Frame perfect
Dan Trachtenberg explains why his latest videogame project is a dream come true
Director Dan Trachtenberg’s latest project is a dream come true
We’ve seen plenty of stars from film and TV winging it when they accept a paycheque to work in videogames. Even the best actors can struggle to convince us that their excitement about a project is genuine (in some cases, they don’t bother trying). Dan Trachtenberg, director of 10 Cloverfield Lane, Black Mirror episode Playtest and the pilot for Amazon antisuperhero series The Boys, does not have to pretend. For a man whose career has been informed by videogames even before No Escape – his dazzling short film based on Valve’s Portal – first brought him to Hollywood’s attention, his latest project was something of a dream gig. In fact, Trachtenberg’s new sixminute cinematic intro to Digital Extremes’ F2P shooter Warframe, unveiled at the studio’s Tennocon event in July, came about after he approached the developer rather than the other way around.
It all began when he was making 10 Cloverfield Lane. Shooting in New Orleans, Trachtenberg was looking for a way to connect with his friends back home in LA. Destiny had just released, he recalls, but it wasn’t quite doing the job. “I was complaining about games like Destiny and Overwatch, where the carrot on the stick is aesthetics, right?” he begins. “It’s about how cool this gun looks, or how cool this new armour looks. And yet I don’t really get to see it, because it’s a firstperson game! It’s always frustrated me.” His friend, artist Brad Arnold (with whom he would later nerd out as the pair storyboarded the cinematic together) suggested he play
Warframe instead: “He said, ‘It’s thirdperson, and it’s got this great traversal mechanic’, and hey, I’m a sucker for a good traversal mechanic.” He started playing on PS4 and was soon hooked; by the time Trachtenberg bought a gaming PC, it had become a full-blown obsession. He tweeted his love for the game, which caught the attention of its makers: “I slid into their DMs, and said, ‘I’d do anything to work with you guys’.”
The two parties were on the same page from minute one. Trachtenberg had been gushing about Warframe to his friends, but was mindful – as, indeed, was Digital Extremes – that the game lacked an immediate narrative hook. Rather than a live-action commercial, the idea for an opening cinematic was floated. Trachtenberg called his colleague Sheridan Thomas at production company Great Guns, before the two found the ideal collaborator in Digic Pictures, a CG animation company based in Budapest.
The whole thing may have taken 18 months to put together – the final sound edit arrived just 24 hours before Tennocon, he tells us – but the process was otherwise relatively smooth. Moving from film to games would, you might think, require a period of adjustment, but since the intro was to be a self-contained narrative – and since Trachtenberg was already more than familiar with the game – there was little disparity between his vision and Digital Extremes’. “A lot of live-action trailers show you things you can’t actually do in the game. The great thing about Warframe is you can do so many of those cool things. I mean, I cheat here and there, but only very lightly.” He describes it almost as a highlights package; a heavily authored version of the kind of multiplayer experiences he’s had while playing Warframe. “The last sequence where the Warframes are using their abilities… sure, it doesn’t always happen that tightly. But certainly over the years I have had moments like that.”
Rather than dispelling any preconceptions he might have had about working in games, the project seems to have invigorated his desire to work within the medium again. “I’m friends with Neil Druckmann, and during discussions with him, and with Geoff and Steve [Sinclair, Warframe’s director], I’ve become very jealous of the creative control that you get in games, and the iterative process that you just don’t get in movies. Those guys are able to design all elements and set the standard of collaboration with everyone; that isn’t always my choice or my position in movies.”
That said, he’s got a blockbuster film on his slate; he’ll direct Tom Holland as Nathan Drake in Sony’s adaptation of Uncharted, due for release next year. Has this helped him understand what fans of a big franchise are looking for? “It was certainly heartening to go from assuming that I know this game well and then being mocked on stage,” he laughs. “It was a lesson that there’s always people who know this thing more than you do. And yet then displaying this thing I’d made and having that be appreciated, like, ‘Oh, this guy does understand what we like about it'? That was a nice little roller-coaster ride to be on – and one that I think probably foreshadows anything else I do when it comes to adapting videogames for movies and TV.”
The cinematic is a heavily-authored version of the kind of multiplayer experiences he’s had in