How Borderlands bridges the border of film and games — Randy Pitchford and Jamie Lee Curtis

Borderlands the movie is coming out on August 9 in theaters as the latest gaming intellectual property that has gone Hollywood.

To Randy Pitchford, a magician and president of Gearbox Entertainment, this created a long-awaited opportunity to find the border interactive and linear storytelling. If you check out movie trailer, you’ll see it has a vibe like the Guardians of the Galaxy with a retro song from ELO, Do You Want My Love. This ragtag group of misfits will band together to pull off a heist. Or maybe it’s a bit like Ocean’s 11. The point is that it’s hard to tell what inspired what.

It’s wonderful that games are become the source for movies and TV and it’s no big deal anymore. We’ve seen wonderful successes in game adaptations with The Super Mario Bros. Movie, The Last of Us, Twisted Metal, Hitman, Uncharted, Sonic the Hedgehog, Fallout and even Five Nights at Freddy’s. It’s like games are the new comics in Hollywood. (OK, we won’t mention Halo).

Borderlands is an ode to many different sci-fi and Western films, and now that it’s being made into a movie, it’s an inspiration itself. I talked to Pitchford and actress Jamie Lee Curtis, who plays Dr. Tannis in the film, sees the blurring of lines as further proof that games, like any medium, is a place for art.

Pitchford said that any time we get a new form of art, it’s additive. Motion pictures didn’t replace painted pictures, he said. Regarding the growth of gaming culture, Curtis said, ” If that’s where art is taking us, if that’s becoming the predominant way to tell stories, groovy.”

I’m looking forward to this movie, as it’s as goofy as its creators are. I tried hard not to be a fan boy here, but Curtis got me when she shouted at me in parting, “Get out of your green box, Dean. Go out and get some sunshine!”

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: I liked the Game Rant interview, where they asked you what Borderlands means. I felt like that’s not a bad place to start.

Randy Pitchford: It’s been there from the beginning. There was a time–I think when we first pitched the game to be on the cover of Game Informer magazine, the publisher was saying we would just name it after the planet. We actually owned the trademark for “Pandora.” I later gave clearance for James Cameron, because he named the planet Pandora in the Avatar films. Then we sold it to the internet radio company.

To me, though, it was always about–it was a Reese’s peanut butter cup. “You got your peanut butter in my chocolate!” “You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!” We jammed an RPG and a shooter together, which had no business being together. We created a genre. Now there’s a whole industry. But it wasn’t just that. Everything. The art direction. The surrealism and the realism. The western and the science fiction. A drama and a comedy smashed together in weird ways. From a character perspective – and this is what I think comes from me, living in that uncomfortable space where all of us live – it’s living between who we wish we were and who we actually are. That’s what a borderland is.

As we got there, the opportunity to try to do it, to play with the borderland between interactive and linear – a big studio movie versus this interactive play space that I’ve dedicated my life to – what’s that going to be like? It’s something I had to explore. I think that’s why we have this movie.

Jamie Lee Curtis: I could listen to you go on about this world that we’re all trying to inhabit–it’s beautiful. You’re a poet.

GamesBeat: Jamie, I hear that you’ve snuck into Evo fighting game events.

Curtis: I’ve snuck into Evo and only had one person figure it out. Another Vega, weirdly enough. Another woman Vega. She heard my voice and came up and said, “Are you…?” But yes, I’ve snuck into anime cons before. I also hosted a cosplay wedding. I performed the ceremony. I was Jaina Proudmoore from World of Warcraft. But yes, my credibility is well-trod. I’m a gamer mom. I raised a gamer from the early years of the Game Boy, all the way through. I’ve bought every iteration of every console, all of them. You’ve bilked me out of a lot of frickin’ money.

GamesBeat: It’s interesting that gaming culture–it either has become or is becoming the biggest entertainment culture. How do you feel about that?

Curtis: I believe in the art form of transition, in the expansiveness of art. If that’s where art is taking us, if that’s becoming the predominant way to tell stories, groovy. The pendulum goes back and forth. Right now it seems to be a very active, creative place. I’m all for it.

Pitchford: Every time our species gets lucky enough to imagine and bring into existence a new medium, the new medium tends to be additive. When movies appeared, when we finally got to watch something unfold in front of us in real time, rather than looking at a still picture, it didn’t mean that people stopped painting pictures. Every new medium is additive.

