Why Even Non-Gamers Will Love Fassbender's 'Assassins Creed'

Michael Fassbender is the first to walk through the door on this bright October afternoon. It's the Assassin's Creed press junket, the autumn change of season, the tail-end of the BFI London Film Festival. Fassbender makes steady eye contact with his questioners, all brilliant blue eyes, dressed in a jumper, button-down combo. He uses his hands when he's speaking, trying to articulate a point, sometimes looking down while taking sips from his coffee cup. Director Justin Kurzel is next, known for Snowtown and Macbeth, which also stars Fassbender and Cotillard. He sits down and is immediately bursting with friendly Australian energy, dressed in a smart blazer, smiling easily.

Then Marion Cotillard strides into the room, the most upfront and no-nonsense of the lot. She's funny and wry, pausing at length to think before answering, dressed in a distressed designer blouse she describes as "a bit punk".

The three have been brought together by the film adaptation of cult video game Assassin's Creed, a project Fassbender also co-produced. He plays Cal, a criminal in the present-day, made by the Templars to partake in the Animus Project where he relives the memories of his ancestors. He also plays Aguilar, Cal's Assassin predecessor. Cotillard plays present-day Templar Sophie, the leading scientist on the project.

"We just got down on our knees and pleaded [with Cotillard] to be in the film." 

Fassbender, captivated by the idea of DNA or genetic memory, recruited Kurzel, who says he was "completely taken" by "the idea of a central character understanding and learning who he is through his blood, and through the ancestry of his past, and the experience of his ancestors". And Cotillard came on board because of her trust in Kurzel and Fassbender. "They're smart and sensitive people," she says. "And I loved the script, I loved the character."

Fassbender, Kurzel and Cotillard pay compliments to each other quickly and brightly. Cotillard says, while working on Macbeth, Fassbender "calmed" her: "The passion he had for his job really calmed me, because I saw through his eyes how giving a vision of the world by this media of cinema was important." Kurzel says, "We just got down on our knees and pleaded [with Cotillard] to be in the film." Fassbender describes Kurzel's filmmaking as "visceral", saying the realism of his work lent itself to filming action pieces "old school", using as little green screen as possible - Fassbender's stunt double actually took a 125-foot "leap of faith" jump. "The real life action sequences are taking place in real locations, with real people. There's not a huge amount of CGI."

The decision to limit the amount of digital manipulation is one part of trying to make the film engaging to a lay audience, while paying respect to hardcore fans. "One of the hardest parts about making a film out of the Assassin's universe is there's so much there," says Fassbender. "With any of these things, it's a healthy dose of respect and disrespect - we came up with new characters that don't exist in the game; we came up with our original regression, the Spanish Inquisition; we took things that are obviously very important to the game, the Animus, things like the bleeding effect, the artifact."

There are, however, some deviations from the computer game's canon. Assassin's Creed the film has dramatically reimagined the Animus (a narratively pivotal piece of advanced technology), so it involves more physical movement: "At the same time that's a video game, this is a film, so to just sort of infuse what we know from working in films, and that's the element of disrespect... We take what's there and try and make it visually more stimulating."

The three have had varying degrees of engagement with the game itself - Fassbender says he played the game a bit to get a feel for it: "I played the game to basically get a physicality, especially for Aguilar." Kurzel played against one of the champions of Assassin's Creed: "He brought me in to take me through it, it was quite embarrassing how poor I was." Meanwhile, Cotillard says she didn't play the game at all: "They let me not do it... I didn't feel that I needed to play... I think players are gonna love it, and also people who don't know the game at all, because you really don't need to know the game to appreciate the movie."

Assassin's Creed was scored by Kurzel's brother, Jed. Justin Kurzel says that in terms of the music it's been quite different from other large genre films, almost "like working on an independent film", doing "really interesting stuff" like using an unreleased Massive Attack song at the end.

Entrance Song by The Black Angels underscores one of the first scenes in the film. Kurzel says they were fans of the band already and wanted to use contemporary music for the score, "but we also felt as though that sort of time and period that you enter the film at with the younger Cal in the '80s, there was something sort of nostalgic and kind of stoner California kind of feel about it all... The Black Angels just seemed to really hit that spot perfectly".