During the recent IMAX screening of Shawn Levy's Real Steel, hosted by our own Steven Weintraub, the prolific director and producer talked at length about his beloved 2011 fighting robot movie ... and a possible sequel. But since he has so many irons in the fire, Levy also talked a bit about the upcoming second season of Netflix's Stranger Things, and, of course, his highly anticipated video game adaptation, Uncharted.

While you can read up on what Levy had to say about Real Steel 2 and Stranger Things in our related articles, this one concerns the status of Uncharted. Levy will direct and produce the Naughty Dog action-adventure game adaptation that follows the roguish Nathan Drake in his quest for legendary treasure. While the film is still in early stages, Levy revealed the progress on all fronts, from the script, to casting, to Sony's planned start date for filming.

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Image via Naughty Dog

As for just how long Levy has been circling Uncharted, he said:

I’ve been interested in this project for years. I’ve played and loved every iteration of the game. I think it’s largely a popularly accepted notion that it’s as cinematic a game as we’ve had, maybe ever, certainly of late. And it’s cinematic in that it’s not only wildly visual, but it’s really rooted in character and a very specific tone and a sense of fun, right? When is the last great, fun, fucking action-dynamic, treasure-hunting movie? Right? It’s not Indiana Jones, it’s not National Treasure; it’s very specific, it’s all kind of anchored in Nathan’s tone.

 

So I’ve been interested in it, and I’ve just been quietly letting people know I’ve been interested in it, but other people have been involved, I’ve been busy, and a moment finally appeared recently where I was like, “Me! Okay, me!” Sony and the producers involved were like, “Yeah, that actually makes perfect sense.” I’m like, “Yeah! That’s what I’ve been saying for a little while.”

 

I am unabashedly thrilled to be making that next year.

You read that right; Levy will indeed be tackling Uncharted within the year:

Yes, that’s my next project. Normally, as a director, you’re attached to something—I know of at least one director in this room—it’s like, the dance we always do is, “Oh, I’m attached to this,” and then you look at my IMDb page and it looks like I’m making 19 movies.

 

Uncharted, I am not messing around. I am so committed to this thing and I’m in it on the script level with Joe Carnahan, who knows what he’s doing; that’s been a really frickin’ fun collaboration.

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Image via Sony

Steve and Levy shared a fun story about how the director had to clamp down, in a good-natured way, on screenwriter Joe Carnahan who was supposed to be working on the script and not tweeting about NFL games:

He was tweeting on a Sunday! And I happen to know that he left his house to go somewhere, like, he’s in a remote location with the sole purpose of escaping his house that has his young kids in it so that he can write this script that I need very, very soon. I’m like, go cloister yourself in this fortress of solitude somewhere that I won’t share with the world.

 

And then, I’m on an airplane, and I’m reading he’s tweeting like about Sunday football, and I’m like, “The hell, man? Get back to work!” So then we had like a three-tweet long Twitter war, and then we texted each other like, “That was fun.” But then I was like, “No, seriously, get back to work.”

Steve also had a chance to chat with Carnahan recently. He talked quite a bit about the challenges of video game adaptations and the tone they were going for with this script. You can read about that here, and follow along below to see Levy's take on it:

Steve: He called Uncharted the “anti-Indiana Jones”…

 

Yeah, I always feel like I have a big mouth; Joe has the biggest mouth, it’s awesome. Joe is so entertaining in real life and on social media because he’s fearless, he’s candid, and I do think that where he’s telling the truth is that, Indiana Jones, people compare Uncharted to it because both are treasure-hunting movies, but Indy was academic, there was nobility and a kind of well-intentioned … he actually was heroic whereas Drake, the last thing he would ever call himself or be called is heroic. And if he has heroic qualities within him, they’re in spite of his rogue nature.

 

So maybe from a million miles away it’ll have those Indy elements, but it’s very much a much grittier, more naturalistic, real-world, contemporary … that’s the other thing, Indiana Jones is a period piece, right? We always kind of forget that it’s not set in this world, in this now, whereas Uncharted will be.