Sometimes it’s the case that the newest medium tends to jump up to that position, if people are looking at the scoreboard, but it’s not because any prior medium went down. It’s just because we’re getting better at sharing what we create as a species. It’s getting easier to show what we create. New people are interested in new things. That just tends to be what happens. It’s not weird that there’s something called movies or something called video games. That’s just one of the options, and they’re all options. Just because we have VR doesn’t mean we stopped listening to music.

Curtis: In a world of AI–AI is feeding itself. It’s already feeding itself. It can’t learn any more. It’s over, in that way. Creativity, people like Randy, that’s the future of the world. Randy is that combination of a nerd and art and magic, or the art of magic. The way you communicate, the way you think and how you speak, is the future of that combination of art, technology, storytelling–as you said, it’s the new medium. You cannot do it without artists. We’ll never be able to do it without artists.

Pitchford: These are just mediums. We can use them for expression and we can use them for entertainment. Any given person who’s going to play with a medium–film is very different from video games. There are things we can do in film that you can’t do in video games. That’s why it was important for me to make this movie.

GamesBeat: I was wondering what was hard about this transition from games to movies for you.

Pitchford: It’s about that spot we’ve talked about, that space between things that don’t belong. The space between a linear medium like film and an interactive medium like video games is worth exploring.

Curtis: And the emotional medium of acting. It isn’t linear or interactive per se. It’s emotion-driven.

Pitchford: If you watch this, you’ll see Jamie and the cast start in the same borderlands, where they have no business being with each other. The crew that’s assembled has no business being with each other. By the end of the story they’re a family. You watch that transition happen. There’s love there. You’ll feel it. We could never express, in a video game, that kind of emotion.

That’s also part of what Borderlands is all about, the family you make. That’s why all of our games are cooperative. I wanted that. I can’t believe how fortunate and lucky and amazing it’s been to have this talent. Jamie, you watch her as Dr. Tannis. She’s a fucking god at acting and making us feel and believe in her becoming the character. Cate Blanchett, holy shit. How is Cate Blanchett in our dumb video game movie? This is insane. This is the world we’re in now. This is actually happening. I never would have imagined this 20 years ago.

GamesBeat: I thought the trailer felt a bit like Guardians of the Galaxy. It had the retro soundtrack playing. It feels like that might have been a nice pathway for you.

Pitchford: Guardians has really helped. I did a panel with James Gunn. He told me that he played Borderlands and Borderlands was a big influence on what he did with Guardians, actually. We were in development when the movie came out. At first I was worried. “Man, I hope this works, because if that doesn’t work, we’re fucked.” And then it not only worked, but it was amazing. It was the most validating thing in the world. That put extra gas under it.

It doesn’t matter if an artist like me wants something to happen. I’m not a filmmaker. To make something like this happen takes an unbelievable engine. It takes an ungodly amount of money and unbelievable talent, all of which can be doing anything they want with their time. Jamie could be anywhere in the world right now, but she’s here talking to us because she committed herself to what this is. It’s unbelievable that we get to be in this space.

GamesBeat: Did a lot of films inspire Borderlands itself?

Pitchford: Of course. You could feel it. You could feel where we liked the dystopian world of Mad Max, but somehow juxtaposing that with an aspirational view of the future. Again, that’s another borderland that we play with. Everything about the universe underscores that. Mixing the best and the worst, the east and the west, the north and the south, the up and the down, trying to live in that weird place between. It’s like where the highway meets the prairie.

Curtis: You have bounty hunters and children. You know and I know, when the bounty hunter meets the child, that’s going to change them. That’s the emotional thread of the movie. You’re going to find this feral, parentless child – except for Krieg, who’s like the nanny plus 15 nitrous oxide Whip-Its – and yet you know that familyless child is going to find a family. It’s that classic western story. Shane. You start thinking about all these great–Lilith is basically a western archetype.

GamesBeat: Do you think gamer humor is the same as mass culture humor at this point?

Pitchford: I don’t even know what gamer humor is. But for us it’s a lot of fun to commit to a serious, meaningful, high-stakes center line and then make fart jokes on top of that. That’s how I am in the real world. The shit could be going down and you still find a way to have this stupid surface thing that will break the tension. We kinda need that as a species. I need that in my day to day life. It makes sense that it appears in the entertainment that we create.

Curtis: Now get out of your green box Dean. Go out and get some sunshine.