Director Nia DaCosta has spoken of her affection for Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children – and how she used it to pitch The Marvels.
The days when videogames were regarded by the rest of the media as those weird, bleepy things kids played with in their bedrooms are thankfully over. How do we know this? Because there’s a generation of film directors – including Jordan Vogt Roberts and Neill Blomkamp, to name but two – who are more than happy to cite videogames as reference points and enthuse about them in interviews.
All of which brings us – in this, our second paragraph – to Nia DaCosta, who after breaking through with the atmospheric, beautifully-shot remake of Candyman, is about to unleash her superhero action banquet, The Marvels. In an interview snippet shared on X (formerly Twitter) by IGN, DaCosta talks about her affection for Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children – a 2005 film spin-off from Square Enix’s fantasy RPG series.
In fact, DaCosta was so inspired by Advent Children that she even used it as a reference point when she was pitching her version of The Marvels to, well, Marvel Studios.
“One of my references when I was pitching for the film was Advent Children,” DaCosta told IGN. “A couple of scenes from that, because it’s just amazing. [It] has really great fight scenes and has a really great ending sequence with the main character being thrown into the sky by all the other characters.”
Elsewhere, DaCosta talked about the ‘cinematic’ quality of other video games from the past decade or so, and hints at the growing crossover, visually, between games and movies.
“I actually didn’t want [The Marvels] to look like a videogame… but, obviously, [videogames are] so cinematic now as well,” DaCosta said. “Think about The Last Of Us cutscenes or Horizon Zero Dawn cutscenes. But it’s a very different style, so, for me, it was from the best kinds of games, the best, sort of, stories that you get – that’s what inspires me to play, and, I think, inspires people to watch movies like this.”
Read more: The Marvels review | Promising sequel gets bogged down
The Marvels is out in UK cinemas on the 10th November.
