug Miro and Carlo Bernard.

That sounds like a crazy num­ber of writ­ers, but the orig­i­nal screen­play struc­ture, plot and char­ac­ters have sur­vived the whole process pretty much intact.

It’s still very much the same movie John August and I pitched to Dis­ney and Bruck­heimer back in 2004 — it’s been stream­lined in cer­tain ways, souped up in oth­ers. It’s a good, solid story and I think it’ll be very sat­is­fy­ing on screen.

What are the dif­fer­ences between writ­ing for a video game and writ­ing for a film? How closely does the movie sto­ry­line cor­re­spond to the games?

If you sum­ma­rize the movie in one sen­tence, it sounds iden­ti­cal to the first Sands of Time videogame, but scene by scene it’s actu­ally com­pletely dif­fer­ent. It has to be, because games and film are such dif­fer­ent mediums.

On the sur­face they’re decep­tively sim­i­lar — you can watch five min­utes of an action-adventure videogame and think “this could be a movie,” or vice-versa — but struc­turally the require­ments are totally different.

Here’s one exam­ple: The game kicks off with a cat­a­clysm that basi­cally destroys the world and turns all liv­ing crea­tures except for the three main char­ac­ters into rag­ing, mur­der­ous sand mon­sters. That was a great setup for the game­play we had, which was “acro­batic Per­sian sur­vival horror.”

But if you put that setup in a film, it would be a “B” movie, and that’s not the kind of movie Prince of Per­sia should be. Our model is clas­sic epic, swash­buck­ling action-adventure movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Zorro, and Thief of Bagh­dad, with humor and romance and full of mem­o­rable char­ac­ters. You can’t get there if you turn every­body into sand mon­sters on page fifteen.

I hope Sands of Time game fans will see the movie with an open mind and judge it based on the expe­ri­ence it cre­ates for them, not by the stan­dard of how closely it matches the 2003 video game. The game still exists and you can still have the expe­ri­ence of play­ing it. We’re not destroy­ing it by mak­ing the movie. We’re cre­at­ing some­thing new that has to stand on its own, just as the game did.

Will there be a game title that goes along with the movie? Are there any new games in the works sep­a­rate from the movie?

Sorry, but I can’t answer that question!

How close is the movie to start­ing film­ing and how does the strike affect it?

The movie is in pre-production. At this moment there’s no way to know how long the writ­ers’ strike will last, or if the direc­tors’ and actors’ guilds will strike as well. It’s a very inse­cure time for the whole industry.

A lot of big movies that were set to go, now aren’t. I was really hop­ing that Mike Newell would be the one to direct this movie and I was ecsta­tic when he agreed, but it was bit­ter­sweet because I only had about 24 hours to rejoice before the writ­ers’ strike began.

I sup­port my guild and the writ­ers’ cause, so until the strike is resolved I can’t meet with Newell and the Bruck­heimer execs or con­tribute fur­ther to the devel­op­ment of the movie. It’s frus­trat­ing because I’ve been dream­ing of a Prince of Per­sia movie, basi­cally, for 20 years, and now at this key moment when the project has finally found the right direc­tor and he’s brim­ming with enthu­si­asm and excite­ment, I can’t even meet with him.