craveonline

The cast of the Max Payne movie – Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis and Ludacris – along with director John Moore showed some footage at Comic Con before going upstairs to talk to the press. Spirits were high as Wahlberg picked up his cell phone twice to try to direct his friends to San Diego, while taking jabs at The Happening. Plenty of profanity too.

Crave Online: The video game is so cinematic and inspired by movies, how do you make a movie that's inspired by that?

John Moore: I'll try that one. It's kind of obvious because it is so cinematic. It seems that it was fairly requesting to be on the big reinterpreted on the big screen. You don't sense that there's resistance within that format, within that piece of art to be transferred to the big screen. So I thought that it's like the signs within the game say, "Look, I think this would be good on the big screen. I think this would look cool on the big screen." So I think that's what made its adaptation, I won't say easy, but flow quite naturally.

Mark Wahlberg: Well, when I read the script, I was like, "Wow this is awesome." I said, "Where did it come from?" They said it was based on a videogame. I said, "Oh, f*ck no, I don't want to do that." And then they were like, "No, it's really cool. You've got to check it out." And so I started doing a little research and then when I saw the game, I realized, wow, the story is really elaborate. There's a lot going on there. So I was surprised they hadn't made it a movie earlier.

Crave Online: So how do you make a two dimensional character three dimensional?

Mark Wahlberg: With the help of this man, John. I've done characters and I've showed glimpses of what I hope to accomplish in this movie with Fear and The Departed and Four Brothers, but I wanted to take this a whole other place. Thankfully John was also in the headspace of doing something that really was layered because I had already done the guy with a few words, you know? That's one note and that's it. I wanted to really kind of go off and push the envelope.

John Moore: No, it's true. Mark would always talk about variance. There's no point in just being you know flat line cool for the whole movie. I mean, that's going to get old quick. For a movie or a story that's based on a man losing his wife and child, for him to not show a range of emotion there would have been the wrong choice so Mark goes to places in the movie that a quite extreme.

Crave Online: So you're not running the wind in this movie?

Mark Wahlberg: I'm not running from sh*t in this movie. No more running from the wind.

Crave Online: Mila, tell us about your character.

Mila Kunis: Okay. I play an assassin. Her name's Mona Sax. My sister gets murdered and I blamed Mark's character, Max Payne, for the murder.

Mark Wahlberg: Yeah. She thinks I had sex with her and did all this other stuff.

Mila Kunis: Yeah. He schtuped my sister.

Mark Wahlberg: No, I didn't.

Mila Kunis: And so I go and I find him and f*ck him up. But then I realize we're both looking for the same bad guy and then we team up.

Crave Online: How does the movie diverge from the videogame?

John Moore: I think diverge seems like a slightly negative term.