After living a mostly low key career after he and wife Jerusha launched with the Sundance sensation Napoleon Dynamite in 2004, director Jared Hess has come roaring back with A Minecraft Movie, a true sleeper from Warner Bros and Legendary that is outpacing the early returns of other WB releases like Barbie and The Dark Knight. Hess ponders ringing that elusive Zeitgeist bell twice, why a Minecraft sequel is so much more plausible than Napoleon Dynamite 2, and why the movie overperformed when so many game-based films fail.
DEADLINE: You must be feeling pretty good today after a memorable weekend…
JARED HESS: After being in New Zealand for a juicy stretch, it’s just great to be home back, in dad mode.
DEADLINE: How old are your kids?
HESS: I’ve got two in college, and then my youngest are 14 and 12.
DEADLINE: Who sparked your interest in Minecraft?
HESS: That was my introduction to the game, right when it came out. They were in elementary school and just would have a riot playing the game, and so I had to jump in and join the party.
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DEADLINE: In different ways, you touched the Zeitgeist with Napoleon Dynamite and now again with Minecraft opening bigger than Barbie and The Dark Knight. What’s that feel like, when you hit that vein an the oil comes spraying out of the ground?
HESS: That you just can’t plan for stuff like this. For me, it’s always just trying to make something that you’re passionate about, that’s funny to you, that you’re interested in. And to try to have that integrity as you’re making it. That’s the best you can hope for. You never ever know what’s going to happen with anything, and you just feel immense gratitude that it’s connecting.
DEADLINE: One of the things I liked about the Fox lot was that statue of Napoleon Dynamite on the lawn outside of the Fox Searchlight offices. Whatever happened to that silly bronze statue?
HESS: It got moved to the Fox Searchlight offices that are on the Disney lot. And so it’s like, I want to say it’s in this atrium, this courtyard where nobody can see it. I wish that it was out in the open but maybe that would be sacrilege to put it next to Mickey. I remember when it was on the Fox lot, and people would dress it up all the time. When the pandemic hit, people would send me pictures of Napoleon wearing a mask. He was one of the first ones to jump in and urge people to be responsible, as he was one of the first to wear the Covid mask.
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DEADLINE: Too ostentatious for you to buy that statue and put it on your front lawn?
HESS: Now that’s terrifying, as it is when you look at it up close. The gums and the teeth are pretty remarkable. He’s holding the tether ball. People would pull the tether ball and have him hold weird stuff. It was pretty great.
DEADLINE: Back to Minecraft, and the question is why, though it reminds me of the William Goldman quote that nobody knows anything…
HESS: I stand by that quote as the most truthful thing ever uttered about showbiz.
DEADLINE: Can I ask you to put your finger on a few reasons this film resonated, from appealing to those who, like you, played it with your kids when it came out in 2009?
HESS: It’s one of those things. There was an immense audience that was so passionate about the game and for whom Minecraft was such a key part of their childhood adolescence, just something that they loved. The game itself is so creative, but it’s also ridiculous and really funny and absurd in so many ways. That was so much of the appeal to me in adapting it. It was like, how can you just do a ridiculously fun and funny adventure movie in this world? All of those goofy, dorky things, we just really tried to celebrate and were super conscious of while making it. When you’re working with Jack Black and Jason Mamoa and Daniel Brooks and Jennifer Coolidge and the whole cast, it’s like we just spent a ton of time coming up with what really was funny to us. I think one of the things that people are responding to is how dead serious the characters are taking this ridiculous world. Jack is playing everything with so much passion. And when we were shooting, it’d be like, you know what, Jack, let’s put a little more mustard on that. And he just takes everything to an 11, all the time. That absurd seriousness about such a ridiculous world is part of the vitality of the comedy. I think that is what people are celebrating, literally right before you called, my nephew lived in New York, he’s in high school, and he went twice over the weekend with friends. He literally Facetimed me from his classroom, and he’s like, Uncle Jared, Hey, hey dude, I’ve got some friends here. They got a question. And I said, in Jack’s voice, ‘water bucket release!” And dude, that whole classroom just exploded. Then I said, “chicken jockey,” and it bananas again. Once the marketing over the last couple of months really started to kick into gear, and people just really zeroed in on funny quotes in the materials that resonated, it just took on the life of its own. But you can’t ever anticipate that.
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DEADLINE: Jack Black is an interesting dude. I went and visited Francis Coppola on a night shoot in Atlanta for Megalopolis. There’s this scruffy guy sitting quietly on a beach chair and someone says, there’s Jack Black. I ask if he’s in the movie, and the answer was no, he just wanted to watch Francis shoot. Then I see him on SNL this past weekend, bouncing off the walls. What is it about that guy that maybe people don’t understand, from showing up to watch a great like Coppola shoot, to being so combustible on stage at 30 Rock?
