6 No./ Meet the new dungeon masters
The filmmakers behind Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves on striving to make a movie the game deserves
ASIDE FROM ITS huge influence on (and appearances in) Stranger Things,
the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons has never played well on the screen. There was that cheesy ’80s kids cartoon, then in 2000 the eponymous big-screen box-office flop. And let’s not even get started on the straight-to-dvd films that followed.
Writer-directing duo John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein (whose last film was, appropriately, Game Night)
are well aware of all this. “We take it as a challenge,” says Goldstein. “In some ways it’s a good thing, because people come in with low expectations and we get a chance to knock their socks off.”
Daley and Goldstein both know and love D&D. Goldstein was “an early adopter” who, like Elliott in E.T., insisted on joining his big brother’s games during the early ’80s. Daley played it on TV as lead geek Sam Weir in Judd Apatow’s Freaks And Geeks. “All of us castmembers decided to play a campaign to become acquainted with it,” he says. “I had no idea how creative it was.”
When first approached about the movie, the pair saw the potential to not only get D&D right, but also do something different with fantasy. “D&D is the perfect opportunity to mix genres, because it is inherently comedic when you’re playing, but it’s also very serious. Your life is always at risk,” says Goldstein.
The way they describe their film, it sounds like Guardians Of The Galaxy,
but with swords and sorcery. “We have this rag-tag team that are forced together,” explains Daley. That team includes Chris Pine as a lute-playing bard, and Michelle Rodriguez as a barbarian who, Goldstein says, is “very much the strength of the operation”.
At the movie’s start, he continues, “the two of them are in prison, because they were part of a group of thieves and got caught.” This may or may not have something to do with Hugh Grant’s character, a “narcissistic sociopath” who used to work with the pair, but now holds the grand title ‘Lord of Neverwinter’.
Fan service is something the pair are handling carefully. “We were really cognisant of it to the extent of being true to the world and including some of the beloved monsters and places,” says Goldstein, “but also of making a movie that would appeal to someone if they’ve never spent a moment thinking about D&D. There really is an emotional story at the core of this thing.” In their hands, it sounds like this D&D adaptation will be far less a roll of the dice than its predecessors.
DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOUR AMONG THIEVES IS OUT IN MARCH 2023