What do you do when you have too many stories to tell — and only one movie in which to tell them? That’s the problem Duncan Jones, the director of the upcoming film based on the Warcraft universe, faces.
Warcraft is now in post production and scheduled for March 2016. Jones is best known for his well-received 2011 thriller Source Code (in which Jake Gyllenhaal is a soldier who must re-enact the last eight minutes before a train explodes). He spoke on a panel today at the BlizzCon convention in Anaheim, Calif., on the making of the movie and its special challenges.
Most video game movies aren’t concerned about having too much plot. If anything, they suffer from the opposite problem, which leads filmmakers to just make the main character look like the game and then write a completely different story. (I’m looking at you, Lara Croft.)
“World of Warcraft has a different problem,” Jones said, “in that it’s got so many stories. It’s been going for 10 years, and Warcraft itself has been going for 20 years. Our challenge was to actually drill down and find a story that would work as a single film. There’s so many great characters and so many story arcs.”
When he picked up the project, it had an existing body of work from director Sam Raimi (of the Spider-Man movies), who had first been attached to the project. But right away, Jones saw a problem: no love for the Horde, the inhuman faction of Warcraft.
“It was, in my opinion, very human-centric, very Alliance-centric. There was I think an approach that in my opinion didn’t put the Orcs in the best light,” he said. And as someone who had played World of Warcraft for a long time, Jones strongly maintained that both factions needed fair representation.
“As in the game where you could choose which side to be on, I thought that it was really important that we made a film which allowed you to be on either side of the conflict, and followed through heroes from both sides,” he said.
That put Jones in uncharted waters: Even live action war movies rarely show both sides. Clint Eastwood’s acclaimed Flags of Our Fathers/Letters from Iwo Jima movies might be the best modern example, and he took two films to tell the two sides of World War II.
“Telling a story where you really allow the audience to empathize and feel for both sides is unusual in war movies alone,” Jones said, “let alone fantasy films, where normally the monsters are portrayed as villains. … In our case, the Orcs were a group that we really wanted to allow the audience to care about.”
Above: The Orc warchief Durotan.
So with input from the story masters at game publisher Blizzard Entertainment, he decided to go all the way back to the beginning, the story that drove the company’s first Warcraft game: Orcs & Humans.
That story was the conflict between the Orc chief Durotan and Anduin Lothar, the leader of the Alliance armies, and the rise of Orc warchief Orgrim Doomhammer (who lends his name to the current Warcraft Horde capital city of Orgrimmar.) Both sides had powerful mages at their command, names that are also familiar to Warcraft players: Khadgar and Medivh.
In the original story as told by the Warcraft games, the Orcs were from another realm: Draenor. (That world is depicted via time travel in the upcoming Warcraft expansion pack Warlords of Draenor, launching next week.) A small portal opened between their world and Azeroth, where the humans lived, and after some minor raids, the Orcs launched an attack on the human capital city.
It wasn’t clear from the panel just how closely the movie will hew to the original story.
The panel stage showed off armor and weapons from the film, which were strikingly similar to those depicted in the World of Warcraft storylines.
Above: The full panel, flanked by actors in Alliance soldier uniforms.
Other tidbits from the session:
Bill Westenhofer is the visual effects supervisor for the film, and he won an Oscar for his work on the effects from Life of Pi. Like many involved in the project, he is a longtime WoW player, starting with the game’s first alpha test. (Some of the Warcraft movie’s effects were put together by Industrial Light and Magic by other hardcore Warcraft players.)
He said the motion capture for the film was done on-set, which is incredibly rare. Typically, this is recorded separately.
“We wanted to put our Orc actors right next to our human actors and have them interplay,” he said. “There’s a magic that happens in the real performance. … Motion capture on set was an incredible technical challenge. Our camera operator could see, through his viewfinder, a digital representation of the Orc as he’s filming it. Our actors would be translated in real time, converted into an Orc, and they could see it.
“We’re really proud of how it turned out.”
Westenhofer noted that he plays an Alliance mage, joking that he asked himself whether he could do justice to “the enemy.” “Out of respect for all of you who have ganked me, we are delivering you Orcs that I am very proud of,” he told the appreciative crowd.
Above: Rob Kazinsky and Chris Metzen share an animated moment.
Rob Kazinsky (Chuck Hansen in Pacific Rim) plays Orgrim, Durotan’s friend. He said he plays for a world top-100 guild of WoW players and had more than 500 days /played — an in-game command that enables you to measure actual playtime. He spent months training with a movement master to learn how to move and walk like something 7 feet tall and upward of 600 pounds.
“We’re fans. We wanted it to be right. It would absolutely murder me if this thing sucked,” he said.
Clancy Brown (The Shawshank Redemption, Starship Troopers, Spongebob) plays Blackhand the Destroyer, a leading Orc in the story. Blizzard’s senior vice president of story and franchise development, Chris Metzen, told the panel that Brown was the voice of Horde leader Thrall in the Warcraft Adventures, a game the company canceled years ago. He met the actor on the set of the movie.
“He said, ‘I can’t believe you hired me for this gig.’ I said, ‘What do you mean? You’re Clancy Brown.’ ‘I thought I was the death of Warcraft products.’ ”
Jones said the movie is mostly waiting on special effects to be done.
“Storytelling-wise, we know what the film is. We’re there now. We have so many special effects, it’s outrageous. It’s Avatar and The Lord of the Rings at the same time. It’s a big, big, big film. It’s just going to take a while. … I’m sorry, I wish it was sooner.”
“This is a Blizzard audience. They know the drill,” Metzen told him.
The panel discussed the lineup of actors in the film.
For the Alliance:
- Travis Fimmel (Vikings): Lothar
- Dominic Cooper (Need for Speed, Captain America): King Llane
- Ruth Negga (The Samaritan, Love/Hate): Lady Taria
- Ben Schnetzer (Pride, The Riot Club, The Book Thief): Khadgar
For the Horde:
- Toby Kebbell (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Prince of Persia, Sorcerer’s Apprentice, War Horse): Durotan
- Rob Kazinsky (Pacific Rim): Orgrim Doomhammer
- Clancy Brown (The Shawshank Redemption): Blackhand the Destroyer
- Paula Patton (Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, Precious, 2 Guns): Garona
- Ben Foster (Lone Survivor, 3:10 to Yuma): Medivh
- Daniel Wu (That Demon Within, The Man with the Iron Fists, New Police Story): Gul’dan