Prince of Persia director hates video games

Mike Newell (Pictured above), best known for the Harry Potter series and Four Weddings and a Funeral, doesn’t like videogames. He can’t play them, he thinks they’re vapid, and talking about them “bores the arse” off him. Didn’t stop him from making a Prince of Persia movie, of course.

“I’m entirely incompetent at playing videogames,” admits Newell. “In the Prince Of Persia game, you have to run across walls — I could never get more than three feet without falling into the revolving knives. I was hopeless. And yet I knew I had to satisfy the gamers with the Prince Of Persia movie. It’s an important audience and it’s a very vocal audience. If they don’t like something, you’re going to hear. I didn’t want that to happen.”

Newell believes the Prince of Persia movie is good because it didn’t try to copy the games themselves, which he says lack human drama: “You can’t do it without the human drama. And the videogame cannot do that. The videogame can do all sorts of face-pulling, all sorts of: ‘I am a bad man, I have a mean jagged sword,’, but it can’t do any more than that.

“… Don’t get me wrong — I watched the game and took many things from it. But I haven’t had the experience of feeling in a game. The one thing I do not do when I watch my son mow down Brazilians by the regiment – nor when I watched my assistants playing Prince Of Persia — I don’t feel anything, which is why I hate my son doing it.”

[Source]