Jordan Mechner, the creator of Prince of Persia, was recently a guest on Simon Parkin's My Perfect Console podcast, and in the process shared some fascinating background on the making of its Hollywood film. This included how he ended up writing the original story for its 2010 adaptation, despite being "completely unproven" as a screenwriter at the time.
If you've read Mechner's "The Making of Prince of Persia" journals, you'll probably already know that the game developer had been trying to make it as a screenwriter in Hollywood for over a decade by this point, but had only experienced limited success in all that time putting together the occasional short film and penning scripts for unproduced projects like Birthstone, Birds of Paradise, and In The Dark.
As a result, he wasn't necessarily the first choice to write the script for a major motion picture (even if he did end up creating the original game it was based on), with the more sensible approach being for the studio to buy the rights outright and bring on an experienced pair of hands to get a Prince of Persia film off the ground.
Yet, somehow, Mechner managed to convince both Bruckheimer Films and Disney to let him create the first few scripts for the project, leading him to get a "Story By" credit on the finished film (after the script was given some additional rewrites by other writers). This is something that he now attributes to two different factors, which he ended up revealing to Parkin over on the podcast.
According to Mechner, the first reason that allowed him to convince Disney and Bruckheimer Films to let him work on the script was the happy "accident" that he had somehow come into possession of the movie rights "from way back when", giving him a useful bargaining chip in the negotiations. Meanwhile, the second reason had to do with his developing friendship with John August, a Hollywood writer who had previously worked on Charlie's Angels, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Big Fish, who vouched for the developer during the initial pitch meetings.
Mechner told Parkin, "[John August] was a screenwriter whose first movie that he became known for was Go — a great independent film from the 90s — and then he wrote movies for Tim Burton. He’s actually a gamer, so I was introduced to John by American McGee, a game designer and the creator of American McGee’s Alice, who I met first in my San Francisco days. So John had played Karateka. I told him what I wanted to do for Prince of Persia. I pitched it, and he said, ‘Show me the scripts you’ve written and I’ll read them over the weekend.’ I didn’t yet realize how rare this was in Hollywood, but he actually read them over the weekend. So, on the Monday, he called me and said, ‘You can totally do this’ and I’ll back you up. So John became attached not as a writer but as a producer, which was another huge gift."
As Mechner recalls, it was August who gave him the confidence to try to pitch the project around Hollywood with himself still attached as the screenwriter, and who ultimately became instrumental in helping to sell the project to Walt Disney Pictures and Bruckheimer films.
The film later went on to be released in 2010, achieving a worldwide box office gross of $335 million. It was the highest-grossing video game movie adaptation until 2016 when the movie adaptation of Warcraft was released (this record is now held by The Super Mario Bros. Movie).
If you'd like to listen to the rest of the podcast, you can do so here. It also includes Mechner's experience of the film's three premieres in London, Moscow, and LA, as well as his memories of growing up playing games like Choplifter on the Apple II. You can also read Mechner's 2005 script for the Prince of Persia film over on his website, to see how it differs from Jeff Nachmanoff, Boaz Yakin, Doug Miro & Carlo Bernard's shooting script that was used for the finished film.