Earlier this week, Disney and OnePR treated games journalists to the first-ever screening of the Prince of Persia film trailer. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Ben Kingsley, former Bond Girl Gemma Arterton and Alfred Molina, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is a big budget action-adventure film based on the 2003 video game of the same name. 

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer and creator Jordan Mechner were on hand for the screening, and stuck around afterwards for a Q&A session with those in attendance. Below are the highlights from the conversation.

Which games is The Sands of Time movie based on?

Jordan Mechner: The game that the movie was based on is Sands of Time. That is the 2003 game that Ubisoft Montreal and I relaunched the franchise with. But you can see with his costume and with certain elements in the trailer, it also draws on the whole Sands of Time trilogy. 

Your brother was the character model for the original game. Did he make it into the film at all?

Mechner: It's true. My brother actually was the model for the original animations in the first Prince of Persia game back in 1985 when he was in high school. He wasn't a very good athlete even then, and he hasn't really gotten any better (laughs). He was disappointed, but no, Jake really did his own stunt work. 

How long did it take to get the rewind effect right?

Bruckheimer: Well we started, what, a year and a half ago working on it. We have visual effects supervisors in a visual effects house in London that is working with us. What they did is first they did an animatic or a storyboard, and we kept building from that. Some of the stuff we didn't like. We finally arrived on a process that we liked, and then we kept embellishing that process, which you are seeing now. You would just keep adding layers to it. First, the things didn't go through his body. He just came up and overlooked the scene. And we started adding layers and started actually using sand, so the sand just swirls around his body. So it is constantly embellishing something that you really like.

Game-licensed movies are notoriously bad. How are you trying to avoid that outcome? 

Bruckheimer: Well, we took our time developing it. It was over a number of years that we developed it and worked with a number of different writers until we got to a place where we thought we really had a good screenplay, and that is the key. It is telling a good story. I haven't seen a lot of the other video game films, but I think that is the key to our success in our company, is telling you good stories, creating interesting characters, creating the romance, creating the action, having you care about the characters, and putting them in very dramatic situations. 

It reminds you of a throwback to like Lawrence of Arabia; like an old movie with the supernatural added to it, because it is a really wonderful tale and it takes you full circle. You know, how interesting the story is in itself. It's very satisfying at the end. 

A huge part of the Prince of Persia games is the "platforming" gameplay. In the movie trailer you can see that a bit of that has carried over. How integral is that element in the movie?

Mechner: The cool thing about Prince of Persia - and this goes back to the first game 20 years ago - it was a game that was inspired by movies, and especially by those great old Hollywood swashbuckling movies with Errol Flynn, Douglas Fairbanks, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, which came out when I was in high school. It was a big inspiration. So I think that kind of action just really translates really well to cinema. As you can see in the trailer, I think it goes beyond the game. It captures the spirit of the gameplay, but it also really goes beyond it. It is more visceral, more exciting. 

Bruckheimer: And the editor who cut Raiders of the Lost Ark also worked on this film.