Joe Carnahan is an unexpected and welcome choice to write a movie based on the popular video game series Uncharted. Carnahan has an abrasive, aggressive tone in his writing that has given his films Narc, Smokin’ Aces, The A-Team, The Grey, and Stretch a welcome and unforgettable edge. While Sony is clearly looking for something that will appeal to a broad audience with what could be a tentpole franchise, the fact that they’re willing to trust Carnahan with the script says that they’re not just trying to make an Indiana Jones clone. If anything, Carnahan is acutely aware of trying to make Uncharted stand on its own.

For those who are unfamiliar with the Uncharted games, they follow adventurer Nathan Drake, a descendant of the privateer Sir Francis Drake [correction: he begins the game series believing he's Drake's descendant], who, with the help of his friend Sully, goes in search of lost cities and treasures.

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Image via Sony

Steve Weintraub recently spoke to Carnahan, and he talked about working with director Shawn Levy to capture a tone that evokes Raiders of the Lost Ark but also has a very anti-Indiana Jones feel with its protagonist’s personality:

JOE CARNAHAN: I can tell you that Shawn Levy and I sat down last weekend, he has fantastic knowledge. Here's the thing, Shawn is an incredibly bright, incredibly skilled, talented guy, and you sit with him for five minutes and you know and understand why he has the level of success he's had. I think he understands, we both have tremendous fondness for Raiders, and he wants to, I think Shawn's capable of doing a lot of things. I can tell you this: what I've written is very anti-Indy in the sense of the guy that loves museums and wants to preserve these artifacts. He's not! He's a thief and he's a grifter, and he's a scourge. He and Sully are not good guys but they're better than the bad guys. It's a game, you know, they're certainly rogues, and certainly don't have a problem, even in the first game he just kind of dump Elena and it's interesting. I think it's gonna be, I honestly think this one's got a real shot. And I was really glad when Shawn came on because I'm too deep into Bad Boys and I really wanna see that through. Too much sweat equity in that one; years of trying to do Uncharted. I'm flattered that these guys wanted me to write it. It's a hell of a responsibility and hell of an opportunity and I don't want to squander it now.

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Image via Naughty Dog

Carnahan’s well aware of the negative association audiences have with movies based off video games, and he believes that the reason video game movies have fallen short is being too faithful to the source material and not focusing enough on telling a story that can stand on its own:

CARNAHAN: I think that, it's gonna need to be something that exceeds the sum of its parts, you know what I'm saying? It just doesn't function as a straight lift of the video game. I sat down with Amy [Hening, director of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune] and sat down with [Drake voice actor] Nolan North and sat down with Neil [Druckmann, writer of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune], who created this thing, and took them through what I was doing and what I was thinking of and they loved it. She loved it. She understands too that you can't be so slavish and devoted to the source material. They could've just altered certain things about Watchmen, Zack Snyder’s film. I thought it was so much better than what it was--and I really enjoyed it--I thought God, there's some really great movie in there that I felt got held back because we gotta check these boxes or these fans are gonna get on our ass. And I'm a big believer that the fanboy element or the fan lobbies are massively overrepresented in Hollywood and don't have nearly the lobbying power that we think they do.

 

We gotta sometimes cut loose of those, because it shackles you. You're gonna have Nate do this and you're gonna say Kitty got wet and gonna do this, and you say, “Listen, we're gonna do as much of it as we can,” but I remember the late great Stephen Cannell [creator of The A-Team] say to me, listen, if you wanna make B.A. Baracus a white woman, you should do that. He didn't have this sense of, no I think that'd probably have exploded in my face, but this is the guy that created him and he understood that you need to break with tradition sometimes to tell compelling stories. It's just making a great movie and trying to put as much of the game in as you can and the sensibilities of making Drake and Sullivan and so on, and beyond that, just do something original and fun. Roll the dice, like we have to do on anything. There are no assurances, and there certainly are very few hedging your bets when it comes to making movies. So I really believe that. Just be original. Do your best. Try to check the boxes you can, but beyond that don't get wrapped up.

