Uncharted director and gaming guru Hex on how to make a video game movie that doesn’t suck

After decades of shonky film versions of beloved video games, Uncharted’s director and a gaming guru reveal the secrets to making a good one.

Uncharted director Ruben Fleischer is all too aware of the challenges of turning a hit video game into a hit movie – and that history is against him.

Dating back to the 1990s stinkers such as Super Mario Brothers and Street Fighter through to more recent big-budget misfires including Warcraft and Hitman (twice!), the track record of such adaptations has been grim, to the point that some refer to it as the “video game curse”.

Fleischer, who has taken on one of the biggest video game franchises ever, with more than 47 million copies sold since the original Uncharted was released in 2007, believes a common mistake in the many failed attempts in the genre is trying to do a “one-for-one version” of the video game.

“Watching a film is a much more passive experience when compared to the active experience of playing one, where you are literally the star of your own movie,” Fleischer says.

“In terms of the video game curse, all I was concerned with was making sure we were telling a story that was really engaging and trying to make sure that the movie worked in and of itself, without relying on just the title and the association for its success.”

Actor Tom Holland and director Ruben Fleischer attend a photocall at Palazzo Manfredi for their new video game movie Uncharted.

Gaming guru Stephanie Bendixsen, host of Red Bull Wrap Up and the Back Pocket, is “cautiously optimistic” for Uncharted, as a huge fan of the game and its developer Naughty Dog.

She applauds the casting of Tom Holland as fortune-hunter Nathan Drake and Mark Wahlberg as his mentor Victor “Sully” Sullivan, as well as the decision to make the film an origin story rather than a more direct adaptation of one of the four games in the franchise.

Bendixsen says most adaptations fall down in the storytelling: a video game can prop up a weak story with its interactive gameplay, but a film has no such luxury.

The challenge for filmmakers, she says, is to reward the hard-core gamers who bring a built-in, but judgmental, audience, but also cater to those who have never played the game and just want a couple of hours of escapism.

The Uncharted video game series has sold more than 40 million copies.

“Anytime you adapt one thing from another medium there needs to be specific changes to make it suit partly a different audience and a different format,” she says.

“But I think the core of what makes the characters beloved to a lot of people needs to be retained.

“It needs to have references that gamers will recognise but be an entertaining film in its own right for people who’ve never seen it at all.

“Fans will enjoy little Easter egg moments. There will be lines that Tom Holland will say that we’ll recognise, there will be puzzle moments that will be like, ‘Oh my gosh, I remember doing that’. But then the rest of it just needs to be a film.

“Otherwise, you’re not doing the film medium justice.”

Gaming guru Stephanie “Hex” Bendixsen says video games are becoming more cinematic.

As technology improves, gaming has undoubtedly become more cinematic.

With better graphics and sound, the “cut scenes” – non-interactive, mini-movies that interrupt the game to advance or explain the story – have become more elaborate and allowed for richer characters and more spectacular scenarios.

Bendixsen gives credit to Naughty Dog, which made the acclaimed, award-winning The Last Of Us, for being among the first developers to push gaming “in a true cinematic direction”, taking characterisation seriously and embracing motion capture to create a more immersive and rewarding experience.

“We found ourselves so much more emotionally invested in the story because they treated it as if they were making a film,” she says of the Uncharted games.

“We are now starting to see films from games that make a lot more sense in translation because they come from a cinematic place already.”

The trailblazing Uncharted games took full advantage of the cut-scene technology, allowing the original voice actors cast as Nate and Sully to improvise dialogue, resulting in a loose, playful tone that Fleischer wanted to replicate in his movie version, with input from PlayStation and Naughty Dog.

Tom Holland, left, as Nathan Drake and Mark Wahlberg as Victor “Sully” Sullivan in Uncharted. Picture: Clay Enos

Thankfully, he says, Holland and Wahlberg were up to the task, from the very first scene they filmed together on day three of what became an arduous, Covid-interrupted shoot in Germany and Spain.

“That chemistry was there from the beginning and almost immediately it was them improvising and making it their own and going above and beyond the script,” he says.

“As a director with a background in comedy I love that and having these two incredibly capable actors really embodying their roles bringing so much to it and adding to it.”

Fleischer discovered another challenge of translating video game highlights into the real world the hard way – having to obey pesky laws of physics.

In one of the movie’s many games homages, the director re-purposes a scene from Uncharted 3, which features Drake dangling from the back of a plane in mid-flight, leaping from one cargo bale to the next.

Ruben Fleischer was grateful that Tom Holland was able to perform many of his own stunts for Uncharted.

“I know there is a ton of (gaming) development that goes into making them but when you actually have to do it with real people and deal with real laws of gravity and physics it makes it a lot more challenging,” Fleischer laughs.

“They set the bar high but with every sequence we approached we just wanted to try to make it the best it could be.”

Again, gaming fan Holland, who bulked up from his Spider-Man physique to play Drake, was the secret weapon, insisting on doing as much of the action as he was allowed.

“He’s basically a stuntman himself,” Fleischer says. “You can tell in the finished result that’s really him hanging off the floor of a balcony, being whipped around by these boxes at the back of the plane and doing all the death-defying feats in the midst of the boat sequence.”

Uncharted opens in cinemas on February 17. New episodes of Back Pocket stream on Twitch every Thursday at 7pm AEDT

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Originally published as Uncharted director and gaming guru Hex on how to make a video game movie that doesn’t suck