Randy Pitchford is happy there’s finally a version of Borderlands his mom can get into

Anyone who loves a video game has almost certainly struggled to explain why they love it to someone who simply doesn’t play video games at all. Randy Pitchford makes games, as the CEO of Gearbox Software, home of the Borderlands franchise, and even he has.

But as of this summer, he also makes movies. Pitchford served as producer on Lionsgate’s Borderlands, directed by Eli Roth and starring Cate Blanchett (Tár), Ariana Greenblatt (Barbie), Jamie Lee Curtis (Everything Everywhere All At Once), Kevin Hart (Jumanji), and Jack Black (The Super Mario Bros. Movie). And among all the hopes he has for the production, a primary one was that it would help Borderlands fans share the world of the games with the non-gamers in their life.

“Like, my mom loves me and is proud of me,” Pitchford told Polygon, “but she doesn’t play my video games.” Polygon sat down with Pitchford to talk about the long road to making a video game movie, and the surprising place it started: Telltale Games’ critically lauded Tales from the Borderlands.

Polygon: It’s safe to say that video game adaptations have a less-than-stellar reputation — though one that’s changing with more recent releases, especially in TV — do you feel you have a different perspective on movie adaptations of video games now that you’ve made one?

Randy Pitchford: I mean, I’m definitely a different person now than I was when we started. But I know there’s a reason why people love the characters that we’ve made in the universe that my team and I created. And you want to be careful — I never want to have too much bias towards the things that I like. But I put myself into it, and you you put it out there in the world, and Wow, people are digging it, and it makes you believe that there are some other ways that people maybe who don’t play video games can enjoy the storytelling value, or the characters and the universe and all these relatable situations that they find themselves in. We seem to have found some angles that aren’t really covered in other mediums, for storytelling, and that felt, to me, like an opportunity that it could be adaptable.

One of the experiments we did early on was with a partnership with Telltale Games. And it was a game series called Tales from the Borderlands. And Tales from the Borderlands had no… it was not the gameplay of the mainline Borderlands games. It was a storytelling medium, just interactive, and it was wildly successful. It was the highest rated game series that Telltale ever did. And they worked on, you know, The Walking Dead and Batman; tons of other amazing things. And then that validated that the universe and the characters and the storylines [of Borderlands] were meaningful and resonated. So that was the other kind of thing that made me confident.

Image: Telltale Games/Gearbox Software

But I will say, the first meeting that I had about this film with Ari Arad — Arad Productions were the producers — was in 2011. What was the expected value for for a video game adaptation into a film back then? Right? So, so we went into this thinking, OK, I don’t know what the business case will be, but you know what? Dammit, we think there’s something here and we’re going to try. And we took the risk, and Lionsgate came along with us. And so did all this incredible cast and this unbelievable talent, with Cate Blanchett and Kevin Hart and Jack Black, and Jamie Lee Curtis for frick’s sake, and Eli [Roth] directing. It’s unbelievable that we were able to put all this together and then do it. And now here we are, where it’s done and it’s about to be unleashed.

I gotta say, this really validates me as someone who has not played any of the core Borderlands games, but loves Tales from the Borderlands. Did Tales show you that this could be a movie, or did it more specifically show you what parts of Borderlands would translate to a more narrative format? And what were those parts?

It’s kind of two different things. As to what we wanted to accomplish, to me what Borderlands always is — it’s in the title. Borderlands is us jamming together things that do not belong together. A Borderlands is the uncomfortable place between two other places. If you think about where the highway meets the prairie, there’s this area there in between, where there’s asphalt that’s cracked, that you’re not not the part you’re driving on, where the edges of the highway are. And there’s grass and weeds growing through, but it’s neither the prairie nor the highway, but it’s kind of both. It’s that weird uncomfortable place — in the video game space, from a design side, it was between role playing game and shooter, and from a genre [standpoint], science fiction and Western, or drama and comedy. Jamming things together that don’t belong. And for the characters, they live in a space that’s between who they are and who they wish they were. Which I think is a lot of us — I know it’s me. Who I wished I was and who I am aren’t exactly the same and that’s, I think, what we’re all dealing with, in a lot of ways.

Borderlands entertains that thinking, and it’s not afraid to kind of live in that weird border land, that’s what the storytelling is about. In the video game, especially with the shooter games, we have to focus on the game design loop, because people are buying a video game. With Tales from the Borderlands, we were able to let go of that fundamental shooter, looter game loop, and focus on the storytelling, and it was very, very rewarding. And the audience that found it loved it. But again, not everybody plays those kinds of video games or any video game, right? With a movie, we can reach a completely different audience, or a wider audience, with this [storytelling] that we’re playing with that just isn’t being played with in the same way. To me, that was why [the movie was] worth existing.

