A Minecraft Movie is "not the canonised version of Minecraft lore", says director
Jared Hess spoke exclusively to RadioTimes.com about the new video game adaptation – which arrives in cinemas this weekend.
With some video game films and TV shows – take The Last of Us for example – writing a script is a fairly straightforward case of adaptation: taking a storyline directly from the game and bringing it to life in a new medium.
That is very much not the case when it comes to A Minecraft Movie. One of the things that has made the hugely popular game such a global phenomenon is precisely the fact that there is no overarching storyline – that what happens in its world falls entirely to the individual player.
"I mean, that's the unique thing about the game," explained director Jared Hess in an exclusive interview with RadioTimes.com ahead of the film's debut. "There's no story when you play, and you bring your own imagination, your own narrative to the characters, to the world.
"So when we were developing the film, we had to kind of approach it from a way of opportunity, where it was like, 'Man, we can almost do anything that we want here.'"
He continued: "And for me, it's just such an amazing setting to go in an epic adventure film that's also ridiculous. So much of the world is silly, but it's super scary, and parts of the world are really dark as well.
"And I quickly fell in love with the piglins, as the chief villains of the film, just because they're so iconic, I've never seen piglin barbarians that are cannibals and obsessed with gold that exist anywhere else and and so it was like, 'Gosh, let's build a story around that!'"
One way in which the film differs from the game relates to the graphics; the game is known for its simple, pixelated aesthetic – with absolutely everything made from blocks – and although this has been partly replicated for the movie, there were some aspects that Hess said were open to "interpretation".
"Like, the creeper, for example," he explained, referring to the famous hostile creatures from the game. "A lot of people may have gone, 'Oh, wow, does it have, like, reptilian skin that's green, or is it covered in moss?'
"And so we had a ton of conversations with (video game company) Mojang about it, and this is where we ended up. So it's like, other people that play it may see that it's made from something totally different.
"And that's great, because we're definitely not the canonised version of what the Minecraft lore is, but [we're] translating all of that and trying to preserve the iconic blocky shape of everything."
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A Minecraft Movie hits UK cinemas on 4th April.
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Authors
Patrick Cremona is the Senior Film Writer at Radio Times, and looks after all the latest film releases both in cinemas and on streaming. He has been with the website since October 2019, and in that time has interviewed a host of big name stars and reviewed a diverse range of movies.
