Ed Zwick is the man behind The Last Samurai, Blood Diamond, and Defiance. He's also the man behind "The Hero's Journey", a short film released to coincide with the release of Uncharted 3 early next month.
Featuring the likes of certified 27%-er Sam Rockwell, Michelle Rodriguez and Nathan Drake himself, Nolan North, it's a mini-documentary of sorts, with a number of actors (and people behind the game itself) discussing the nature of heroism.
It's not The Siege, sure, but it's interesting for a number of reasons, especially considering the ever-blurring line between games and film recently.
We got the chance to speak to Mr. Zwick about this project of his and he admitted that "he wouldn't call himself a gamer, no" but this concept of defining heroism intrigued him.
"I thought the best way to do it was to create a mosiac, if you will, of different responses, and so I asked a number of people I thought would be an eclectic and sometimes maybe unconventional group, and have a conversation with them."
Asking him whether computer games could ever be art – bouncing off Roger Ebert's idea that they never could – this was Zwick's response:
"Well before Disney did Fantasia, before Miyazaki did Howl's Moving Castle, people were loathed to think of animation as art, so I would never want to preclude the possibility that games could transcend to art."
"The tools are technological, it's what one does with them that is artful or not – I know that the problem with games, like anything, are adhering to any number of commerical influences, and the whole notion of something being interactive is possibly the real injuction stopping games from being art."
And what about possibly directing an Uncharted movie, would there be any chance of that?
"Ha, no, that's not anything I've ever given thought to..."
We'll take your word for it, Ed... Anyway, here's the short film, and once you're done taking a look at it, tell us what you think in the comment box below.
brightcove.createExperiences();Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception is out on November 2.