Movies and series based on a video game are currently all the rage in Hollywood. The resounding successes of Super Mario Bros, Uncharted and The Last Of Us, are there to testify to this. But with Gran Turismo, this adaptation exercise is reinvented.
When Sony asked Neill Blomkamp to direct a film inspired by this series of games dedicated to motor racing, the filmmaker known for his sci-fi films – District 9 and Elysium – was at first perplexed. How could he base a plot on a game that not only lacks mustachioed plumbers or zombies, but outright claims the absence of characters? Gran Turismo “is just a racing simulator”, summarizes the director to AFP. “I almost wanted to read the script just to understand what they were talking about, because it didn’t make any sense to me.”
But the scenario surprised him, taking a side path. The story is largely inspired by a marketing stunt organized by Sony and Nissan in 2008, when the two Japanese giants launched a competition allowing the best Gran Turismo players to swap their controller for a real racing car. Thanks to the GT Academy, the aces of the Playstation could test their skills on real racing circuits. Each year, hand-picked players competed against each other. The champion could then compete against professional drivers on legendary tracks, such as Le Mans or Silverstone.
This somewhat crazy challenge saw the birth of a pilot behind the controls. After joining the GT Academy, Briton Jann Mardenborough confirmed his talent for racing in real life, to the point of becoming a professional driver. He is the hero of the film. “I was very struck by the idea that it was both a biography and a movie about video games,” says Blomkamp. The director also appreciates the mise en abyme of the feature film, where “the video game is an element within this real world – in the same way that Gran Turismo exists in our world.”
Criticism remains mixed in the face of this adaptation. The prestigious Guardian described the film as an “ode to product placement”. But others were surprised by its emotional force, enabled by the narration of a fatal accident. In 2015, Jann Mardenborough’s car took off vertically and flipped over Germany’s famous Nürburgring circuit. By crashing into the fence, the racing car kills a spectator and injures several others. The investigation into the bizarre accident has exonerated the Briton of any responsibility, but as the film reminds, motorsports purists have long whispered behind the driver’s back, because of his past as a video game player.
“It’s an integral part of his life,” sums up Mr. Blomkamp, who hired the pilot as a stuntman to dub the driving scenes of Archie Madekwe, the actor who plays his character in the film. Despite the presence of the real Jann Mardenborough on the set, the fatal accident was reconstructed in “100% digital”. Taking a car vertically off a steep incline was too unusual. “We tried to reproduce what the car did, down to the pixel, from the video sequences that we could find”, explained Neill Blomkamp, recalling that the crash also remains a “very sensitive subject for Jann”.
Originally scheduled for August 11, the film’s release was postponed to August 25 by Sony due to the ongoing Hollywood strike, which is preventing film actors like Orlando Bloom and David Harbor from promoting it. The deadline should allow for the organization of previews, with the hope of creating a buzz. “Stars can’t promote the movie, but audiences can,” a Sony spokesperson told The Hollywood Reporter.
