Director John Moore and stars Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, and Chris “Ludacris” Bridges were in attendance at the San Diego Comic-Con this weekend to discuss Max Payne, their upcoming film adaptation of the video game.
Right off the bat, Moore explained that his biggest goal in taking such a popular video game with a great story and turning it into a major motion picture was just not to mess it up.
Here’s the funny thing about video games and movies — the minute you take that controller out of the player’s hands, you better deliver something of equal value. Ya gotta give them something so exciting and kick-ass and we thought the way to do that is to be highly subjective and make you feel like you are Max Payne.
Marky Mark is still highly popular with the ladies apparently. Must have been leftover “Twilighters” (that’s what I’m callin’ them now).
In regards to creating the character, Mark Wahlberg said:
I read the script after Invincible and The Happening and Lovely Bones, I wanted to kick some ass again and I got an opportunity to do it in a way where I think I did more than I did in The Departed, movies like Four Brothers and Fear.
Mila Kunis apparently kicks a lot of ass in this movie, too. She trained with an automatic and a baton and also speaks Russian. Awesome. Go Meg.
They used a new camera system called the Phantom that shoots up to one thousand frames per second for the slow-motion, “bullet-time” look we know from the game. They also needed to come up with their own style of doing this so that they weren’t being John Woo or the Wachowski Brothers.
When I first heard about this project, I figured just another game-to-movie embarrassment (which is yet to be seen), but I will admit, the footage I’ve seen is very impressive visually. If they pull together a good story and good performances, they may just have something. On the other hand — as it always seems to come up — there have been rumors of this being PG-13 and for an M-rated game, for the fans of the game anyway, that might not be the best way to “give them something of equal value” as John Moore put it. I personally have not played the game, so I have no idea how important that aspect is right now.
Max Payne is slated for a October 17, 2008 release.
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