We just chatted with Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the writer-director team behind Gamer (and the Crank saga). And we asked them what other films they drew inspiration from in making their upcoming videogame thriller. Find out what they had to say after the jump!
Mark Neveldine: Fried Green Tomatoes. The Smurfs… No, we were reading about the end of the world and singularity and stuff like that. We also do movies that are fun and ridiculous and we thought, “Let’s do a movie about a live video game, but let it be sort of a warning in a way,” because people are so involved in these reality games and playing videogames 24/7, and people love watching UFC fights. So we kind of packed it all into one game and said, “This is where it could go. If given the chance, would you control another human being?” And a lot of people would. It’s kind of going in that direction. We”re already controlled anyway by advertising media, and manipulated and everything else. So we just kind of put our Crank paste all over that and blew it up.
Brian Taylor: There’s different kinds of science-fiction movies. Some science-fiction movies are basically just an action movie or a horror movie with spaceships in it. But our favorite science-fiction movies are the ones from the ’70s and ’80s where there’s issues involved. There’s some sort of a social framework – Soylent Green, the original Rollerball, things like that. So we kind of wanted to do a throwback to those kinds of movies, where you”re saying something about where we’re going, and you have some kind of central character – in this case, Gerard [Butler ‘s character, who is sort of this one man in the midst of all this who needs to fight against it and kind of find the humanity in where things are going.