From ‘Indiana Jones’ To ‘Cocktail,’ Director Ruben Fleisher Deciphers The DNA Of ‘Uncharted’

Director Ruben Fleisher has succeeded where so many others have failed and completed the mission of bringing the big-screen adaptation of Uncharted to the big screen. It’s a rush.

Based on the wildly successful PlayStation video game series by Naughty Dog, the movie entered development in 2008 and passed through the hands of filmmaker after filmmaker.

The epic treasure-hunting romp stars Tom Holland as Nathan Drake, while Mark Wahlberg, attached to the project since early development, is Victor “Sully” Sullivan. The romp, which cost $120 million to make, is a jewel in the crown of video game adaptations. 

I caught up with Fleisher to discuss the film worthy of kickstarting a franchise to find out which movies from his childhood inspired his vision, easter eggs for fans, and what connects the adventure to the Tom Cruise movie, Cocktail. 

Simon Thompson: Many people have struggled to make good movies based on video games, but you’ve cracked the code with Uncharted. How did you do it? I am surprised that I genuinely enjoyed it so much.

Ruben Fleisher: That makes me so happy because that’s what we set out to do, make a really fun movie. Video games are already an incredibly immersive, and these days cinematic, experience; you can’t try and purely recreate that experience because they’ll never compare. They are an active experience where you’re guiding the path of this hero and watching the world through their eyes. Movies are inherently passive experiences where somebody else presents this journey for you, and you have no part in how it plays out. 

Thompson: One of the challenges you face with this kind of movie is making a film that the video game fans will like. You also have to make a movie that someone like me, who has never played any Uncharted game, wants to see, will engage with, and hopefully evangelize about. You can’t please everyone, but how do you get as close to that as possible?

Fleisher: It has to work as a movie. If it doesn’t work as a movie, then it satisfies nobody. The people who have never heard of the game won’t care because it’s not good, and the fans will be disappointed because it’s not a satisfying story. Whether it’s Venom or this Uncharted, in taking something beloved by fans, I want to make sure that it can stand on its own two feet and work as its intended format, as a theatrical feature film. It also has to honor and pay tribute to what we all love about the source material. With Uncharted, those things were these incredible action set pieces, the great humor, and the buddy dynamic between Nate and Sully. Those were all of our touchstones, which make for a great video game, but they are also the makings of any great movie. Our job was to make sure that we cast it extremely well and delivered on that same spirit of adventure and treasure hunting that the video games do.

Thompson: When Uncharted came your way, did you say yes right away? You are not the first director to be presented with this project.

Fleisher: It was somewhat extenuating circumstances when I got sent the script, but I was on board as soon as I read it. It was mainly because Raiders of the Lost Ark is my all-time favorite movie, and they don’t make this kind of big treasure-hunting adventure film anymore. That was what originally inspired me even to go down this path. When I was sent something that captured that spirit and allowed me to make a film in this genre that can hopefully be this generation’s own beloved treasure hunting movie, I jumped at the chance.

Thompson: We are around the same age, and we grew up with movies in an era with action adventures that had a specific heart, character, and spectacle. As someone shaped by those films, like Raiders, is there something deep in your director DNA that makes you uniquely positioned to bring something specific that we haven’t seen for decades?

Fleisher: I’m not sure how to answer that question, but I think there is a generation of filmmakers that are our age that was so inspired by the likes of classic directors such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Robert Zemeckis, Joe Dante, and the films of Amblin, that it’s become cyclical. We’re now kind of evoking some of those same spirits. To me, those movies of the 80s like Raiders and Back to the Future are the best movies ever made.

Thompson: You mentioned Raiders of the Lost Ark as one of the movies that influenced Uncharted. What are some of the others that infused your vision?  

Fleisher: I think a lot of them are fairly obvious. Star Wars was a reference point for me in terms of the Luke-Han dynamic because you can see many aspects of the Nate and Sully relationship. There’s this older, jaded, self-interested guy, and then a younger, eager, and a little bit more naive guy, and they come together. It’s not as obvious, but the buddy pairing invokes Midnight Run, which is probably my favorite buddy pairing in a movie. While Charles Grodin and Robert De Niro are certainly a different dynamic from Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg, I love those road trip movies. While it’s not a single movie, I would say classic Bond films were also a reference point in terms of the globe-trotting nature of Uncharted and the exotic locations. When you see Nate on a speedboat in the South Pacific, to me, that feels like a real James Bond moment as well as the chase scene on the rooftop. When we were scouting in the area, I saw it, and it felt like a Bond location to me. Pirates of the Caribbean has a cumulative adventure spirit, not as an individual movie but as a franchise. I wanted this movie to live in a similar space where it was fun for the whole family. Also, in the film’s finale, you can’t avoid the obvious parallel of the Pirate ships.

Thompson: If you’re going to take on an epic adventure movie, I’m guessing during a pandemic is not the easiest time to take it on?

