Details on Why David O Russell Left UNCHARTED
Yesterday we reported that director David O Russell ended up walking off the big screen adaptation of the hit video game franchise Uncharted. There was no reason given at the time to why he left, but the LA Times have some information on what went wrong, and why he left. He was making a film that didn't mesh with what the studio wanted, and he was moving forward with it fast. Here's what he had to say in a previous interview in which he revealed how things were going,
It's a locomotive, I don't know how to say this except that I feel that I see things much more clearly. I don't turn over an idea as I once would.
He was going to take the film in a very different direction than the game, which was also a completely different direction than what the studio wanted as well. It would have been an art-heist movie that involves a family of international thieves. The game was being used as a loose template. He said in a previous interview that he loved the idea of “a family that's a force to be reckoned with in the world of international art and antiquities ... [a family] that deals with heads of state and heads of museums and metes out justice.” But as you know the game centered on the adventures of one man... Nathan Drake.
According to the LA Times, "Russell had already turned in a script, but it was a script so long and so ambitious that it was at least partly responsible for the studio and him parting ways…. Among the many flourishes Russell had added were a bevy of characters not in the video game. "
The studio will still make the movie but they just need to find a new writer and director to work on developing a new story. It sounds to me like they will be working on the project from scratch, but have and earlier draft to work off of from Conan the Barbarian scribes Thomas Dean Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer.
Maybe it was a good thing for fans of the game that O Russell left the project. It doesn't sound like this is the film that fans would have wanted to see. What do you think?