Mike Newell is one of the UK's most successful film-makers.
Perhaps best known for his much-loved Harry Potter series, Newell is also renowned for cinematic modern classics Four Weddings & A Funeral, Donnie Brasco and Mona Lisa Smile.
But one thing he admits that he doesn't know too much about is video games. Which is strange, when you consider he also directed the very passable summer blockbuster Prince Of Persia.
From Newell's perspective, games simply can't convey emotion or storytelling like the movies. Indeed, he says the only way he could make PoP into a film he could be proud of was to remove it from the video game - only working with the basics of Ubisoft's series.
When we caught up with him recently to discuss PoP, Newell was unapologetic about his viewpoint - even face-to-face with a games journalist.
He admitted that he hadn't played Heavy Rain - or indeed, many of the titles we might consider 'emotionally engaging'.
But - as he explains in his re-printed comments below - that didn't stop his steadfast belief that video games are played by those with 'glazed eyes' and offer nothing near the 'journey' of the cinema...
ZoomI'm entirely incompetent at playing video games. In the Prince Of Persia game, you have to run across walls - I could never get more than three feet without falling into the revolving knives. I was hopeless.
And yet I knew I had to satisfy the gamers with the Prince Of Persia movie. It's an important audience and it's a very vocal audience. If they don't like something, you're going to hear. I didn't want that to happen.
They were worried. They said 'there's never been a good movie of a video game - how are you going to be different?'.
The answer was that I didn't try to make a movie of the game. I tried to make a movie that, in some aspects, had the spirit of the game.
Let's be clear - for Hollywood, video games change everything. Of course they do. I have a 14-year-old son, he's a bright kid, he goes to a good school, and what he does for at least 45 minutes every night is he gets online and he kills people in various scenarios and various parts of the world.
'Hello Billy, where are you tonight?'
'Erm, Borneo.'
'Oh. Is that where palm trees are?'
'Yep.'
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
If I think it changes everything - and I do - what I have to do is to say: 'You can't just accept the morals of that. There's got to be something more. There has to be a sense of human complexity.'
And so, I tried to make the relationships between the characters [in Prince Of Persia] as sophisticated as I could.
ZoomOne of the things I notice from the gamers - whether you are representing them or not - at every damn roundtable, they take over. And they mustn't. They don't want it.
They say there's never been a decent movie of a game made yet. Well one of the reasons maybe is that people are trying to make movies of the games - for them! Why don't we just go off to the side a little bit? Why don't we do what I tried to do, which is to take the good bits? You know, just massage them into a proper drama. [Prince of Persia] is that.
God Damn the gamers! Get them out of my head! The Prince Of Persia movie is a great big, general entertainment with a romance, a boy and a girl, comedy, action and a very good melodramatic story. It should be enormous, free reign entertainment. That's what a Bruckheimer movie is, and that's what this tries to do.
