PoP Original Screenplay
Regarding Prince of Persia’s recent journey from video game to movie, I’m sometimes asked how closely the final film follows my original story.
Now that the movie is out on DVD/Blu-Ray, I figure the easy way to satisfy curiosity is to simply post my screenplay from June 2005.
Quick history: This was the last draft I wrote, starting from the story John August and I pitched to Disney/Bruckheimer in 2004. A series of other writers took it from there: Jeff Nachmanoff, Boaz Yakin, Doug Miro & Carlo Bernard, in that order, resulting in the shooting script that went into production in summer 2008.
The making of the movie is well documented in Michael Singer’s coffee-table-worthy book and the movie DVD/Blu-Ray extras. Now, you can see how it started.
Update: If you’re curious about the game-into-movie adaptation process, I’ve also posted the original game script of Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, which I wrote in 2002-03, and an accompanying article about how that game story was developed. As these materials illustrate, writing for games and movies are two very different crafts.
Toronto
Just got back from my first-ever visit to Toronto, a city I’ve long wished to visit for many reasons, yet somehow, amazingly and despite being from New York, never did until this weekend.
It was a whirlwind, too-short 36 hours including
- Ubisoft’s Toronto studio launch party Sunday night
- giving the keynote Monday morning for Interactive Ontario (talking about one of my favorite subjects, Prince of Persia)
- doing a TIFF “Film and Games” panel later that afternoon with Jade Raymond and Jon Landau (a really nice, down to earth guy who produced two small yet profitable indie films, Titanic and Avatar)
- standing ovation for Catherine Deneuve after the premiere of “Potiche” (her 109th movie according to IMDB)
The Toronto International Film Festival felt welcoming, spiffy and well organized, like Toronto itself. I left the city by an airport on an island in the middle of downtown that you take a ferry to get to. Now that’s cool.
Sketching in cafés and airports
Some more sketchbook pages for no particular reason. This was in NY a few months ago:
and this was the week Alice in Wonderland opened at El Capitan:
and this was last week at Dorval airport:
Weirdly, I spotted the guy with the mustache again a few days later, at a bar in LA. Sketching people makes you pay close attention to them; I doubt I’d have recognized him otherwise. I wonder how many of the strangers I pass by every day are people I’ve seen before, maybe many times before, but I just don’t notice.
Airport security
Did these quick sketches while standing in line for airport security screening. It was way too early in the morning and all I wanted to do was get on the plane and sleep.
PoP released for IMAX and iPhone
I woke up this morning thinking “Today’s the day!” One that’s been emblazoned in my mind for weeks now, thanks to subtle reminders like this one:
But it wasn’t until I picked up my iPhone and blearily checked email and Twitter while making breakfast (compulsive habit, I know; I’m trying to break it) that I received the surprising news that today is ALSO the release date of the original Prince of Persia for iPhone/iPad.
You’d think such perfect timing would have to have been coordinated months in advance, but it wasn’t. If there was a mastermind, it could only have been some unsung Apple employee with a sense of irony.
This weekend might be just the occasion for me to try playing through the game for the first time in 20 years. I already have my fallback strategy: If I can’t get past level three, I’ll blame the touchscreen controls. It couldn’t be aging reflexes. No way.
And I promise not to play my iPhone during the movie after the lights have gone down.