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Image via Naughty Dog

So when it comes down “checking boxes” on an Uncharted movie, what does Carnahan want to include? He believes that Drake’s lineage, particularly growing up an orphan, is an important part of the character:

You've obviously played the games, but is there anything from the games story-wise or character-wise that you wanted to pull in? I know you said you have to make your own movie, but is there anything for fans that you really wanted to make sure got in there?

 

CARNAHAN: Certainly the signet ring. Sic Parvis Magna, the whole Francis Drake legend, and his parentage, his lineage. I thought that was important. You're dealing with a guy who's an orphan, and I came at it that way—what's some of the things that are important to someone who's an orphan? In the fourth game they dispelled all that, but I thought it's still kind of an interesting. What excuses would you make about your character if you held to this notion that you were the heir to this great explorer? Your ancestor's this great dubious, nefarious explorer? If you believed somehow that was your birthright. Were you conning yourself? There's some interesting character stuff you can do there. That and the insane, the big action stuff. I kept some characters I like and kind of reset them within that world so there'll be names and familiar faces and so on, but they won't necessarily be what they were in the game, which I think is important, you have to do that, create amalgams. I can't imagine fans of Uncharted will be unhappy, at least with the screenplay. And I do think there's some interesting, again, anti-Indiana Jones stuff going on, looting and pillaging these UNESCO sites and world heritage sites and also these uncharted realms. There's 3 million shipwrecks all over the world that have never been seen. That to me is fascinating. So there's a lot of that stuff, and a lot of that's kinda new and improved, for lack of a better phrase. I think people will dig it, but I can't imagine. But I'm sure someone'll hate my guts, but that's okay, a lot of people hate my guts.

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Image via Naughty Dog

Carnahan also discussed the fan-casting (Nathan Fillion is a name that has come up repeatedly) and previous names mentioned in connection to the lead role (such as Mark Wahlberg), and explained that while casting is important, there’s a lot more to consider than just who looks the part:

CARNAHAN: Shawn and I have talked about a couple of guys, but it's pointless to mention them now because we don't know where everybody's gonna be. In a perfect world it'd be Nolan North! [laughing] That's who I'd like to see play Nathan Drake, that'd be the perfect casting, but I don’t know. I think that's gonna be, again man, sheer economics. Who's worth what, when, where, how. What gets us this, what gets us that. What's the foreign side of things, international things. Mark's great, Wahlberg's great, but it just depends how young we wanna make Nate and then ultimately how young we wanna make Sully. Is Sully in his 50s and Nate in his late 30s? Is Nate in his late 20s and Sully's in his early 40s? Who knows. It really is gonna depend on that process because if X gets excited and says “Oh, I want to play that,” then it means Sully's gonna have to be this age, and that changes things. And if you're talking about making three, four films, what's ideal for that.

So it definitely sounds like that in the script Carnahan is working on, Sully is a key ingredient to the overall picture, and it will be interesting to see if he makes it all the way to the final picture. Sully’s an important part of the games because you need Drake to bounce off of someone, and while the character is a bit of an archetype, I think Carnahan could invest him with a distinctive personality.

Finally, when asked if Carnahan is shooting for a particular rating, he said right now he’s just writing it, but there’s nothing in the content that can’t be reworked into a PG-13 (which is presumably going to be where Sony wants it):

CARNAHAN: Certainly the language is not PG-13, but that can always be stripped out. I'm just writing it; I'm not paying attention to the rating. You can always take fucks out, you can always take language out, but in terms of situationally, there's no sex trafficking or whatever would give it an R rating. But even then, Taken was PG-13. I always thought that was an R-rated film, but they got away with a lot.

Considering that in the games, Drake is pretty much a mass murderer (you can unlock a trophy if you kill 100 enemies with headshots), and the MPAA has shown time and again that it isn’t bothered by gratuitous violence, Uncharted should be just fine.

Look for more from Steve's interview with Joe Carnahan tomorrow.

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Image via Open Road Films