HESS: Here’s the thing. Jack is the most genuine artist ever. I would put him on my list of top five greatest athletes of all time. The dude is so shredded, has so much energy, a crazy amount. He is one of the hardest workers ever, but he’s also the most gracious and compassionate. Every single person on the crew, he knew all of their names. And there’s hundreds of people. His presence on set just elevates everybody; he cares so deeply about people and his passion for life and people is so sincere and real, it comes through in everything that he does. I don’t know, man. He’s one of a kind. There will never be anyone else like him.
DEADLINE: I was at a dinner party years ago in Sundance and Jason Momoa joined us, just after he played the mono syllabic Cal Drogo in Game of Thrones. This guy just took over the whole table with his charisma, stories about Hawaii and all these movies he was going to make. Talk about putting these two big personalities together.
HESS: Jason is larger than life. He’s the biggest hunk of our time, but he’s a big nerd. Nerdy about motorcycles, and movies and he’s got the biggest heart. He’s so stinkin’ funny. One of the great things is both of those guys had secret crushes on each other from afar. They’d never worked together. We just thought it would be so funny if these guys were trying to one up each other and outdo each other, the whole movie, and finally come together in this epic romance, and people are really having a fun time with it.
DEADLINE: Obviously, they bought into this preposterous premise and world that you created here.
HESS: Totally. Our approach to the characters and the type of comedy in this, we never wanted it to be cynical in any way, just a ridiculous celebration of this world, creativity and friendship. Those are things that are key things of the game, too. But there was also physics and rules of the gameplay we applied to the movie, so anything that we built in the film that you fans could go back and create in the game. That was a super important element, but we also wanted to push it as well and create a new experience beyond just the gameplay. I think Minecraft was the first IP to hit over a trillion views or something on YouTube. Over the years, so many content creators making videos and stories about the world, and that’s something unique about the game. There is no story. It’s an open world game, and everybody that plays it brings their own story to the characters, to the worlds that they build and explore. We knew it was going to be a challenge, that people really are passionate about this, and it’s something very personal to them. Our approach always is like, look, we can never fit everything about the game into a movie, so we just have to go with our gut about what we love about it. This is one adventure of many, because people have made life action videos, animation, all kinds of things for over a decade. And we were just like, look, we’re going to celebrate what we love. We’re going to pick the creatures that we love and build an epic adventure comic around us.
DEADLINE: This hopefully ends what has been an unenviable turn in the barrel for Warner Bros and its head picture pickers Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy. It’s also another big IP hit for Legendary, a company name that might be becoming an adjective for its creative leader Mary Parent.
HESS: I’ve known Mary and Cale Boyter for years, and we had a number of projects that we were trying to do together. They call me in December of 2019. Hey do you have any interest in Minecraft? Do you know what it is? I’m like, oh my gosh. Yeah, we’re total dorks over here for that game. And I immediately said, you could make the most absurd adventure comedy in this world. I dove in and went through the pandemic and the strikes and everything, but Mary and Cale have supported my voice since I’ve known them. The team at Warner Bros too, the development process with them and Mojang and Microsoft. They’d had a longer development road with other directors and writers before I came along, and there were lots of different takes and different ideas that had been on the table. The hardest thing of the whole process definitely was when the first teaser came out. It did not provide a lot of context and there was so much unfinished visual effects shots that we were still right in the middle of working on and a number of things. We definitely had to spend a lot of time recovering from that experience. But we all stayed the course. You can’t go down the rabbit hole of every comment on Reddit and trying to let comments direct the look of anything. The great thing is we’ve been testing it, so we knew what was working and that was all we were armed with. Once we started putting out things that really truly reflected what the tone of the film was in the marketing, everything changed. And then it was just like, here we go.
DEADLINE: Why did you never make a sequel to Napoleon Dynamite?
HESS: I don’t know. There were just other things that I wanted to do, and what doesn’t feel natural as an artist, I don’t think you should do it. If you’re doing it for the wrong reason. There was something special about the circumstances that it was made in. These were characters that Jerusha and I absolutely love and adore. So further installments would have to be warranted by the characters.
DEADLINE: You could have Pedro, voted in as school president, implementing tariffs?
HESS: A good one, but no.
DEADLINE: They aren’t going to let you off so easy with the Minecraft sequel, not when the first put up such big numbers. Take me through that process, and your desire to be part of it?
HESS: Oh, man. Well, it would be so much fun. We had so much fun making this movie, and it’s such an expansive world in the game, and there were so many things that we didn’t tap into that we wanted to. I would have a blast doing the sequel, and it seems like there’s already talk about it happening, so I’m super excited. It’ll be so much fun to go back into the world. The fans are just having such a good time. We teased it in the end credits and the fans seem to be going wild for it.
DEADLINE: Who’s the new character driving the next Minecraft?
HESS: The character we teased is Alex, the other massively critical character in Minecraft. It’s Steve (Jack Black) and Alex, and so that’s the one that we will be bringing to the table without a doubt.
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