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Image via Naughty Dog

Clearly one of the biggest news items related to Uncharted will be the casting of Nathan Drake. Levy confirmed the status of that process:

Have you thought about casting?

 

Levy: I’ve definitely thought about it.

 

Have you been meeting with people?

 

Levy: The truth is, the conversations that are happening right now are with the studio and the producers talking about who feels right to us and to me.

And since the casting decision is so highly anticipated, lots of fans have been pitching their favorites across social media. I hate to break it to you, but Levy won't be crowd-sourcing the lead of his long-awaited Uncharted adaptation:

I’ve been pitched everyone. God bless you, Twitter, but I made a joke that, “You’re saving me the money of hiring a casting director, Twitter,” because from Nikolaj [Coster-Waldau] to Oscar Isaac, [Nathan] Fillion, everyone that you would, [Chris] Pratt, Chris Evans, Chris Pine, I mean the suggestions are…

 

So it’s every actor that’s out there.

 

Levy: It’s every actor who is ruggedly handsome, which is to say every movie star, and who looks anything like the square-jawed, chiseled-featured Drake. I’m not actually going to base my casting on Twitter suggestions. Maybe I’ve even said the name in this room; who knows?

 

Eventually, if people keep suggesting ideas and actors, one of them will prove to be true. We’re very hard at work on the script right now.

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Image via Naughty Dog

With the script in the works and casting decisions just starting to be talked about in a more official manner, you can bet that Uncharted plans to kick off filming within the year:

You’re not filming before March?

 

I’m definitely not filming before March. The goal is to film in the late spring, early summer.

So there you have it. The script is in process (so leave Carnahan alone on Twitter for a while), and the casting decisions have yet to be finalized, but things will get underway in the next six to nine months if everything goes according to plan.

As for the movie itself, during the Q&A portion a fan asked about the use of virtual reality and augmented reality in upcoming movies. Levy related his answer to his approach to Uncharted:

I think what we all feel when we play Uncharted is that approach, that action experience is so, so immersive. I’ve already started thinking about how do we approach these action sequences in a way that may or may not be the same set pieces from the game, because I think people would be disappointed if all I did was put those in live-action, but that feel continuous with that immersion. You are there, with Drake, doing that stuff from building to building to vehicle to water to air, and it feels kind of continuous and engaging.

 

I have, like many of us, only dabbled in samplings of virtual reality and more literal immersive technologies. I think it is staggeringly impressive and probably a future we can’t fight, but I’m hoping for many, many years first of making movies in this dimension and in this format, and in the challenge of making this flat screen immersive even without us being localized in it. I think we’ll watch it change, but there’s a certain challenge to creating a world that you are in even if you know you’re watching a two-dimensional screen.

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Image via Naughty Dog

 

Finally, Levy also shared a bit of insight into the camera technology he used on Real Steel, teased where you might see it used next, and also revealed a cool behind-the-scenes moment from filming:

There’s this thing called the “virtual camera” which, I was at Naughty Dog and we were talking about the making of Uncharted and the process. It’s very, very similar to the way we did Real Steel which is to say, we captured the fights, but then we had a virtual camera—VC as we called it—and this was technology that was largely designed out of necessity on Avatar where you could photograph this captured data from an infinite number of angles. You could literally try a shot, watch it, try another shot, edit them together, watch it, and go, “No, you know what, I need you to be tighter there,” scrub one, reshoot it tighter, but it’s right there on your monitor.

 

But where Real Steel got even crazier, and was a technology that was only partially used on Avatar, and will be heftily used on the sequels I’d expect, was a technology called Simulcam which is, we then went to Michigan, went to that old Ford Model T factory that we used for Crash Palace and we had the technology that when we put the camera on our shoulder, we saw our robots in that real ring. All those shots in all those fights, we did those shots in a real stadium or arena in Michigan, but I had real-time playback of the fight converted to the robot avatars in real time while I was shooting with thousands of extras. That remains one of the coolest experiences I’ve ever had.

While we have a bit to wait for Uncharted to hit theaters, be sure to check out Levy's latest production, Arrival, in theaters this weekend.

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Image via Naughty Dog