-By Ethan Alter

Mike Newell has encountered some intriguing characters during his three-decade career as a feature filmmaker, from an NBA star named after a famous hymn, to a commitment-phobic cad who finally meets Ms. Right only to discover that she's about to become a Mrs., to a bespectacled boy wizard attempting to control his raging hormones while in the midst of an intense magic competition.

Even with that diverse background, the 67-year-old British native never expected to be making a movie about a fifth-century Persian prince who has to save his kingdom from the clutches of an evil vizier with the aid of a comely princess and a mystical object that can control time itself. It was super-producer Jerry Bruckheimer who arranged the meeting between Newell and this royal warrior by recruiting the director to helm the summer spectacle Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, based on the best-selling videogame.

"I got a call out of the blue from Jerry, who asked if I would read the script," Newell remembers. "I had no idea that I was on his radar at all. So I agreed to read it and was very persuaded. There was a lot of interesting stuff on the page: big, broad spectacle, a lot of action, a really good love story and a lot of comedy as well. It was a rich mixture that I felt played to my strengths and interests." Newell spoke with Film Journal International about his awfully big adventure making Disney’s Prince of Persia three weeks before the film's premiere at ShoWest and three months before its May 28 arrival in theatres.

Film Journal International: Why do you think Jerry Bruckheimer was so eager to have you direct Prince of Persia?
Mike Newell: Well, I had just made a Potter movie—Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire—so I was current with all the latest CGI techniques. But Jerry also explained to me that he wanted someone whose greatest interest lay in characters and how characters interact. All the movies I've enjoyed making the most are where the story comes out of the collision of the characters. Along with the script, he sent me a marvelous book of 19th-century paintings of Persia and the Near East, which was full of all sorts of wonderful, atmospheric images that I had never seen before. That was the thing that got me really intrigued about doing it.

FJI: Goblet of Fire was your introduction to big-budget filmmaking, but based on the trailers, the scale of Prince of Persia seems even larger. Were you at all daunted by the scope of the project?
Newell: If you were truly daunted by that, you'd never get up in the morning. What an assignment like this gives you is the appetite to do it. So it absolutely was not daunting, but it was a completely different thing from Harry Potter. With that film, I was very familiar with the world because it's the world of the British public school. I went to one of those schools, for God's sake, so I knew whereof I spoke. Whereas Prince of Persia is only partially based on historical truth.

FJI: Were there specific films or works of art that you drew on to craft the look of the film?
Newell: I was very anxious to give it a kind of modern-epic edge, so I knew I had to reference all of those George Lucas and Steven Spielberg films, particularly the Indiana Jones series. But I also hoped to take the audience further than that, further into an ancient world, and to try and make them believe what the people in that ancient world believed. The movie's story depends on that trick. It's all about myth made reality, which is so fascinating in a tale like this. And audiences these days are cynical; they know you can do almost anything with CGI. So you have to make them forget about all that and believe absolutely in the world and the characters that they're seeing onscreen. One of the things Jerry and I always agreed upon was that we wanted to take the audience somewhere they've never been before.

FJI: Did the videogame serve as a point of reference as well?
Newell: It did. I'm not a gamer, but I played the game and I made sure that I understood the game. I was hopeless at it, of course. [laughs] I got to be very close with the guy who created the videogame, Jordan Mechner. He would explain where certain things in the game came from and I would say, "I think we need to make the weaponry look more savage and dangerous than it does in the game." But we never said, "We can't do that because the game doesn't" or "We must do that because the game does." We wanted to use it as a point of reference but not be slavish to it. Then again, we knew that the gamers are a very important part of the audience and we tried to keep the spirit of the game. That was our primary goal—finding the spirit of the game and respecting it.

FJI: How did you come to cast Jake Gyllenhaal as the titular prince and Gemma Arterton as his love interest, Tamina?
Newell: I know Jake's parents, so I've known him since he was a small child and I've watched him grow up to become a really wonderful, subtle, sensitive actor with terrific emotional range. That's what I wanted for this character, but at the same time I had to have an action hero. So I took a bet! Jake's a strong guy and he's immensely hard-working, so I knew that one of the things that would set him on his mettle was actually performing these stunts. A lot of the fighting in the movie is Jake and a fight routine has to be learned to the inch or people get hurt. What you have is this tremendously energetic and youthful man of action who also has a wonderful sensitive side under the surface.

