Jordan Mechner, the creator of Prince of Persia was at Comic-Con 2008 to discuss everything having to do with the franchise, from the upcoming movie, to the revamped Prince of Persia 4 video game, to the graphic novel.
But the subject he covered most was the upcoming Jerry Bruckheimer produced film, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.
Thankfully, Jordan Mechner himself is the one writing the script for the movie. He discussed how he had to start writing the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time script from scratch, since he had to re-imagine the events from the time-manipulating video game of the same name to put them into film form. He did say that you can expect carefully hidden allusions to past games in the series (meaning, The Sands of Time, Warrior Within and The Two Thrones).
When asked about the casting for Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time movie, Mechnar told the audience, “I’m delighted with the casting of the movie”, as he listed off the core actors that will be in the film: Jake Gyllenhaal, Gemma Arterton, Ben Kingsley, Alfred Molina. That was followed by Mechner expressing his faith in the movie’s director, Newell, calling him “an actor’s director” and sounding very confident that even bit parts would be cast faithfully.
Then an audience member asked why they didn’t choose someone who was actually Persian, to do the acting for the Prince Dartan in the movie. Mechna responded by saying that they looked at a range of actors, but could only choose one, saying, “Yeah, they looked at a huge range of actors. There are hundreds of great actors that could’ve done the job, but you end up picking one.”
He then went on to discuss his dissatisfaction with the second game in the trilogy, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. In the past he had said he was “not a fan” of the game. So he clarified that previous statement by saying, “I don’t like to criticize a particular game, basically what I meant to say was that the style wasn’t my style. It wasn’t what I would’ve done, but it is what it is. I’d rather focus on the positive and hope that the [new Prince of Persia game] is really awesome.”