Fleisher: We were due to start shooting on March 16, 2020, which was, I think, the official day that everything shut down, so we shut down and came back in July. That was still very early days in the pandemic, and we were kind of without, no pun intended, charting our own course as far as how to make a movie in the new normal. That involved everything from wearing masks, testing every day and things that are commonplace now. At that time, none of us had done anything like that. The particularly challenging thing for us was the crowd scenes like the auction. There was a city-wide mandate about how many people could be in a room at the same time, so we had to scale back significantly because of that. For that big sequence on the rooftops that I mentioned, the days we were shooting that we tested 700 people in a day between cast, crew, and extras. The volume of people was really challenging. Also, in the scene in a packed nightclub, we were all a little nervous about being in an intimate environment. Thankfully we didn’t shut down a single day during production, and everybody was healthy and well at the end of the shoot.

Thompson: Mark Wahlberg has been attached to Uncharted for a long time, and then Tom Holland was cast. They have great chemistry, and I have wondered how people haven’t paired them up before.

Fleisher: I think Mark is underrated as a comedian. He’s this larger-than-life-action star who has also been nominated twice for Oscars and been in great movies like The Fighter. He’s worked with the world’s greatest filmmakers from Scorsese down, but people often forget about films like The Other Guys, Ted, and even his character in The Departed is a funny dude. I think that’s just Mark Wahlberg, so it was thrilling for me when we first had them on screen together, and there was that just instantaneous banter. A lot of it was scripted, but a lot of it was them just giving each other s**t on the day. They’re both so naturally and effortlessly funny and charming. As somebody who has a strong comedy background as a filmmaker, I was a pig in s**t watching these two go back and forth with one another. There’s a surprising amount of improv in this movie, from two people you wouldn’t necessarily categorize as comedians. Their ability to improvise is incredibly impressive, and some of the funniest jokes in the film are ones that they came up with on the day.

Thompson: Does that mean there was a lot of stuff that didn’t make it into the movie we could potentially see as extras on a Blu-ray or a DVD?

Fleisher: I could have cut a reel of all the alt jokes they came up with, but I didn’t do that. The nature of improv is that not everything will land, but when they hit, they hit. We have a lot of jokes they came up with or that I pitched that are in the archive somewhere.

Thompson: Something that struck me about Tom’s performance, certainly when he’s behind the bar, is that it gave me serious flashbacks to Cocktail.

Fleisher: (Laughs)

Thompson: It’s a movie I love. I make no apologies for that. Did that ever come up in conversation?

Fleisher: It’s so funny you say that because one of the jokes that didn’t make it to the final cut involves the bar manager who appears in the opening scene. There’s a moment where Tom’s character is spinning bottles, and the bar manager comes up to him and says, ‘Tom Cruise wants his bottles back.’ It was a funny joke, and I’m sad to date you, but not everybody gets that reference. I think that you and I certainly do, but a younger audience might be a little lost. But yeah, there are definitely Cocktail vibes in the bar scene.

Thompson: I’ve been campaigning for a Cocktail sequel for years, and it did make me think that Tom Holland could play the son of Tom Cruise’s character, Brian Flanagan, in that movie.

Fleisher: You could do like The Color of Money meets Cocktail with Tom and Tom. There’s a big bartending competition in Vegas that they both are training for. He never knew Flanagan was his father, and they do a paternity test. It writes itself.

Thompson: Okay, we need to talk about making that happen. What about Easter eggs in this movie for those hardcore fans?

Fleisher: There are easter eggs scattered throughout this film, from beginning to end. Literally, the first line in the movie, ‘Oh, crap,’ is a signature Nathan Drake line from the games. When he’s in the well, he says, ‘Well, well, well,’ and that’s a direct reference to the video games. There is a hugely significant one that is a big wink for anyone who knows Uncharted, and we use some of the score from the video game in that scene too. Nate’s signature look from the games is a holster that he puts on during the movie, and we use the video games score for that moment, too, because it is so iconic.

Thompson: Uncharted sets things up for another movie. Is this something that you would want to stay with as a franchise? You did the first Venom movie but not the second, but you did do a second Zombieland. 

Fleisher: I would be thrilled. If we’re lucky enough to get to make more of these, it would be a dream come true. As I said, Raiders is my all-time favorite movie, so getting to do more of these globe-trotting, treasure-hunting adventures would be an absolute pleasure. I hope that fans and audiences want to see another one.

Thompson: While we’re on franchises, where are we at with another Zombieland movie? Might it be called Zomb3land?

Fleisher: I will take Zomb3land into consideration as a title. I hope that we get to make another one. When we were shooting the second one, I remember Emma Stone joking that we should make one of them every ten years. If that proves to be the case, I will, in fact, be the luckiest man in the world.

Uncharted lands in theaters on Friday, February 18, 2022.