The man behind the original Prince of Persia and its more recent revival, Jordan Mechner, recently penned the first draft of the screenplay for Jerry Bruckheimer's big screen adaptation, which Walt Disney Pictures hopes will become the next Pirates of the Caribbean-type franchise. Mechner, who can be seen in the new Starz Entertainment documentary, "Hollywood Goes Gaming," talks about working with Bruckheimer on the new movie, as well as the games it's based on, in this exclusive interview.

How was the Prince of Persia movie developed?
After the Sands of Time video game came out and was a success, I pitched the project to John August, who's best known as a screenwriter but is also now making a name for himself as a producer and director. He saw the potential and we took the pitch in together to Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer in early 2004. They were interested, and I spent the next year and a half writing and revising the screenplay.

The truth is I've always dreamed of Prince of Persia becoming a movie. The original 1989 game was inspired by action-adventure movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark, and those great old Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn swashbucklers of the the '20s and '30s like Thief of Baghdad and Robin Hood.

How much has the Pirates of the Caribbean films influenced the PoP screenplay?
I first saw Pirates on the big screen in Montreal with members of the PoP team. We were in the final stages of making Sands of Time and we'd heard from a lot of people that Pirates had a Prince of Persia feel. I loved it, thought it did a great job of capturing the spirit of those classic adventure movies, but updating it with the kind of spectacular action you expect from a modern summer blockbuster. We hoped to do the same thing in the videogame medium with Sands of Time, and seeing Pirates work so well was inspiring. At that time we didn't dream that Bruckheimer would be the one to make the POP movie, we were just trying to finish the game by Christmas.

What's it like working with Jerry Bruckheimer, the king of over-the-top movie making?
Jerry Bruckheimer is at the top of the pantheon of producers now working in Hollywood because he has shown the ability to deliver on a huge scale, consistently and over decades. He's a hands-on producer who's involved in every aspect of his films. When he took on Prince of Persia it instantly gave everyone confidence and made the project real.

What was it like for you to get the job of translating your game to film?
There haven't been a lot of videogame designers that have made the transition to screenwriting, so the situation with Prince of Persia was in some ways unprecedented. An executive on the movie told me later that when they'd made the deal, they hadn't really counted on me turning in a usable script. They figured that as the "game guy," what I wrote would just be a starting point so they could then hire the real writers. To their surprise, I delivered a first draft that was solidly crafted. I did the first few sets of revisions and worked with them on it for about a year and a half. They did eventually bring in additional writers, but at that point it was a question of fine-tuning a script that was already in good shape, rather than starting over with a new take.

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