Australian filmmaker Justin Kurzel made a name for himself with the dark serial killer drama “Snowtown” before heading to Hollywood to try two very different projects that both involved actors Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard.
One was his adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” which pulled in positive reviews but was a box-office failure – making just $16 million from a $20 million budget.
The other was his film adaptation of video game series “Assassin’s Creed,” based on the major Ubisoft franchise. Though reviews were negative, they were better than some other adaptations – even so, the film fizzled in release – snagging just $240 million worldwide against its $125 million budget.
Speaking with The Fourth Wall podcast for a recent interview, Kurzel opened up about his time making “Assassin’s Creed” and how video game adaptations are so difficult to pull off:
“There were certain aspects of the game that everyone thought would be fantastic to have in the film. I don’t think there was ever like, ‘You have to do this.’ I think the challenge is the ideas in the game are so complicated.” [In ‘Assassin’s Creed,’] you’ve got two different worlds; the modern world with Callum Lynch who then goes into the Animus and goes back to a particular time. And to be honest, that’s why most people play the game – to be immersed in a particular period of history.
So it was really tricky, that balance of how much to you start in the future and how much do you land in the past, how the two time periods riff off each other, and that became the most challenging part of the writing. There are aspects of that film I really love and are really unusual and I definitely was surprised by some of the feedback from it because I think there’s a lot of merit in it. But the most challenging part for all of us was to land what is a really complicated story and that from the beginning was the thing we knew was tricky.”
The games in the series spend very little time in the present, opting to stick in the past, but the film overall had only a handful of scenes set outside the present – specifically 15th century Spain. Kurzel says one change he would make had a film sequel been a real potential would have been to play around with more timelines and different periods:
“I don’t think we got down the track too far with [a sequel], but I mean, it’s obvious – pick your time period in which you could’ve traveled to next. Instead of going back so many years, I thought it’d be really interesting to go back to a period in time that felt closer to the present.
I was thinking about adaptations for great books as well. How do you suddenly take a 600 or 700-page book that’s a masterpiece and shove all that in 90 minutes? Sometimes I think you need to dismantle it all and approach it in a very simple way…So maybe, ‘Assassin’s’ would work really fantastically as a series. Maybe there’s a way of simplifying the concept of the game to really capture the heart of it.”
Kurzel recently did a punk rock version of the Ned Kelly tale with “True History of the Kelly Gang” starring George McKay, Nicholas Hoult, Charlie Hunnam, Essie Davis and Russell Crowe. He’s also developing multiple series for streaming.
