How does one follow up a successful movie likeKong: Skull Island? If you’redirector Jordan Vogt-Roberts, you make an awesome live-action trailer for a highly-anticipated video game.Destiny 2is finally set to arrive on September 6 (October 24 if you’re a PC gamer) and Bungie is trying to get the word out there. So they have just released a brand new, live-action trailer forDestiny 2that features Nathan Fillion as his character Cayde-6, which was helmed by Vogt-Roberts who proves he could be the man to make a great video game movie someday.
In the newDestiny 2trailer, Nathan Fillion’s Cayde-6 explains that everything you love about Earth is gone. Except for the Last City. And now a psycho rhino named Ghaul is coming to take that away too. So it’s time to grab some big guns, unite our scattered heroes, and take back our home. While speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Jordan Vogt-Roberts explained how he shifted from doing a huge movie likeKong: Skull Islandto making this live-actionDestiny 2trailer.
“Kong had finished and I was trying to figure out how to process what the last two and a half years of my life was. I’m so proud of the collaborations with Kong, but that was the quarter of a decade, essentially, so I wasn’t looking to jump into a project right away. I was sort of looking at commercials and TV stuff. This sort of randomly came up and I was joking, well I love comedy, I love sci-fi and I love video games so this is sort of a perfect combination. It only got sweeter when during my pitch I said I wanted to actually shoot it in Detroit. Luckily, Eric Hirshberg (Activision CEO) is from Michigan as well and saw that and said, ‘Alright, cool, let’s do that.’ So, the job kept getting sweeter and sweeter for me. For me as a gamer, and the world is changing so much, but I just remember so vividly when I was younger marketing campaigns hadn’t figured out how to be respectful and loving to the actual people playing games in their basement before gaming was cool. Now, I think people like Activision and Sony are getting much smarter and they should be rewarded a bit for actually giving a shit about real gamers, people who made Destiny a success, logged in hundreds and hundreds of hours.”
The trailer makes use of everything Jordan Vogt-Roberts learned about big-budget filmmaking while makingKong: Skull Island. Even if you aren’t a gamer, this trailer may be enough to get you playingDestiny 2. Vogt-Roberts also talked a bit about how the whole thing came about and the creative process that went into making this trailer.
“I went up to Bungie, in Seattle, to play this new one and meet with the team up there, with Luke Smith (Destiny2’s game director) and the artists to sort of play around up there, sit down with them, pick their brain. It’s rare to get in the attic, in the spider webs, of somebody else’s creation. It was such a nerdy, great experience. Those guys are all such masters.Nathan Fillionwas not on set with us but he was incredibly involved. I can’t say enough good things about that guy. We had a bunch of emails going back and forth and a couple calls. He actually went and recorded video of himself riffing the speech. I was able to take the video of that to the actor who did the motion capture for Cayde-6 in the game who was there on set with us in the Cayde suit. It was a really lovely collaboration between the artist who does the mo-cap and Nathan who does the voice.”
Hollywood still hasn’t made a goodvideo game movie, which is really surprising considering how good something like thisDestiny 2trailer looks. Jordan Vogt-Roberts is actually working on the long-gestatingMetal Gear Solid movieand his experience doing this trailer is actually going to affect his work on that movie. Here’s what he had to say about it.
“I think for me there is always going to be a little bit of exploration of playing with that translation of active experience to passive experience and I think that builds into what I’m trying to achieve with Metal Gear and takes the first steps into that world of how these things can translate. Metal Gear is an infinitely tricky project and there’s a billion ways to go wrong with that. Every little experiment is ultimately going in that reservoir of knowledge of how to protect an equally important property to people.”
We still don’t know when thatMetal Gear Solidmovie is going to arrive, but he seems like the right guy for the job. Who knows? Maybe Bungie will get in the game, so to speak, and try to get aDestinymovie made. If so, maybe they should giveJordan Vogt-Robertsa call. Be sure to check out the live-actionDestiny 2trailer for yourself below.
