Luke Owen speaks with Bad Boys 3 director and Uncharted writer Joe Carnahan…
Organising time with Joe Carnahan was harder than both of us had intended. Both parties were excited to talk, but time differences, bad mobile connections and Carnahan’s insane schedule caused some minor delays. Not only is Carnahan prepping to direct Bad Boys 3 (titled Bad Boys For Life), which sees Will Smith and Martin Lawrence return to their roles, he’s also writing the script for the Uncharted movie adaptation while his script for the Death Wish remake starring Bruce Willis is also in pre-production. He’s a busy man, but he likes it that way.
Although his excitement for Bad Boys For Life shines through, he’s very eager to talk about his script for Uncharted – the big screen adaptation of the popular video game franchise which has been in development for quite some time. “A couple of years ago there was talk about coming in [to write for Uncharted], so I kind of prepared some notes as there was a draft at that time,” he tells me. “So I prepared some notes on that draft, and then I discovered, much my chagrin, that there were other filmmakers involved – which never surprised me – but one of those writers was a good buddy of mine, and I didn’t want to be in competition with my friend. So I kind of stepped aside.” That draft would wind up in the hands of director Seth Gordon (King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters), but he wasn’t the first man to take the job.
Plans for Uncharted date back to 2008 with Avi Arad (Spider-Man) acquiring the rights and hiring David O. Russell (Silver Linings Playbook) to direct. Production was going well, with Russell casting Mark Wahlberg to play hero Nathan Drake alongside Goodfellas co-stars Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, but the director would leave the project in 2010. That script was then re-written by Marianne and Cormac Wibberley (Charlie’s Angels) with Neil Burger (Limitless) taking over the director’s chair. When all three left, Gordon stepped in and a draft by Mark Boal (Zero Dark Thirty) floated around for a while before the director also vacated the chair. This is where Carnahan stepped in. “We were working on Bad Boys 3 and I kind of wanted to focus on the directing portion of it, and let Will [Smith] get in there and do his thing, let the producers get in there, let Jerry Bruckheimer get in there and do their thing, and I was asked what my feeling was on Uncharted,” Carnahan recalls. “And I was obviously a fan of the game and that genre; Raiders of the Lost Ark was a huge perennial film of mine. So the discussion quickly moved from that to, ‘read what we’ve got and give us your thoughts’. So I did, and gave them what I would do and they and they responded well and we were off and running.”
With the video game series selling so well (the latest entry, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, is the highest scoring game on Metacritic for 2016), you have to ask why it’s taken so long for the film adaptation to get off the ground. “It’s always impossible to know why something doesn’t gel or come together,” Carnahan says. “Sometimes it doesn’t even have to do with the script itself, because I read some very compelling versions of Uncharted myself.” So why is it different now in 2016 then it was in 2008? “You’ve got to have a certain amount of fire power,” he admits. “If you don’t have a star you need a director, and if you don’t have a director, you need something else. At least in this instance, both me and [director] Shawn Levy come from different filmmaking backgrounds. We’re both known quantities and that helps, it creates buzz around the project. There isn’t anything that really handicaps the project, sometimes it’s just not the right time or place. That’s usually what it comes down to.”
This leads us to discussing the supposed ‘video game movie curse’, something that has plagued Hollywood since Super Mario Bros. was released in 1993. Although some films have found success (Mortal Kombat, the Resident Evil franchise, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider) it wasn’t until 2016 that the tides began to turn in favour of video game adaptations. “I think people are lying in wait for these things not to work,” he says. “Be it Super Mario Bros. or any other dumpster fire of an adaptation that just didn’t work creates this categorical, ‘well none of them work’. It’s like, ‘we want them to fail. We don’t know why, we just don’t want them to work.’ And that’s why Rockstar has put off the idea of doing Grand Theft Auto. What does that movie look like? Grand Theft Auto is a video game, and it should probably remain a video game. It’s a great mash-up and mixtape of pop culture and that lends itself to this vicarious wish-fulfillment gameplay where you can shoot cops. But those things do not lend themselves to the narrative three acts we need. Uncharted has that in spades.” In the past, movies like Max Payne, Silent Hill and Hitman (and even more recently Hitman: Agent 47) all failed to live up to their video game counterparts and grab audiences at the box office, but the success of The Angry Birds Movie and Warcraft (in China at least) make compelling cases for more movies in this sub-genre. “I really want Assassin’s Creed to work,” he admits, referring to the upcoming video game adaptation starring Michael Fassbender. “It’s a good barometer if it does, it will show that audiences are coming round to it. It has been and always will be driven by economics. If it’s a “genre” that can generate revenue then everybody will embrace them warmly.”
On the next page, Joe Carnahan discusses developing the plot of Uncharted for the big screen and potential casting of Nathan Drake…
