‘Uncharted’ Screenwriter Joe Carnahan Is Saying All The Right Things
The long-gestating film adaptation of the popular (and for good reason)Unchartedvideo game series has been a revolving door of talent for years now. Cycle through the/Film archivesand you’ll find writers and directors boarding and exiting the project with a frequency that boggles the mind. Despite its inherently cinematic premise,Unchartedhas proven itself to be a tough nut to crack.
But maybe this is the point where things start to look up! Maybe this is the point in the timeline whereUnchartedstops shuffling around development hell and starts to take shape! And if so, the timing couldn’t be better, because screenwriterJoe Carnahanis saying all of the right things about what he’s trying to do with his script.
Colliderspoke with Carnahan shortly after the news broke thatShawn Levy was brought on to helm the film. Carnahan (a filmmaker whose credits includeNarc,Smokin' Aces,The A-Team, andStretchand a natural raconteur who couldn’t give a bad interview if he tried) explained how Nathan Drake, the artifact-hunting antihero at the heart of theUnchartedseries, is the anti-Indiana Jones:
It’s the kind of answer that almost makes you wish Carnahan himself (who has proven himself so adept at blending action and humor in the past) was behind the camera. Buthe has a thirdBad Boysmovie to worry about, so it falls to Shawn Levy to get the job done. Levy is a capable filmmaker with his fair share of hits, but much of his career has been focused on family-friendly material likeNight at the MuseumandThe Pink Panther. He has his fingers in a few beloved-by-nerds properties (including Netflix’sStranger Things), but fans of the video games have every right to feel a little perplexed about his hiring. It’s certainly not the choice everyone was expecting.
And yes, Carnahan has an opinion on fans…namely that they don’t wield as much influence as everyone thinks they do:
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 ofUncharted: Drake’s Fortune] and sat down with [Drake voice actor] Nolan North and sat down with Neil [Druckmann, writer ofUncharted: 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 aboutWatchmen, 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.
I find Carnahan’s candor refreshing, especially since he seems to get what makes theUnchartedgames tick and has done the proper legwork with the folks behind the original games – he’s a fan who is more than willing to be critical of fandom. I like that he’s not afraid to ruffle the feathers of fanboys in the same interview where he says the kind of things that should reassure them. He’s refreshingly free of canned responses.
There’s a lot more from Carnahan over atCollider, so ensure you check it out if you want to know more.Unchartedis currently without a release date, but we should expect that to change soon.
