Making Prince of Persia
Prince of Persia started as a game inspired by movies — from the sword battles in Robin Hood (1938) to Indiana Jones' spikes-defying leaps in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) — so it's only fitting that, twenty years later, the pixelly Apple II prince would make the jump to the big screen himself.
Walt Disney Pictures and Jerry Bruckheimer, fresh off Pirates of the Caribbean, bought the pitch, based on Ubisoft's successful 2003 relaunch. I wrote the first screenplay (PDF), then watched the project evolve and grow into a massive summer-blockbuster production that brought a cast and crew of thousands to the Moroccan desert.
My childhood self saw a special poetry in the casting of Alfred Molina (who'd failed to evade the spikes ten minutes into Raiders) as Sheikh Amar.
The May 2010 Disney movie launch included a slew of Prince of Persia books, toys, and merchandising tie-ins, including, most awesomely, LEGO Prince of Persia. I wrote a graphic-novel anthology prequel, Prince of Persia: Before the Sandstorm, in collaboration with artists Tommy Lee Edwards, Bernard Chang, Cameron Stewart, and Niko Henrichon. The only thing missing (ironically) was a tie-in video game; Ubisoft's game franchise has remained independent of the film.
I'd been working on my screenwriting craft since college; when my first screenplay got optioned in 1987, I almost didn't finish making Prince of Persia. (That story is told in my 1980s journal). I could never have guessed that my Apple II labors would lead to my first produced screenplay, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, 20 years later. With a worldwide box office tally of $335 million, Prince of Persia was the world's highest-grossing video game-to-movie adaptation until Warcraft dethroned it in 2016.
Transmedia: Games to Movies to Comics
Through the prince's multiple adventures, the fast-flowing sands of time carried me not only from games to screenwriting, but onward (and home again) to another visual storytelling medium that I've loved all my life: graphic novels.
In 2004 I got an email from Mark Siegel, the editor of a new Macmillan publishing imprint called First Second Books. He told me that Prince of Persia had had a special place in his heart since the early 1990s, when he'd played it on a black-and-white Macintosh Classic. Would I be interested in developing it as a book?
Since I was busy writing the Prince of Persia movie screenplay at the time, I suggested that rather than adapt either the original 2D games or The Sands of Time again, we invite a Persian author to offer a fresh take on the ancient myths and legends from which the game and movie sprang. The result — a one-shot graphic novel by Iranian poet A. B. Sina, illustrated by the wonderful LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland (I wrote the afterword) — inspired me to conceive my next major original work, Templar, not as a feature film or TV series, but as a book with LeUyen and Alex.
Their brilliantly inventive artwork, backed by four years of deep historical immersion, brought Templar's world of 14th-century knights, capers, romance and skulduggery vividly to life. The moment I held in my hands our beautifully printed hardcover, full-color, 480-page epic, I was hooked. What I'd once thought of as a complement to my main video-game-making and screenwriting career now appeared to me in a new light. This was an artistic medium as versatile and powerful as film, TV or games. It offered creative freedom, and didn't require convincing studios to put up multi-million-dollar budgets.
In the same period, between 2005 and 2012, among other screenwriting efforts, I wrote a TV pilot about private military contractors with John August for Fox Studios, a feature adaptation of Michael Turner's Fathom for actress Megan Fox (no relation), and an adaptation of my own game The Last Express for director Paul Verhoeven. All three were experiences I treasure, made more poignant because (by Hollywood standards) they came fairly close to getting made. Templar reminded me that, just as when I'd made Karateka and Prince of Persia on an Apple II computer in the 1980s, graphic novels were a medium in which I could create without needing anyone's permission.
If you enjoyed the storytelling in Prince of Persia or The Last Express, I hope you'll check out Templar, and my two latest graphic-novel trilogies: a modern adaptation of Monte Cristo (with Mario Alberti), and an 18th-century historical adventure, Liberty (with Etienne Le Roux). The last two are currently available in French as individual volumes, with English integral editions to follow once the trilogies are complete.
Replay
The panel above, depicting a moment on the Morocco film set of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, is from my new autobiographical graphic novel Replay. If the 2010 Prince of Persia movie completed a 20-year time loop, Replay closes another, even bigger circuit: it's the first graphic novel I've drawn as well as written.
That's me on the Prince of Persia set in 2008, sketching from life in my Moleskine notebook. As I explain on the Artworks page, my artist diary began as a daily practice, and became much more.
After fifteen years and forty sketchbooks filled, plus the equivalent of an ongoing master class in graphic-novel storytelling from my artist collaborators, I felt ready to tackle my most personal and ambitious project yet: Replay, a 320-page graphic memoir interweaving episodes from my video game and filmmaking career with three generations of my family's story.
Replay is available from Delcourt in French and from First Second Books in English.
