A portion of a Q&A with Jordan Mechner...

Q: Do you think you've escaped the whole stigma of "movie game?"

JM: You mean the fact that there hasn't really been a good movie based on a video game? I think Prince of Persia is a movie that can stand on its own even if there wasn't a video game. To me, as a movie-goer, the problem with video game movies is that the first thing that's lost in translation is the gameplay, which so often is the thing about the game that made it successful in the first place. It's kind of ironic that that's the element that doesn't come across. I think the reason that Prince of Persia can work as an action-adventure movie is not because of the gameplay. It's because, first of all, it's set in the universe of One Thousand and One Nights, which is this really rich and cinematic world. That's always been fascinating to filmmakers, and it's been a long time since that world has been brought to the screen, and certainly never in this epic scale that's possible with today's technology and visual effects. That's one reason. Another is that the kind of action in the games—the parkour, the sword fighting, the swashbuckling kind of hero that the Prince of Persia has always been—is something that also lends itself well to cinema. And finally, the character of the prince is a recognizable, likeable, sympathetic human being. So I think the movie has all those things going for it.

Q: Seeing as how this is a feature bankrolled by Disney and Bruckheimer, are we going to see a big merchandising blitz for it? Will we be seeing Prince of Persia book bags and action figures and collectibles and all this other awesome stuff?

JM: There will be action figures, designed by Todd MacFarlane, actually. There will be LEGOs. To me in some ways that's even more cosmic than there being a movie.