For the videogame adaptation Assassin's Creed, Michael Fassbender re-teamed with his Macbeth director Justin Kurzel and costar Marion Cotillard.
Fassbender has been involved in the project since the very beginning to develop the film and hopefully conquer the curse of movie versions of games.
He feels that reuniting with Kurzel helped make the process easier. "We enjoy working with one another," Michael says. "We understand one another, and you definitely wouldn't go back and work with somebody again if it wasn't a good experience the first time. And a shorthand does develop."
Michael Fassebender in Assassin's Creed
Fassbender was drawn to the project because it grounds its fantasy world in science. "I like the idea of DNA memory," he says. "I just thought that was a really interesting catch. And I thought that it was a very plausible theory. I think if you can bring something like that to a fantastical world, it hooks the audience in even more and it makes the journey even more immersive."
And then there's the war that drives the premise. "I just loved the idea of Templars versus Assassins," he smiles. "This idea of an elite group of people struggling with the idea of free will and these sort of rebels, if you like, to that sort of elite force trying to struggle for humanity. Essentially, the original assassins were Adam and Eve when they picked the apple in the Garden of Eden. I thought that was really interesting."
Fassbender thinks this sets the film apart from other blockbusters. "This isn't Star Wars," he says. "There isn't a dark side and light side. We have very ambiguous morals going on. It's a very grey world where both sides are contradictory of their belief systems. They have to bend them at certain times, skew them a little bit. I like that. I always think it's more interesting when you've got a grey area as opposed to black and white."
For Fassbender, the most challenging part of making the movie was training for the action scenes. "No, the problem was not having enough training," he laughs. "It's just trying to get those action scenes in one run-through. So we're not using a lot of green screens. We're doing it on actual locations. We were out in Malta with stunt guys jumping between and falling off real buildings. It's a bit old-school like that. And it's exciting to see it done that way."
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