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."