Image: Liongsate

I think of myself as an entertainer, but you can’t help but also think of yourself as an artist. Long ago I reached a point where I didn’t, you know, need any more money from the world. [laughs] I’m good. But you want to try things and you want to do things, so part of part of this was an experiment to see if we can play with these themes and these ideas, and the only medium that to do it was in film, because we already did what we’re doing on the video game side. So if we can adapt this to there, maybe — I’ll tell you, the audience that I really am most interested in is, there’s people in our lives that don’t play any video games. And if there’s something we love, we can share a movie with them maybe, and invite them into the world, in a way that they would never get a peek into if the only thing that existed was a video game. You might choose to do that, where there’s someone in your life, [you’d say] Hey, there was this cool world that I discovered, let’s go spend a couple of hours in a movie theater and enjoy it together. And that’s a cool, easy way to share and invite people in. I want that to be an awesome experience for people sharing in that way.

Like, my mom loves me and is proud of me, but she doesn’t play my video games, the way they’re designed, you know? Not because she doesn’t love me. She’s just into different stuff.

There’s a there’s a barrier of experience there and of comfortability, totally.

I think I think all gamers have people in their lives like that. The movie helps.

Did you did you have people in mind for these roles? Did you go right out and say We want Cate Blanchett and we want Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Hart from early stages, or was that a later process?

Randy Pitchford We didn’t start casting for this film until we had the script. That said — [setting the scene] June of 2012. Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. I’m there demoing Borderlands 2. Jack Black comes with this kid, because they’re fans of the game! And he’s there and I’m like, “Dude, you know, if we ever make a movie, you got to play Claptrap.” And he’s like [Jack Black impression, mock yelling] “YEAHH, let’s do it!” Some of this stuff goes back.

And my wife wrote the first iteration of Dr. Tannis, and she couldn’t imagine anyone but Jamie doing it, so that was really, really awesome. Even other things; there’s a character Mad Moxxi, who is played by Gina Gershon. And I always imagined like a Mae West vibe to why mad Mad Moxxi existed, and her personality and character. I remember I was talking to my wife about it long before we called her, I think I think Gina Gershon is the right cast for this. I was very fortunate that Eli liked that. Eli and Ari, we were on the ground, just looking at the casting boards, and everybody’s was like, Yeah, let’s go for that.

Image: Lionsgate

Eli found Cate, they had worked together before. And I just, I never would have gone there because I wouldn’t think it would be possible. Like Cate is a frickin’ god. How the heck is she gonna stop by my dumb little video game movie? And Eli made that happen. And man, there was a scene that I remember when we were shooting where Cate and Jamie were playing Lilith and Tannis, and they were looking at the map to the Vault. And they’re deep in the lore, this shit I made up, they’re deep in it, and I’m totally buying it. I’m and like, These are the greatest actors in the world. They’re just becoming these characters that we only imagined digitally and virtually, and they brought them to life in the real world. It’s absolutely amazing. I’m just beside myself with how much talent got on board.

And Kevin’s a giant, that guy, I can’t believe we got him. I think for him it was an opportunity to demonstrate that he’s not just a comic, he’s an action star. And he’s a fucking action star! Dude, he crushed it. I was sold right away. He worked out and built himself up for the thing, and height doesn’t matter when you’re on set, you know, that’s what Hollywood’s for, you know. And he crushed it. He crushed it. If anything, I’m was like, Man, we got Kevin, I kind of do want to throw them a couple gags — because he plays a straight man in the movie. And he did do a couple gags, but he was like, No, I want to be pure action hero. But I was like, Dude, it’s Kevin Hart, come on, we gotta give him a couple. So we played with that a little bit. And Eli just did it brilliantly with with all the cast. Brilliantly.

Photo: Katalin Vermes/Lionsgate

Are there any aspects of the game that you knew that you’d just have to let go in adaptation because it wouldn’t work?

Oh, yeah. These games take — Borderlands 3 is 40-50 hours. Borderlands 2, 40-50 hours of gameplay and storytelling throughout the whole thing. The movie is less than two hours. We’ve created dozens and dozens and dozens of characters, there’s no way we could do at all. So we had to prioritize, and that’s really difficult because I love everything, prioritizing is difficult. But I knew and hope that if we did a good enough job that we’d may be ushering in a new cinematic universe and we’d have more opportunities with with future films.

I think the biggest thing, though, was making this decision to let go of the scripts of the games and not just redo the games. To actually create a cinematic universe that’s adjacent to the video games, but lives independently of the video games. If we make more, we won’t run into the problem of running out of games [to adapt], but we’re still making movies. It’s kind of like how Marvel did it you know where the cinematic universe uses the characters in the universe and the themes, but it’s not the exact beat by beat storylines. So we can have some creative liberty there with with the films that we can’t have in the games. And that’s necessary because the film medium is different. And this is an adaptation, so lets lean in to where films are strongest.

Yeah, if you do more films, do you think you would return to the same characters or go with new ones? Or is that too far in the future and to too much of an unknown at this point.

I wouldn’t want to paint myself into a corner. There are some things I want to do. But I think until we get into the room and start working it, I think it’d be a mistake to set any expectations.