I saw a lot of girls for the female lead; I looked at Iranian actresses, Israeli actresses and was about to go to India to look at Bollywood actresses. But Jerry kept pushing me towards English actresses because he had had such luck with Keira Knightley in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. As soon as Gemma walked in, I fell for her. She's very energetic and very feisty and very intelligent and she's wonderful at being the tough girl who can stand up to Jake's character.

FJI: Most of the exteriors were shot on location in Morocco. Did you enjoy your time there?
Newell: When you're making a modest film, you scout lots of streets and lots of houses. The wonderful thing about making a film like this is that you get to scout lots of different countries. We looked at a number of places, including Jordan and Spain, but I kept coming back to Morocco, because it has a wonderful, epic look to it that isn't like anywhere else. It has deserts with huge sand dunes, it has rocky deserts, it has the Atlas Mountains and it has wonderful, ancient cities. There's such variety there. One of the things that all the guidebooks say is "Don't go anywhere near Morocco during the months of July and August." And, of course, that's exactly when we shot the film! So there were difficulties that came with that. But when it was done, we all felt like we had done our time in the desert—that we had fought our own battle and won.

FJI: Speaking of battles, Prince of Persia marks your first experience directing large-scale battle sequences. Was that one of the more challenging aspects of this assignment?
Newell: Well, yes, because before this film, nobody had ever given me 400 cavalry and 100 camels and said, "Now stage a battle." Fortunately I had a brilliant first assistant director and a marvelous second unit director. I had a very clear idea of how I wanted the sequences to look and they helped me achieve it. I'm eternally grateful to them for that.

FJI: Jerry Bruckheimer is known for being very hands-on with his productions. What was your working relationship like?
Newell: In my experience, once he knew what you wanted to do and agreed with you and trusted you, he left you alone. I saw Jerry maybe four times during the shoot. He'd be on the set just behind the camera or wandering around taking photographs. He's not a man who hires a dog and then wants to bark himself; he knows you get the best out of letting someone go. In the early stages of editing, he let me produce my cut and then he came in and said, "Okay, here are the virtues of what you've done and here are the vices. Let's see whether we can strip away from the vices and add to the virtues." He's very good at tweaking in the editing room. He's a drama mechanic—he knows when an engine is running sweetly and when it’s being starved of fuel.

FJI: Were there any scenes that you were sorry to lose from the final theatrical cut?
Newell: We cut very few actual scenes, but there is one scene that I always loved that involves a prince who gives his father a special gift: the heads of the rebels he's been fighting preserved in great basins of ice. I loved that and Jerry didn't, so we romped and rolled over it a bit and finally—guess what!—it's not in the movie. I also felt at times that we were taking out too many of the great big wide shots, but I think we've massaged those back into it. Overall, there was nothing in the process that was out of the ordinary. Directors always fall in love with certain scenes and shots, sometimes healthily and sometimes unhealthily. It goes back to that wise saying in filmmaking: Always be prepared to kill your darlings.

FJI: With Harry Potter, you came onboard a franchise already in motion. Here you have the opportunity to start—or potentially end—a franchise. Did that weigh on your mind at all?
Newell: I don't think it did. Certainly all of us played that game in our heads: "Is this the scene that's going to be used in the theme-park ride?" or "Will this character survive for the sequel?" But nobody ever spoke about that and nobody has spoken about that at this stage. I have no idea what the plans are for sequels. We'll probably have to wait and see if audiences have an appetite for it. I simply said to myself, "It doesn't matter about the future. Just give as much color and energy and fascination as you can to this one."

FJI: If there is a sequel, would you want to return behind the camera?
Newell: One would always like to be asked. If there are to be more, it will signify that the first one was a success and you don't like to turn your back on success. At the same time, my last four movies have all been big films, so I think a little downtime is what I want! [laughs]

To read FJI's interview with Prince of Persia producer Jerry Bruckheimer, click here.