Reporting from London Mike Newell, the director of "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time," the latest pyrotechnic display from producer Jerry Bruckheimer, is standing on a brick path in his English garden when he poses a question to his wife."Darling, can I make green tea in this pot?" the 68-year-old filmmaker, clad in tissue-thin blue slacks and black slippers, asks in a lilting accent before popping through a door and into the kitchen. Several minutes later, he emerges with a pitcher of tea and two saucers, his 6-foot-3 frame ambling past the hanging ivy and tinkling fountain that adorn the backyard of his home near Primrose Hill in North London.
If this domestic scene seems a little incongruous — more suited to a starchy British novel than the CG flash of a $200-million summer action movie — it's for good reason. It would be hard to find a stranger cinematic pairing than Newell, the filmmaking spirit guide behind intimate character studies such as "Four Weddings and a Funeral," "Donnie Brasco" and "Enchanted April," and Bruckheimer, the spirit guide behind such extravagant noisefests as "Armageddon" and "Pirates of the Caribbean."
In fact, the director himself was a little perplexed by the matchup and questioned whether he might be the wrong man for the job after he took it. "I said to Jerry, 'I think you might have gotten the casting wrong,' " Newell recalls. That Newell had previously stewarded a franchise film, 2005's " Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," did little to relieve his concerns.
"I felt comfortable with 'Harry Potter' because it was an English schoolboy story, and I knew that world well," Newell says as he takes a seat at a wooden table in the garden. "I didn't know ' Prince of Persia' at all.' "
The fruits of Newell's education goes on full view this weekend, as Disney releases "Prince of Persia" around the country, after a release-date postponement of nearly a year and an executive housecleaning that saw the deposal of many of the studio officials who shepherded the movie.
Based on a popular video game from creator Jordan Mechner (who was also involved in developing the film) and a script from Boaz Yakin, Doug Miro and Carlo Bernard, "Prince of Persia" concerns a prince named Dastan ( Jake Gyllenhaal) who is framed for the murder of his father, prompting him to flee to the desert. It also tracks Dastan's relationship with his two brothers (Richard Coyle and Toby Kebbell), his prickly courtship of an enemy princess (Gemma Arterton), a complicated dynamic with his uncle Nizam ( Ben Kingsley) who may or may not be Dastan's ally and — naturally — a dagger with the ability to turn back time.
As many of the reviews have noted, the film contains plenty of Bruckheimer trademarks with just scattered touches of Newell; overflowing with grand spectacle, effects-heavy battles and emotional crescendos, while sprinkling in only a few dollops of character (as a street urchin who is adopted into a royal family, Dastan evinces both toughness and vulnerability), and cinematographic nuance.
If there is an imbalance between Bruckheimer and Newell influences, there's a reason for that too. The collaboration was not without its hiccups, in particular, a creative disagreement between Newell and Bruckheimer that led to the hiring of an outside editor, Michael Kahn, to work on the film for several weeks, without Newell's involvement, after the director had turned in his cut. "I had been very happy with the stuff I had produced but Jerry clearly wasn't," Newell recalls. "What he said was, 'My ... detector goes off.' "
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