While the film is based on Human Revolution it’s not after the video game, as their ”chief philosophy” is that they’re ”making a cyberpunk movie,” not a ‘game movie’, says co-writer C. Robert Cargill.
They reckon they’ve distilled what an audience is ”going to want to see out of a Deus Ex movie.” Apparently that involves ”elements of the game” without rehashing it.
”Everything is kind of happening all at once,” the film’s director Scott Derrickson told Crave. ”Deus Ex is moving like a rocket. We’ve turned in a draft of that that everyone seems excited about, and we’re very excited about that.”
”…the chief philosophy is we’re not making a video game movie, we’re making a cyberpunk movie,” Cargill added. ”We’ve taken a look at what’s worked in video games and what hasn’t, and really what we’ve broken down is what we think the audience really wants,” and what ”the audience that loves Deus Ex is going to want to see out of a Deus Ex movie.”
”And it’s not a rehashing of the game. What they want to see is, they want to see elements of the game that they love, but they want to see things that they hadn’t quite seen in the game, that the game didn’t allow them to see. So it’s really allowed us to expand upon the things that happened in the game, and the game has such a great cinematic story to begin with that those elements are very easy to extract,” continued the co-writer.
”But really, at its core, we just keep telling each other, “We’re not making a video game movie, we’re making a cyberpunk movie.” And Scott and I are such big cyberpunk fans from way back in the day that that just really charges us up. Because that’s what’s so great about Deus Ex to begin with, is it really gets cyberpunk.”
Cargill added that Human Revolution developer Eidos Montreal ”really understood the nature of cyberpunk and made “the” cyberpunk game, and it is just fantastic, and we’ve just had a great time adapting it.”
The duo have looked at the likes of ”District 9 and Looper, and Inception,” for how to ”break out” Deus Ex from the mold others have used when approaching something with a cyberpunk vibe.
”It’s… Let’s push this and do something new with concepts people love, but tell a story that they’ve never seen before, that just melts their brain. And that is just hyperkinetic and smart and just hits all the right buttons that genre audiences want to see. That’s what we’ve gunned for,” explained scribe C. Robert Cargill.
”Yeah, cyberpunk is difficult. There’s a reason we haven’t had a great cyberpunk movie yet.”
”There’s a reason why a sci-fi movie as great as Neuromancer has never made it to the screen. I do think there’s a new wave coming, and not just because the technology and the effects are up to speed, but I think that there’s a sensibility to cyberpunk that the movies are catching up with.”
He talks of Blade Runner and The Matrix as being ‘curses’ on cyberpunk, saying, ”…you’ve got these movies that touch on cyberpunk elements that aren’t really cyberpunk films but they are so iconic, and so insurmountable. They’re perfect films in their own ways,” said Cargill, but ”no one has been able to break free of that, or no one has broken free of that, and tried to go at it completely fresh. I think that we’re going to see a wave of them, I predict.”
”I think that cyberpunk is going to break out. There’s going to be a new kind of science fiction film, and it will be cyberpunk, and it will be amazing.” There’s no release schedule yet for Deus Ex from Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill. Fortunately we’ll be getting a cyberpunk fix from CD Projekt’s Cyberpunk 2077 before then.
