I think most of us were slightly caught off guard when it was announced that A24 would be making a play to get into the blockbuster and franchise game, seeking various IP projects to develop, as seen recently with video game adaptations like Michael Sarnoski’s feature take on the popular sci-fi survival delivery game “Death Stranding“ and Alex Garland‘s adaptation of the grim fantasy game “Elden Ring” (George R.R. Martin helped crafting the game’s lore).
A new profile chronicling the company’s ambitious plans in The New Yorker features some interesting quotes from Garland that detail, in his opinion, that nothing much has changed in his ongoing experience working with A24, as he’s one of the first directors to help their push into bigger commercial projects, along with how “Elden Ring” came together so quickly (his next movie after taking up on the idea of retiring from directing).
“I’ve been working in film for over twenty-five years, and I’ve crossed a pre-A24 and a post-A24 era,” Garland said. Musing on his early days in the industry during the 90s, he said, “The deal was you could have ideas, you could have ethical complexity, you could have things that were confronting to the viewer in one way or another, but you needed to smuggle them into the film.” On his experience with A24, “I don’t have to smuggle ideas in. In fact, the ideas are things that we will freely discuss and try to exploit.”
The extremely in-depth article also details how Garland’s “Elden Ring” movie came together as A24’s head of film, Noah Sacco, visited the filmmaker in London a few years back and was shown the video game, and Garland directly asked if the studio would back a feature adaptation as the extremely artsty game reminded Sacco of “Lord of The Rings” and responded with, “F*** yeah!”
Garland aimed to get the support of Hidetaka Miyazaki, the game’s creator, by writing a spec-script that was a 160-page draft (alongside pages of visual imagery) as the two flew to Japan to convince him, and the game’s publisher Bandai Namco, to allow A24/Garland to make the movie, which, of course, worked out in the end.
Kit Connor, from “Warfare,” is said to be in talks for a lead role in “Elden Ring” with rumblings of Ben Whishaw (“Skyfall”) and “Civil War” actress Cailee Spaeny (“Alien: Romulus”) being courted as well.
Also, the profile briefly mentions that A24, during their courting of Hideo Kojima‘s “Death Stranding,” asked if the brilliant video game creator (who has directed all the motion capture footage for the two installments, mind you, video game these runtimes dwarf feature films) if he wanted to helm the film version himself; Kojima obviously declined.
Not exactly how blockbusters or big movies come together, traditionally, in the studio system, as it sounds like there is still somewhat an indie-level spirit going on over at A24, including offering a major directing gig to a video game creator/director is nearly unheard of.
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