Mike Newell has done right by big fantasy franchises before. His Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire honored the epic book despite consolidated scripting. Now he's tapped to handle Prince of Persia. He was on tour promoting his latest film, Love in the Time of Cholera, but warmed up to the PoP inquiries quickly.
CraveOnline: How do you feel about doing a video game movie?
Mike Newell: It's not a video game movie. It's a great story. I'm sorry, that slightly blindsided me. I will talk about Prince of Persia but I've been making Prince of Persia for only the last five days. I don't have any great truths to say about it. If you had read the script, you would know that it wasn't a video game. It's very exciting and it's immensely romantic and it's like Lost Horizon. It takes you to somewhere you've never been.
CraveOnline: Is the script set in stone because of the strike?
Mike Newell: Oh no, no, no. This is a Jerry Bruckheimer film. Strikes are like the weather. If it's rain today, it'll be sunny tomorrow. That's how Bruckheimer is. You just wait. It'll all be fine.
CraveOnline: Have you plaid the video game?
Mike Newell: No, I haven't played the Prince of Persia game. I've got a minion who is, even as we speak, training on the Prince of Persia game and will show me tomorrow.
CraveOnline: You have guys holding onto ledges and pulling themselves up, right?
Mike Newell: Oh, we'll have all that. Certainly we will. Yes, yes, you bet. But there's so much that will happen with that story because it's 1300 years ago. This girl who was actually a kind of priest… I'm sorry, I've been on it five days. I'm full of f***ing ideas. It'll be terrific.
CraveOnline: It'll be like Pirates probably.
Mike Newell: No, absolutely not like Pirates. Pirates is comedy. This isn't comedy. This will be romance. This will be a great love story set against danger and the fate of the world. You know what Stonehenge is? Stonehenge is a machine that tells you that the world will survive because every year the sun comes up in exactly the same place. And… yeah, I know.
CraveOnline: Okay. Cholera has lots of fans too. Will they be satisfied with your movie?
Mike Newell: I can't tell you that. I'm satisfied with the movie because what the book says is that Farmina is all her life a great beauty and she's timid. She's not sure whether she's lived her life. Did I really love him? He was a good man but did I really, really love him? She thinks that all the way along, all the way through. She gets married for the wrong reasons. She has a stressed relationship with him and yet at the end, she can perfectly honestly say that it was a good marriage. It was a good marriage. It's just there were stresses in it. But she's tinted and Florentino isn't timid at all. Florentino is wild and brave and crazy and loves her to distraction all his life, and has 622 other lovers. In the end, what the book says is now is now. I know we're 70, we're old people, we might die tomorrow. Marry me now and at least we'll get 24 hours. So the book is a great heroic, as well as everything else, as well as how delicate and subtle and careful and well observed it is. It's a great heroic affirmation of life, of positiveness, of belief and doing things. That we got. If we got that, we've got a version of Marquez. How could we ever be literal? If we were going to be literal, I would need 16 hours of television to do it. What we do have is a film that sees what the book is about and does that. Sure, there were things that killed me to leave out.
CraveOnline: Like what?
Mike Newell: One of the things was, I don't know if you know the book, was the very first chapter. I loved the very first chapter. I loved this silver haired old bullsh*tter coming into the room and saying, 'Don't worry, it's suicide, clearly suicide but the police don't have to know that and we'll do this, that and the other.' Then there is this fantastic image of him opening his medical bag and inside his medical bag is chaos. The chaos is his life. He looks so great from the outside, Juvenal, and the bag which is literally his impedimenta and those enormous elegances of construction are wonderful. I used to read the book every couple of weeks, while we were shooting. I used to read it every couple of weeks for pure pleasure. I would sit down and say, "Why don't I read up? I'm shooting that in the next couple of days. I'll just check it out of the book." I would just cruise on through and love it. But the making of a movie is not the writing of a book.
CraveOnline: So the book starts with everyone in old age too?
Mike Newell: That's what the novel does. The novel was always a guide for us. Marquez was very generous about it and said, "I think you feel too respectful towards the novel." This is in the scripting stage. When he saw the movie, he didn’t feel like that at all. He thought the movie was great, which I can't tell you what a good feeling that is for us because we don't have to sit in front of guys like you and duck and weave because we know that he didn't like it. He did like it so no ducking and weaving. But the beginning is outlandish. You have a man falling out of a tree because he's bitten by a parrot. You have an old, old, old man in bed with a naked girl of about 17-18. Then extraordinarily enough, you have that old man going to the old woman whose husband just died saying, 'I have loved you for 50 years and I'm now pledging you my heart all over again and would like to marry you.' It's outrageous and outlandish. It's Marquez. He's one of the great writers ever. He has that kind of cheek and gall and surprise. If you don't do that, if you simply let it unroll from young to old, I don't think that you have done that sort of seizing the audience in surprise.
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