When asked if Hollywood is finally facing its video game renaissance, Jared Hess abruptly switched topics, from “Minecraft” to “Nosferatu.”
“I just loved it,” “A Minecraft Movie” director Hess told IndieWire of the gothic romance from last year. Robert Eggers’ award-winning vampire movie adapts the 1922 German film and Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” by extension. It’s set centuries before video games were invented, but for Hess, Eggers’ exacting and gutsy reconsideration is proof of a key principle behind “A Minecraft Movie.”
“A lot of big movies from the last 20-plus years, so much of the imagery and the experience feels similar,” said Hess. “My favorite [films] are the ones that have personality and characters and interesting things that are unexpected and that surprise you. Those films always inspire me.”
Hess made his feature debut at Sundance in 2004 with an underdog comedy that demonstrated a clarity of vision beyond the twenty-something filmmaker’s years. Even well-received at the festival, “Napoleon Dynamite” was far from becoming a household title — and it might not have been without a “lucky” leap of faith from then-Fox Searchlight, said Hess.
“It came out before social media, so ‘Napoleon Dynamite’ was a true word-of-mouth experience,” he said. The cult classic played in just 700 theaters at its peak but was screened for months in several locations. “I just wish that studios and streamers today would take a chance on those remarkable films that are breaking new ground.”
Of course, no one was “taking a chance” on “Minecraft.” From Mojang Studios, the global building-block phenomenon is the No. 1 best-selling video game of all time. Hess was already a fan thanks to his kids, but said he never anticipated steering a project this big. Entering its third weekend in theaters, “A Minecraft Movie” has already made more than $557 million. For scale, “Napoleon Dynamite” earned $46.1 million — total.
“It’s such a fun journey,” said Hess, whose lesser-known works include a recent true-crime documentary for Netflix (“Murder Among the Mormons,” co-directed with Tyler Measom) and a handful of music videos for the 2000s alt-rock band The Postal Service. “You never know what the universe is going to bring your way.”
Before “Minecraft,” Hess had been trying to get a project off the ground at Legendary Pictures for years. The video game adaptation reached his desk in December 2019, thanks to producers Mary Parent and Cale Boyter, and the production quickly became a family affair. The Hess kids are older now, but the director said his children served as unofficial “consultants” throughout the movie’s development. Their favorite “Minecraft” pastimes include helping their dad design elaborate fortresses — and then trapping Hess inside them with undomesticated wolves.
“Yeah, they murdered me,” Hess laughed. “They weren’t tamed! That’s what happens!”
Audiences may be losing interest in tentpoles “just going through the motions of spectacle,” said Hess. But literally going through the motions… in the name of spectacle… is a central tenet of the “Minecraft” universe. By repeating the same simple actions over and over (think dig, dig, build, build, attack wolf, attack wolf, dig, dig, etc.), Mojang Studios unearthed an endless world through simple play. That creative sandbox forced Hess to direct with a kind of double-edged sword — battling to protect both the film’s heart and its beloved inspiration.
“One of the biggest challenges with ‘Minecraft’ initially was like, ‘Well, there’s no story here. So, how do we do it?’” he said. “But it also created a great opportunity because the Steve character was a blank slate. With Jack Black, it’s like, ‘The sky’s the limit. Let’s just have fun.’”
Also starring Jason Momoa, Danielle Brooks, and a bunch of newcomers, “A Minecraft Movie” is mostly surreal. The production relocated Hess and his family from their home in Utah — the birthplace of Sundance (which is moving to Colorado in 2027) — all the way to New Zealand. Filming took place mostly in Auckland, while post-production happened in Wellington.
“I’ve had longtime friends that lived there, like Jemaine Clement, Bret McKenzie, and Taika Waititi, so it was just a dream to finally be able to go out there,” said Hess. “Anytime those guys had a movie at Sundance, they’d be crashing at my place. It was just fun to be out there on their home turf.”
From serious blockbusters like “The Lord of the Rings” to hidden gems like Ant Timpson’s “Bookworm,” plenty of epic adventure movies are made in New Zealand. The country’s “world-class” crews helped build the practical sets that Hess wanted for “A Minecraft Movie” — an ambitious decision that helped to melt away creative boundaries for the live-action/animation hybrid.
“We built entire ‘Minecraft’ forests, villages, you name it,” said Hess. “And when you’re on those sets for 12 or 14 hours a day, and then you go home, the real world starts to look weird to you. You get kind of used to the blocky Overworld cube zone.”
Even further than Park City, Utah, Hess’s childhood home of Preston, Idaho, inspired much of the humor in “Napoleon Dynamite.” As he put it, “Everywhere that I’ve shot has been a character with a personality all its own in the film.”
The story at the center of “Minecraft” — think “Wizard of Oz” meets GameStop — has divided critics and consumers. IndieWire’s David Ehrlich called the adaptation “deeply unimaginative,” despite Hess’s best efforts. Still, it’s a massive commercial success that’s been praised by others for a script infused with flecks of the same originality that first made Hess famous. So, why isn’t he listed among the project’s five official screenwriters: Chris Bowman, Hubbel Palmer, Neil Widener, Gavin James, and Chris Galletta?
“The reality is I did write on [‘A Minecraft Movie’], and there are a lot of people that wrote on it,” said Hess. “Ultimately, you can only give credit to a certain [number] of writers, but I definitely wrote on it. I wrote on it every single day of the shoot. From the moment I came on forward, with every set of writers, we were collaborating.”
