Gran Turismo Takes a Meta Turn on Hollywood’s Newfound Video Game Adaptation Craze
Ever since the huge successes of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Uncharted, and The Last Of Us, films and TV shows adapted from video games have been all the rage in Hollywood. But when Neill Blomkamp received a call from Sony asking if he wanted to direct a movie based around its super-serious, hyper-realistic racing game series Gran Turismo, he was initially confused.
“I almost wanted to read the screenplay just to understand what they were talking about because it just made no sense to me,” he told AFP. “Obviously, it's just a racing simulator.”
Indeed, the Gran Turismo games have no characters like Italian plumbers or fungus-crazed zombies who would lend themselves to a straightforward Hollywood film adaptation. As a result, the movie's script — penned by the writer of King Richard and Creed III — took an entirely different and very meta approach.
It is largely based instead on a marketing stunt, back in 2008, when Sony and Nissan launched a competition in which top Gran Turismo video gamers could test their skills on actual racetracks. The GT Academy took PlayStation gamers out of their bedrooms, and put them behind real racecar wheels. Each year's champion was then given a chance to race against professional drivers on world-famous tracks including Silverstone and Le Mans.
One of those, Jann Mardenborough — a working-class teen from Darlington, England, who was one of the first GT Academy gamers to successfully compete in real racing — is the subject of the movie.
“I was so struck by this approach of it being a biography, but also being a video game film,” said Blomkamp, who previously directed District 9 and Elysium. “And that the video game would be an element inside that real world — the way that Gran Turismo
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