Nov 2007 - While promoting the romantic drama Love in the Time of Cholera, director Mike Newell was peppered with a few questions on his next project: the Jerry Bruckheimer movie Prince of Persia. Newell had been busy working on the film for five days before the Los Angeles Love in the Time of Cholera press junket and was excited about the challenge of creating a Prince of Persia that’s not simply going to be a ‘video game movie’.
Although the movie is based on Ubisoft’s popular video games, and Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner is collaborating with Jeffrey Nachmanoff (The Day After Tomorrow) on the screenplay, Newell doesn’t like that ‘video game’ label attached to the big screen version. “It's a great story,” explained Newell. “If you had read the script, you would know that it wasn't a video game. It's very exciting and it's immensely romantic. It's like Lost Horizons. It takes you to somewhere you've never been.”
Newell’s not exactly an expert on the Prince of Persia game, but he’ll be learning from one of his assistants who went through training on the game. As far as what fans of the video game can expect, Newell says he’ll definitely be including scenes of men holding onto ledges and pulling themselves up, among other video game references. “Oh, we'll have all that. Certainly we will. Yes, yes, you bet. But there's so much that will happen with that story because it's 1,300 years ago. This girl who was actually a kind of priest - I'm sorry, I've been on it five days. I'm full of f***ing ideas. It'll be terrific.”
Newell warns not to expect something similar in tone to Pirates of the Caribbean. “Pirates is comedy. This isn't comedy. This will be romance. This will be a great love story set against danger and the fate of the world.”
Newell is just barely into production but he did share one little bit of trivia. “You know what Stonehenge is? Stonehenge is a machine that tells you that the world will survive because every year the sun comes up in exactly the same place.”
