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How do you turn a video game series with a 20-year history and tens of millions of fans into a cohesive movie? According to Warcraft director Duncan Jones, you go back to the start.

"Over those 20 years, [Blizzard Entertainment] have so many different stories [that] you really need to get back to the very basics," Jones told Mashable. "The essence of what kicked it all off."

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Warcraft is, effectively, an origin story: It looks all the way back to a time before the games, when orcs -- fleeing their dying world -- ended up in the realm of Azeroth, where humans, dwarves and elves had already etched out their own cultures.

"That's where the conflict started. All of Warcraft [the series] stems from that first contact," Jones said.

"As a filmmaker, my job has always been to try to find a way to make a great story out of the source material," he added. "We're trying to make a fantasy film that's on the same level of something like The Lord of the Rings, and open up a fantasy film for an audience that may know nothing about Warcraft."

Credit: Universal Pictures

Jones' pitch for the movie easily won over Blizzard, the studio behind the series. His vision lined up with what the developer believed was the best way to carry the Warcraft universe over to a wide audience.

"They were the ones who sanctified the decision for me to be the director on this," Jones said of Blizzard.

"I think they were very excited by the fact that I saw things the same way they did. And that was mainly because I was a fan of the game from its very inception.

"My big pitch was: like in the game, where the heroes could be on all sides, this film had to have orcs and humans but it had to allow the audience to understand and empathize with the heroes on both sides of the conflict."

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"This film had to have orcs and humans but it had to allow people to empathize with the heroes on both sides."

For Jones, the trick to teasing a theater-friendly story out of a game series that's delivered everything from real-time strategy to massively multiplayer role-playing to card games, was -- and this might seem obvious -- to never treat it like a game.

Unlike The Angry Birds Movie, which would never get away with notcatapulting birds into towering structures in order to topple them, Warcrafthas a lot more to work with.

"I think what you try to take from Warcraft is the story elements and the character elements," he said. 

"And then if I can sneak a few things in there that let the audience have a little wry smile about something that they recognize -- whether it's an isometric camera angle ... that reminds them of the old RTSes or it's something else that reminds them of Gryphon flights from Stormwind to the Lion's Pride -- that's all content which is there."

The idea is to include nods that fans will notice without confusing non-fans. In a lot of cases, this means using the visual language of film in referential ways, such as when landscape shots mirror famous pieces of concept art from the games.

"The easter-egg quotient in this movie is pretty high," Jones added. "But I hope we've done it in such a way that it doesn't detract from the movie, and it feels very natural and organic. Anyone who actually spends the time to hunt down easter eggs is gonna have a field day."

Credit: Universal Pictures

The challenges faced with catering to fans versus non-fans is comparable in some ways to Pixar films, as Jones described it. The Disney studio is constantly working on two equal-yet-different layers in its work.

"They do a fantastic job of making movies which are incredibly entertaining for kids [while] their parents are watching the movie on a whole different level, and they're getting a different movie," he said. 

"I think that's what you need to do with a film like this. You need to make something where the fanbase feels like they've gone home. But at the same time, for somebody who doesn't know anything about Warcraft, they feel like this is a really enticing fantasy setting on a scale I haven't seen since The Lord of the Rings."

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TopicsFilmGaming