Tetris creator had to 'fight' with movie writer to tell real story
Alexey Pajitnov and Henk Rogers spoke to RadioTimes.com about adapting the true story of Tetris's origins into a film.
This weekend sees the release of a brand new movie that tells the incredible true story behind the origins of iconic computer game Tetris – with the film having been billed by Apple TV+ as a "Cold War-era thriller on steroids".
The film sees Nikita Yefremov play Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov while Taron Egerton stars as Henk Rogers, a Dutch businessman who travelled to the USSR from his home in Japan to secure the international rights to the game.
Although the film is very much based on real events it takes a number of liberties with the truth, and speaking exclusively to RadioTimes.com, Pajitnov and Rogers revealed that they had to fight to ensure the film remained at least broadly accurate.
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"We fought a lot with Noah [Pink, screenwriter] because his job was to make real action stuff with lots of KGB agents, waving the revolver and air battles and everything that Hollywood likes very much," Pajitnov explained.
"But it was our life. So we tried to recreate the real stuff which we faced. And we find it's very, very exciting as well. And we're very happy that Noah was very responsive and made the real thriller on steroids out of our relatively regular story."
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Rogers added: "I don't know about relatively regular! I mean, this was an adventure from beginning to end for me, it was like an amazing adventure that I was on. And yeah, I was really afraid that it would get lost, the actual story would get lost in the movie.
"Because you know the time period is about a year and a half, and so they condensed a year and a half of my life into two hours. How do you get all of that across, you know, the complicated business dealings, dealing with the Soviet Union, all of these things? And they did a great job. So yeah, I was pleasantly surprised.”
The film also boasts Roger Allam, Toby Jones and Anthony Boyle among its cast, while it was directed by Filth and Stan & Ollie filmmaker Jon S Baird.
Tetris is released on Friday 31st March 2023 on Apple TV+ – you can sign up to Apple TV+ here.
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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.
