Just got back from the Prince of Persia movie press junket in London and Moscow. For readers curious about what that was like, I’ve posted these pages from my travel sketchbook.

The idea of a junket is to bring the talent — which in this case included Jerry Bruckheimer, Jake Gyllenhaal, Gemma Arterton, Sir Ben Kingsley, Mike Newell, and me — to one destination so the press can come to us, instead of sending us on a tour from place to place. Having the global premiere of Prince of Persia in London rather than L.A. made it a short trip for European journalists, but a longer one for those from the U.S. and South America.

The junket took over several floors of the Dorchester hotel in London, where the interviews and press conference were held.

An inevitability of press junkets is that although the journalists come from different cities and countries, with a range of interviewing styles, you nonetheless tend to get asked the same questions, sometimes thirty or forty times in a single day.

The premiere was Sunday night at the London Westvue.

Not pictured: Gemma dancing barefoot in her princess gown at the afterparty.

Seeing the “Coming Soon” signs for Prince of Persia in the Odeon Leicester Square gave me tingles. That’s the theater where I first saw Raiders of the Lost Ark in the summer of 1981, right out of high school, in a packed house. It set the bar for my summer moviegoing experiences to date, and was one of my major inspirations in creating Prince of Persia on the Apple II a few years later.

Next: On to Moscow.

Being in London for the Prince of Persia movie press junket, I thought this would be an appropriate occasion to post these sketchbook pages from when we were shooting here 18 months ago.

As the caps and parkas suggest, it gets cold on the Pinewood sound stages in December. The sets are such accurate reproductions of the Morocco locations where we were filming a few months earlier, you’d never guess from the finished film that there’s an 80 degree Fahrenheit temperature difference between certain shots.

Above: That’s director Mike Newell at bottom right, presiding over the action via dual monitors. Going counter-clockwise from Mike, there’s Jake doing the scene, script supervisor Beverley Winston, and my hotel dining room. At bottom left, Sir Ben Kingsley waits between takes with his double.

On the left-hand page, Jake and Sir Ben rehearsing with Mike Newell while second A.D. Rich Goodwin looks on. At upper right, Mike and Beverley watching the take, with Mike half out of his director chair like a bowler using body English to help guide the ball down the lane. Bottom right, cinematographer John Seale.