A Minecraft Movie interview: bringing Mojang's sandbox world to life
A Minecraft Movie releases in cinemas this month, and marks the first time the beloved sandbox game has been adapted for the big-screen.
As a game with an infinite number of possibilities, I was eager to learn more about the work that went into bringing this iconic video game world to life. Director Jared Hess and Mojang content director Torfi Frans Ólafsson were more than happy to talk me through it.
Check out the trailer for A Minecraft Movie below
Advert
So just to kick it off, I wanted to dive into the title, A Minecraft Story, and how important it was to position the film as just one of many stories waiting to be told.
Jared spoke first: “Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, I think early on, we just realised that we didn't want to canonise anything. And the game, when you play it, there's no set story. You bring your own imagination to it. When my daughter plays the game, she has a very detailed narrative of the world that she's created, and that goes for every player that's ever played it. And so when we approached making a movie, we felt we kind of had to do the same thing. This is a story out of a gazillion that are out there within the Minecraft community.”
Torfi continued: “There's a lot of mysteries in Minecraft, like, why do the zombies dress like Steve, and where does the Enter Dragon come from? And why are the Endermen always picking up random blocks … it would kind of ruin everything we think if we explain everything to bits and give the authoritative story.
“People have been using Minecraft to tell amazing stories on YouTube and different platforms for 15 years, either to themselves, or their friends, or to an audience of millions. So like this movie is, in a way, kind of a love letter to the creators that have been using Minecraft to tell stories, and now with it, I think we're kind of joining those creators. It's just a little bit more expensive than the videos that they make.”
Building on that point I then brought up the very few bits of lore that are present in Minecraft, and what it was like examining them from a fan’s perspective and considering how they could be expanded upon for a film.
“Mojang has been our partner right from the get go,” began Jared, “as we started to develop the film, Torpy and I would have really late night texts like, ‘oh, man, it would be really cool if we could get piglins into the overworld. Well, gosh, how are we going to do that?’ Well, they zombify when they go there, but they could chug a butt ton of Nether Wart, right? And then they could survive for a period of time.
“We really wanted to push the experience beyond just what you can experience in the game, and do something special for the film. And so we didn't really break the rules, but we bent them in a way, or approached them in a way where we could do some really fun, outrageous things in the film.”
Torfi then told me that they chose to start with vanilla Minecraft as a general foundation, saying: “start with what is known, to start with what's familiar to people, and even to the point where we would kind of focus on mobs and creatures that had been in the game for a long time, kind of putting less of an emphasis on creatures that have been added recently, knowing that many people maybe grew up playing the game, but haven't been active for the past few years.”
Familiarity was the right approach for sure, as I was one of those people that saw the film after not playing Minecraft for several years, yet there was still plenty to recognise but also plenty of new stuff too.
Then you have Steve, a blank-slate character that Jack Black beautifully brings to life in his own way, really making the character his own.
Speaking further on Jack’s approach to crafting the character of Steve, Jared said: “The fun thing about Jack is he’s on another level, and just the energy he brings, he's just a big kid and that energy and that playfulness, you know, is such a such an amazing thing as it kind of relates to the theme of Minecraft, the game and the film. I mean, he was pretty method in between scenes, on breaks when we were shooting, Jack would be in the trailer just blasting away at Minecraft.”
Jared then shared that a Minecraft server had been created for the cast and crew to play on when they weren’t filming, and through a killer Jack Black impression said: “Jack would come back and be like, ‘Yo, dude just found a ton of Lapis Lazuli. Pretty stoked about it.’ So, yeah, it was just such an amazing experience working with him. I don't think there's anybody better to play Steve than Jack.”
“He was also super eager to learn,” added Torfi. “That was the funny thing, just in between takes. Jack would head behind the camera, not to talk about the take that we’d done, but like, he’d be asking for hints and tips about, like, how to play and what to do and telling me about what he had been doing before. He completely lost himself in the mines, which was very, very cool.”
The conversation then shifted to bringing the world of Minecraft to life, not just through CGI though as apparently a lot of practicality was involved in order to give the actors plenty of physical things to latch their performance onto.
Torfi explained: “Jared had a world class Academy Award winning production team in New Zealand build out like an entire Minecraft village, forest, woodland, mansion, etc, and a ton of detail and work went into building the props.”
“It was amazing going on a set every day,” continued Jared. “We had life size sets for just about every location, which was amazing, whether it was the mines, the woodland mansion, the village, the forests that we experienced in the film. It's so helpful for the actors to be literally put in that environment and have these life size Minecraft cubes and vegetation and, you know, builds. It was really amazing. So, yeah, and the prop department too. It was just so cool.”
Torfi then explained Mojang worked very closely with the production team “for a couple of years before we started building it, and we went through a lot of iterations.” He went on to explain: “this is not within Dungeons and Dragons or World of Warcraft or The Lord of the Rings, though a ton of people who worked on The Lord of the Rings actually worked on this movie, because we kind of adhere to the blocky universe, the blocky outlines and the silhouettes of the mobs, but it is weird to see them photorealistic when all you've seen is like these low resolution pixels for most of your life.”
The mobs themselves obviously needed the biggest overhaul to their design, as in the game they’re much more rigid, whereas the film required them to have more fluid movements.
Jared explained part of the process in adapting these animals and monsters into live-action, saying: “most of the mobs, their arms don't even attach to their bodies, you know? So everything's pretty stiff. For mobility and creating a life-like, organic, sentient creature, we spent a ton of time just again, wanting to preserve the cubic nature and look of everything. So it's iconically Minecraft, but also gives it muscle and movement and texture and skin and whatever it may be. We spent a ton of time figuring that out.”
Torfi added: “most of the mobs that you see on screen are actually actors. The zombies are actors, the piglens are actors, and the villagers are actors. So we had stunt people and dancers, basically, who are very trained in movement. And we had a choreographer, Alex Duncan, who was directing them.
“I had a lot of conversations with Alex, because we were trying to translate the rigid movements of the Minecraft characters into the movements of like the zombies and skeletons. So it was like a huge challenge for her to find enough trained dancers that were five feet four or something like that. There was like a fixed height to play the villagers, because they all had to be the same height. And so she had to go all over New Zealand to find the talent for it.”
As one final question, I had to ask if any conversations had taken place regarding a sequel. Given that it’s A Minecraft Movie rather than The Minecraft Movie, I felt like the door had been left ajar to another adaption at some point in the future, and it sounds like they had the same idea.
“We would have so much fun going in and creating another chapter” began Jared. “I mean, look, the world of the game is endless. Andthe team at Mojang, they keep building out the world with new characters, mobs and everything. So it would be amazing. It's such the perfect place to go on another adventure. So yes, we would love, love to do that. We'll, we'll see what happens.”
A Minecraft Movie will be in cinemas on 4 April, and it’s well-worth watching whether you still play the game regularly, or fell off the Minecraft train a few years ago.