Many cinephiles forget that Hess and his wife, Jerusha, wrote “Napoleon Dynamite” together. The spouses co-wrote several other films that Hess directed, including “Gentlemen Broncos” in 2009. The mid-budget comedy starring Jennifer Coolidge introduced her to “The White Lotus” creator Mike White, who would later cast Coolidge in her most iconic TV role. They’re all still friends, and that shows in “A Minecraft Movie.” Not only is Coolidge in the cast (playing a hilarious divorced vice principal), but the film’s humor reflects a director who, regardless of budget, likes to have fun with talented people.
Hess struggled to describe his comedy style for IndieWire (“…silly? Dorky? Absurd? I have a lot of empathy…”) but compared helming a tentpole like “Minecraft” to making an indie darling with ease.
“It’s the exact same. Truthfully, there’s no difference,” he said. “It’s character and story and trying to communicate to the best of your ability what you think is going to be the best version of something.” For the writer/director, that means line readings — and lots of them.
“I can’t write any dialogue without hearing it in my head first,” Hess said. “So, I do have to give a lot of line readings, and I do need to do a lot of voices. I know that gets annoying for the actors, but they understand that it’s just my super lame way of directing. I’m just a dingdong who would love to learn how other directors, how real directors, do it.”
Looking back at “Napoleon Dynamite” earlier this year, actor Jon Gries (aka Uncle Rico) told IndieWire that he remembered Hess directing star Jon Heder in painstaking detail. To craft a weirdo strong enough to anchor the otherwise feather-light film, Hess and Heder treated the alchemy of acting like a true science, making each choice with precision.
“I’ll never forget it,” Gries told IndieWire. “[Hess] was filming Jon as Napoleon one day, and he’s just like, ‘OK, look down. OK, swallow. OK, got it.’ That exact shot is in the film.”
No one expected anything from a high schooler named Napoleon (“Your name is Napoleon?”), but for decades, game adaptations have struggled to pull heroes out of thin air. From Prime Video’s “Fallout” to Paramount’s “Dungeons & Dragons,” source material without a “main” character can be challenging to adapt, said Hess, but it’s not impossible. There is no protagonist in “Minecraft.” So, to deliver the ridiculous “Steve” — a zippy guy in a blue t-shirt who, “as a kid, yearned for the mines” — Hess once again leaned on what he knew.
“Look, I put Jack Black in my top five greatest athletes of all time,” Hess said. “That dude can do anything physically. He’s got some of the best pipes in the world. He’s unbelievable, and he’s just a big kid. He’s always held that, and he’s never changed.”
Before bringing “Minecraft” to the big screen, Hess and Black teamed up on the 2009 pro-wrestling comedy “Nacho Libre,” also written by the director and Jerusha Hess. The slapstick lucha libre adventure was divisive then, much like “A Minecraft Movie” is now, but the production is a touchstone for the longtime friends. The lessons “Nacho Libre” taught Hess about Black as an actor helped shape their collaboration for “A Minecraft Movie.” Ultimately, Hess said, “That energy became the heartbeat of the film.”
“I remember when we were shooting ‘Nacho Libre,’ Jack was doing his own stunts for most of that film, and he jumped out of the ring and he landed right on his eyebrow — smacked it straight on the back of a folding chair,” said Hess. “We called cut, and he was bleeding. He had to get stitches all along his eyebrow. It ended up being fine, but we were all freaked out.”
He continued, “I remember talking to him and he was like, ‘Hess, 90 percent of my acting is in my eyebrows.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, man, we got to take care of that.’ Because it’s true! With just one facial expression, Jack can bring down the house.”
Even doubling as a turbo-charged vehicle for Black, “A Minecraft Movie” was made with the fans in mind. Hess consulted closely with producer Torfi Olafsson, head of entertainment at Mojang Studios, and kept his writers in near-constant contact with the game’s developers in Stockholm, Sweden. With source material as silly as “Minecraft,” there are no stupid questions — and Hess had to know that world inside and out to adapt it right.
“We wanted to stay true to the rules of the game, but not be limited by it because we wanted to push it for the storytelling,” said Hess. “For example, the ‘piglins,’ they live in The Nether and they can never go into The Overworld — or else they zombify and die, right? So, we were like, ‘Man, how do we solve this? Because it’ll just be totally bananas to have piglins chasing Jack [Black] and Jason Momoa while they’re flying in an Elytra Wingsuit.’ So, it was like, ‘You know what? If they chug a ton of Nether wart, they should be good to go. That’ll be their anti-venom to go topside.’”
Whether it’s adapted for the big screen or played on a computer, Hess is the first to admit that many adults will never get “Minecraft.” The search term “chicken jockey” has been skyrocketing on Google Trends, just as countless social media accounts have emerged to openly mock a movie they admit they haven’t seen. Audiences don’t need to go to Idaho to love “Napoleon Dynamite,” and they don’t have to play or watch “Minecraft” to know if it’s for them. But reflecting on his time in New Zealand — and once again, suddenly switching subjects, this time to “Anora” — Hess sounded like he’d never left Utah.
“That film blew my mind. And everything Sean Baker said during his press tour for the Oscars — about the state of indie film, the future of it, and what needs to change about it — was on the money,” said Hess. “I can’t tell you how many directors I’ve talked to that have had amazing films come out at film festivals and two to three years later, they still haven’t found a distributor.”
On his shifting role in that Hollywood sandbox, Hess said, “I just want desperately for it to change.”
“A Minecraft Movie” is now in theaters from Warner Bros. Pictures.
