MORTAL KOMBAT!!!! An Interview With Director Kevin Tancharoen on MK:legacy

Please let me know what you think of the interview. I got my start writing and commenting here at current and it gave me the confidence to start writing elsewhere.


Director Kevin Tancharoen has bloody thumbs. Its clear from the amount of time and effort he has poured into his latest creation Mortal Kombat: Legacy. This is a labor of love sewn from an encyclopedic knowledge of finishing moves. But don't worry about his getting bogged down in details or following the well treaded horror of another poor video game adaptation. Tancharoen sees the important thing in a translation hammering down the feel and key plot points of a video game and then exploring them in a clean cinematic narrative.

"I think the problem with certain video game adaptations is that Video Games and Movies serve two completely separate purposes. Story in video games is about maintaining game play. Its to get you from scene to scene or fight to fight. That doesn't immediately translate to a cinematic pacing or narrative. Making a movie or feature is a completely different way of crafting a storyline. I think the biggest mistake is when people take the exact same storyline from the game and try and do that story down to the minor details. You have to take the essence of the game the vibe of the game the main plot points and then figure out how to tell a clean narrative in a cinematic structure. Otherwise its a weird mashup of video game dialog."

And he will need that cinematic flair if he is to meet the end goal of the series. Sewing the seeds for another film adaptation for Mortal Kombat. " Always the goal. This series has to do well for me to get to that next step. Whether that is going to happen is still a question mark. We are always talking about it but the series has to be good it only helps the cause."

The project started exactly as that a proof of concept for how Tancharoen would direct a feature film. In Mortal Kombat: Rebirth Tancharoen took seven thousand dollars, some friends, and with a dose of Black Dynamite brought that vision to life.

"I think with rebirth it was just a very short version of what I wanted. I needed to capture it all in one short segment. I decided to kill of Johnny Cage off in that segment for that very reason. If you know the franchise well enough they would know he’s been killed off before and they would get the joke. Its just a Mortal Kombat fan thing. He’s not dead he’s back in this one. But he’s a character you can always have fun with.

For me I had access to a couple of red cameras. I did all the sound design myself. I did all the editing myself. I got some really professional makeup artists to come on board because they love MK. As long as your enthused and you have good people around you. You can make some awesome stuff happen by yourself. The only reason I was able to get Michael Jai White is because he believed in what I was doing. He believes in that indie spirit of doing things yourself because that is exactly what he did with black dynamite and now its a movie and a cartoon on Cartoon Network. I don’t think anyone else would be the perfect Jax. It would be a mistake for anyone not to have Michael Jai White be Jax."

That vision was released prematurely but to massive fan aplomb with more than two million hits generated. Some fans were wary of the new gritty visual style while the bulk of the more than two million viewers left positive impressions.

"You always have those fans who say. That's not really Mortal Kombat but for the most part the response has been overwhelmingly positive. The reason I did that style to be perfectly honest is that you need a crapton of effects. I did the whole real world take on it because for one it looked cool but also you can’t get away with not doing those vfx and you don’t do them unless you can do them well. For me I didn’t have to shoot an ice blast or suck out somebody's soul. Taking place in a police precinct it was ok for it to be a really gritty world. I couldn't create Outworld. I couldn’t go find an Asian temple. There was just no way to do that convincingly.

I kind of inch toward the darker grittier look. My personal aesthetic is always going to be more towards the gritty real world style. But I am going to be introducing some of the supernatural elements. I think when they are tastefully done they are quite cool. For instance Mileena and Kitana come from this very dark fairytale world in the fictional land of Edenia. That is going to seem mystical. Its going to be a bit lord of the rings. Even if its in the fantasy world its going to have that gritty tone to it because its my preference. For Sonja, Jax and Kano these are real world characters so you are going to see more of that style.

Tancharoen was kind enough to offer up details about what characters and stories we will see over the course of the nine episodes and how the episodic format came about. Set before or directly after the first game we see the motivations of the characters. Though individual episodes don't overlap in telling the stories before the tournament we can expect to see multiple characters within each episode. As for fears of fans concerned about seeing their favorite characters die before getting to the tournament as Johnny Cage did in Rebirth. " We lucked out on that one because they are all origin stories before the tournament. Because these characters have got to make it to the tournament you know beforehand that nobody dies.”