Prince Of Persia Press Day
Jake Gyllenhaal and the cast and crew talk about the spectacular adaptation of the classic game.
Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time is one of the unexpected joys of the year so far. Following the disappointing Clash Of The Titans, another swashbuckling sword and sandals epic didn't inspire much anticipation, especially after the goofy trailer.
So it's with great pleasure to report that Four Weddings and a Funeral and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire director Mike Newell has created a stunning and enjoyable blockbuster, on a par with the first Pirates of the Caribbean. Gemma Arterton shines in a role she filmed before the above mentioned Titans and her recently-released Disappearance of Alice Creed, playing the brave and noble Princess Tamina, who will do anything to protect the powerful dagger that can release the sands of time.
She is relunctantly thrown into an adventure with Jake Gyllenhaal's Prince Dastan, who plays his beefed-up action hero with his usual boyish charm. The pair hit London for a weekend of promo, and were joined by their glorious co-star, the surprisingly thoughtful Sir Ben Kingsley, for a press conference. Newell, producer ("the man with the golden gut") Jerry Bruckheimer and Jordan Mechner, creator of the computer game that started the story, gave some clues as to why this adaptation is a considerable cut above the rest.
As Bruckheimer himself admitted, "It's a throwback to the old movies, like Lawrence Of Arabia. I love the old David Lean films." Mechner revealed his inspiration: "I was inspired 25 years ago to make Prince of Persia really by the tale of Arabian Nights, and the old swashbuckling movies, like Thief of Baghdad. I think it's written all over our cultural DNA, and we're not aware of when we first heard it."
Newell told us how Bruckheimer persuaded him that Prince Of Persia was a story worth filming. "Jerry did a wonderfully subtle and clever thing," revealed the giant of a director. "He sent me the script and also a book of 19th century French paintings of the Middle East [The Orientalists]. I loved the story, and I loved the idea of what we'd always been told was a fairy tale was actually real. Jordan's research was terribly important."
Mechner added: "The original was this character 40 pixels high on the Apple screen, running and jumping with the limited technology of the time. In my mind I have imagined a much grander spectacle. To see Jake in the best shape of his life, running on rooftops, I could not have imagined."
The eloquent and deep Kingsley appeared to be genuinely passionate about his role as Dastan's uncle Nizam, brother to the King, agreeing with the compere's comparison to Othello's Iago. "Mike and I, and a lot of us in the cast, did have the bigger picture that Jerry had presented to us," he said. "It's such a springboard, you could jump from it as high saying, this is Shakespearean. Because we were given such a beautiful springboard, my wonderfully English self-deprecating man over there [Mike] had an absolute iron control of her [Gemma's] journey of purity, his [Jake's] journey towards nobility, and my journey governed by envy and regret. He kept us absolutely on course, because we were changing time-zones twice a day, and we would say, quite understandably, do I know this? We were dealing in levels of memory, time and deception."
Expanding, Kingsley talked about the interaction between the three actors on set: Because it's contentious, because we're adversaries, we're like three chemicals, who will explode if you put us together. Mike kept us in that very special corner that we needed to inhabit throughout the film. It affected how we saw the world, the beautiful landscape in Morocco, my friendship with Jake. [SPOILER]I don't have many scenes with Gemma, but Jake needs to show in his face that the worst person to betray him is you. We allowed ourselves to be vulnerable with each other and had a wonderfully creative time.[END SPOILER]
Kingsley was asked if he had met the real Prince of Persia, the son of the last Shah of Iran: "I have met Reza Pahlavi in Paris, as I was meant to be playing the Shah of Iran himself." This led the great actor to ponder on the bigger picture presented in the film. "This is what we were exploring, Dastan and myself, the artificial speculation on the beginnings of a dynasty that ended with a man getting on an airplane crying, and another man getting off the airplane, the Ayatollah Khomeini. That is how that extraordinary dynasty ended. It's remarkably fresh and fascinating."
On to Arterton, who spoke about being cast in such a big role so soon after graduating from drama school: "It was the biggest role I had had to date, and it's always nervewracking when you're the only female in the film. I felt particularly uncomfortable about that! You get over it pretty quickly, as there's so much work to do, and it was great."
She also revealed how much she enjoyed filming in the blazing summer heat of Morocco: "It's incredible, and that's the best thing about this job - you go to all these places. I'd always wanted to go to the desert and I hadn't got round to it. It's a real treat. Everyone was complaining about the heat and I was quite happy about it! It's so diverse in Morocco as you have the mountains. A brilliant place to be and great fun."
As Princess Tamina is unexpectedly not the flighty love interest that the trailer implied, London-born Arterton spoke about her character's strength: "I feel like I'm quite similar to Tamina in many ways. I'm not as graceful or tanned! Being strong is really, really attractive, and that's one of the reasons Dastan does fall for her. It's said that being strong scares people away, but it doesn't."
Finally, the droll Gyllenhaal was left to speak about the physical challenges of the role, particularly the representation of parkour, a variation of freerunning that sees the practitioner overcome physical obstacles with grace. "I did as much as I could," the actor said, referring to the stunts. "The most dangerous ones were done by me... [laughs] I am in many ways a princess, so playing a prince is most fitting. The majority of the parkour was done by the acrobats, mainly David Belle [founder of parkour]. I did a lot of the landings, which is the hardest part!"
However, his biggest challenge was the British accent that is customary for all films set in ancient exotic lands. "No doubt speaking in the British accent was the hardest part for me", he laughed. "It's daunting to do any service, as an American, to such the beautiful, fluid speech pattern that you all have... [Drily] We are just barbarians in comparison. It did help being surrounded by a British cast, so I would have the accent all day. During region to region around England, I would speak to different persons, and I would sound like them, and Mike would say, [bellows in posh accent] "Dear boy, you don't sound right. Smashing! Cut!"
If Jake had a dagger that could turn back time, what would he do? "If I could go back in time and change anything it would be to not have to run away from the ostriches, because that was the most terrifying moment in the entire shoot for me. They are terrifying animals. They threaten to tear out your eyeballs and rip out your heart. They seem like they have eyes similar to mine, but they really don't. I would like to stop that."
Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time is released on 21st May.
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