David O. Russell Calls Uncharted: Drake's Fortune a Family Affair
Posted 12.02.10 by Ryan
For a while director, David O. Russell was set to follow up his upcoming drama The Fighter with an adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith's mashup novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a mixture of the undead and the classic literature of Jane Austen.
Russell left the project for the dramedy Old St. Louis, starring Vince Vaughn, and then lined up an adaptation of the Playstation 3 video game Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, which follows the adventures of Nathan Drake, a descendant of the explorer Sir Francis Drake, as he tries to uncover lost treasure on a remote island. Russell told the LA Times that his plan for the adaptation is to expand the extended Drake family and place them into a globetrotting quest.
This idea really turns me on that there's a family that's a force to be reckoned with in the world of international art and antiquities ... [a family] that deals with heads of state and heads of museums and metes out justice. We'll have the family dynamic, which we've done in a couple of movies now, and then you take that and put it on the bigger, more muscular stage of an international action picture, but also put all the character stuff in it. That's a really cool idea to me.
Mark Wahlberg was recently announced to be cast in the role of Nathan, marking Wahlberg's second foray into video game adaptation's after 2008's woeful Max Payne. Wahlberg said he's heard Russell's idea for the movie and thinks it's a cut above other video game movies. "To me what a lot of those other movies lack is the level of character and heart," Wahlberg told the publication.
Wahlberg also previously revealed who could be up for the other roles in the Drake family: a couple of nobody actors named Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci. Wahlberg said that De Niro will play Nathan's father and Pesci will play the uncle. The casting should ease the video games' fans, who are a little weary to see the game change from its original incarnation.
Hopefully Russell will have time to assemble his Uncharted cast, since he is already halfway through the script. Said Russell of the movie's progress: "It's a locomotive." Wahlberg has said that they hope to start shooting by next summer.