ural it keeps trying since video games are a multibillion dollar industry with a built-in fan base. The latest contender hoping to achieve big screen success is Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Based on the game series created by Jordan Mechner, Persia is a rousing period adventure that has all the right elements for a summer blockbuster: a dashing prince (Jake Gyllenhaal) who teams up with a beautiful princess (Gemma Arterton) to stop a villain from releasing the mystical Sands of Time and destroying the world. Oh, and it also has a dagger that can turn back time. project to screenwriter John August who then took it to Jerry Bruckheimer and Dis- ney. "No game designer had ever success- fully adapted his own game as a screenplay, so that was a hurdle," Mechner says. With August vouching for him, Mechner was given the go-ahead to take a crack at script- ing. He wrote five or six drafts over the next year. Learning to think like a screenwriter rather than a game designer was challeng- mand totally different approaches to story- telling and achieve their effects in different ways," he says. "The surface similarities are actually misleading, because what's fun to play isn't necessarily fun to watch." baton was passed to Boaz Yakin. "Jordan had really laid out the story and the atmosphere of the world was all there, but [the script needed] more dynamic relationships," Yakin says. His work focused primarily on the first act of the script, including one change that had major character implications. "In the original script, the main character was an ac- tual son of the king," he recalls. "I changed it so he was an adopted street kid, hence having a sense of jealousy with his brothers and need- ing to prove something." Also, in previous drafts, Princess Tamina (Arterton) spent much of the film disguised as a servant girl. Yakin decided to reveal her true identity from the start, which changed the stakes and interac- tions between her and Prince Dastan (Gyllen- haal). "I upped the soap content so people have something they are focused on other Yakin did one draft and a set of revisions be- fore moving on. neither was familiar with the games, the script gave them a chance to work with Bruckheimer, something they'd always dreamed of. Bernard says the exotic setting also appealed to them. The partners set a high bar for themselves: "Raiders of the Lost Ark is the template," Miro says. Initially, the writers were asked to focus on the second and third acts, as the studio and producers were happy with the first 30 pages. "We outlined first," Bernard says, "primarily fo- cusing on how to build the story from where the first act left off; then we circled back around to the first act. You familiarize yourself with the materials, then you step back and say, `How do we build it into something that feels like a big movie?'" a scheming older man -- one who was bril- liant and dangerous, but not much of a physical threat to an acrobatic warrior with a time-shifting dagger. "He didn't have a fighting force to act on his behalf, so we in- troduced that," Miro continues. The writ- ers also conjured up a roguish ally for Dastan, a character known as Sheik Amar (Alfred Molina) and polished up the rela- tionship between Dastan and Tamina. writers didn't get to meet him until after the strike was resolved. In fact, the strike almost spelled "game over" for the project. After rushing to get as much done as possible, then chomping at the bit for months until the strike was over, the writers got to work on what would be the most definite draft -- al- though they didn't know it at the time. "With the delay of the strike, if that draft had- n't been good enough, they just would have moved on," Miro says. "Luckily, all our ener- gies had been pent up during the strike and we put them into the script." Mechner puts it, "A movie based on a video game will work or not for the same reasons as any other kind of movie -- because of the quality of its storytelling and filmmak- ing. It doesn't get to play by different rules just because it's based on a game." |