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Joe Russo and Donald Mustard weigh in on the future of storytelling, gaming, and AI in an exclusive conversation at Sands: International Film Festival of St Andrews.
While at the Sands International Film Festival in St. Andrews, Scotland, Collider’s Steve Weintraub had the opportunity to moderate a panel with Joe Russo , and Chief Creative Officer at Epic Games, Donald Mustard. The focus of the panel was on contemporary storytelling, gaming, and looking to the future in all things video games, movies, and television.
MUSTARD: That's a great question, [to Russo] and this is interesting to see what you say about this too. Whenever I'm making something, I'm always just trying to make something that's awesome, that we think is awesome, that I think is awesome that I wanna play and I wanna watch, I wanna see.
RUSSO: Because I think it was probably one of the more important decisions that you made as a stylist. It was a choice with a very strong motivation behind it, which was, you always had this idea that you could build a community, and you wanted that community to pull from all different parts of pop culture that also have new ideas in it, and so you felt like a universal graphic approach could accommodate whatever you wanted to bring into it.When Will AI Take Over the World...
MUSTARD: Yeah, and I agree.
MUSTARD: I think eventually, yeah, it'll get there, but I think it'll, for a while at least, require strong curation, right? And I think if you look at some of the – I don't wanna get this totally wrong, I apologize to the people who make it, but you see, even now, there's some of the special effects houses, and some of these YouTubers are out there, and they're really kind of– I saw a video the other week where they just kind of shot themselves against a green screen, but...
So, it's part of the art of it is, taking ideas– This is not different than 30 years ago when, if I'm going to meet you at dinner and I'm late, I have to pull over, pull a quarter out of my pocket, put it on the phone, dial a restaurant, ask the restaurant to look for someone who looks like you, and then you use a giant book that was a map to figure out how to get to the restaurant, I didn't know where it was… If you had said to me at that time, “Oh, no, that's all gonna be...
What I'm most interested in and what I know exists is a more immersive projection system that can actually, without an apparatus on my head, bring the story to me and around me. Can you imagine watching an action film where the car just races right past your head? So I feel like that's probably the evolution that's coming, and maybe the thing that revitalizes a community experience in a theater is if we have a more immersive way to take in the story.
RUSSO: And he's being modest about this. It was sort of a historic moment because what they were doing was – and I won't give specifics away – [they] created a fantasy virtual space that was photoreal, real-time where there were photoreal avatars mapped onto the motion capture actors. So he literally had created an alternate reality in which he could tell a story and could do it real-time.
MUSTARD: Even a lot of the experiment of Fortnite was– very early on, internally, we didn't look at it as a game. We always kind of thought of it as just this place. I always call Fortnite a place. Like, I just wanted to make a place where you could go and you could hang out with your friends, and you could kind of just do whatever you want.
This isn't the exclusion of anything. Because I feel like whenever you talk about a subject like this, people get very fearful. “Well, why are you saying this? Well, what do you mean by that? Are you saying that movies are gonna die?” No, what I'm saying is that everything is going to evolve, and you're either going to evolve with it or you're going to be left behind. That's how it's always worked throughout history. And we're at a critical juncture of evolution.
The Future of Gaming & Exploring New IPs I think that the video game world is clearly where a lot of technology comes from because it's pushing boundaries. What do you guys think about the future and the technology the video game world creates? RUSSO: But it all came from the gaming space because gamers have a craving for immersion. So there's always been a drive for photoreal in gaming. And gaming makes a lot of money, and you need money to develop technology.
Rather than the sort of, “Well, let's build a game and see if the game works, and if the game works, then maybe in 10 years from now, somebody will make a credible movie version of it, or somebody won't because now the game is making so much money, we don't want to make a movie because if they don't make a good movie then it's really going to affect our profits on the game.
MUSTARD: I don't know. To me, I wanna do stuff that always just feels authentic and is a great story. And so, it's not something we're actively working on right now. I'm not gonna say it would never happen. In fact, I mean, I know exactly how I would do the Fortnite whatever. Exactly. I know exactly the story I’d want to– but it's not the focus right now. I don’t have time. MUSTARD: Oh yeah, if a Fortnite movie gets greenlit by any studio in a second.
And so we thought, “Well, let's just take this process forward and use it to develop other things.” So we built a studio around that codified process. They're not easy to build, you have to be– it usually starts with a conversation and the conversation turns into a three-page document about a story.
MUSTARD: Of course there is. There's totally a business model where that could absolutely work, I think you’d just have to design it that way from the start and know that going in, which is– to use Fortnite as an example, and this is only one vertical, but that was kind of our goal was, we wanted to get it to as many people as possible.
Runtimes, Radicalizing the Formula, & Reality Modifications One of the things that excites me is that I think we're pushing away from the two-hour movie. A lot more movies, I've noticed, are going a little longer, and with video games, some are an hour and some can be 100 hours. For each of you, how do you decide how long an experience should be?
That's all gone. You can watch anything you want, any time you want, anywhere, at a theater day-and-date, with your phone, or with an airplane. So the fact that we can consume content with a voracious appetite has given all of us a PhD in storytelling.
RUSSO: No, they never give you a note on the runtime. Everything has its positives and its negatives, right? Theatrical as its positives, streaming has its positives. One of the positives of streaming is that you can break the format, and with Citadel as an example, we wanted something that felt really serialized, super pacey, real explosive pace, you know, compulsively watchable. And to us, as we cut the episodes, they kept getting punchier and shorter, and more fun the faster we made them.
Right now the PlayStation 5 is out, super popular, Xbox has a system. What do you think the video game consoles in the future are gonna look like, and do we have them now with some of those virtual headsets?
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