‘I basically had no interest, really’: Neill Blomkamp shares what made him do a 180 to direct ‘Gran Turismo’

Stranger things have happened this year, but it’s nothing short of peculiar that Gran Turismo is somehow the second biopic involving a mega-popular video game to release in 2023.

Indeed, those of us who first caught wind of Gran Turismo may have been forgiven for thinking that the racing game was getting its own film adaptation, especially given the number of gaming properties that have begun entering the big and small screen sphere with markedly solid collective success. The reality of Neill Blomkamp‘s latest, though, is that it tells the story of one Jann Mardenborough, a Gran Turismo prodigy whose prowess at the game led him to becoming a real professional racecar driver.

Exactly how good of a job Blomkamp and company did at bringing this story to life is up for debate — audiences are loving the film, while critics are a touch more lukewarm to it — but one thing is for sure; the director knew it was a story worth telling. In a recent interview with Uproxx, Blomkamp revealed that, before he found out about the remarkable-yet-grounded true story it would be based on, he had no interest in helming a Gran Turismo movie, having been under the assumption that it was the game itself that was getting adapted.

“It made no sense how you could make a film out of Gran Turismo. I mean, I basically had no interest, really. And then it was absolutely insane when I read it – that the two things that were fascinating was, one of them, was how the game was within the world of the story, that I was going to film was presented realistically. So it’s a video game inside the real world. And then the second thing was this kind of biographical angle of Mardenborough that grounded it and just made it completely real feeling. And those two things instantly changed my sort of perception of what the film was.”

Of course, even if Gran Turismo had been based on the video games, it’s worth remembering that just about anything can be worthy source material if you get the right pair of hands on it; hell, just look at Barbie.

Gran Turismo begins its wide theatrical release on August 25.