One of my favourite movie tales concerns Marathon Man, a 1976 thriller starring Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier. Known for his method approach, Hoffman stayed up for three days in preparation for a scene in which his character was sleep-deprived. When he found out about this approach, the urbane Olivier apparently said to the young Hoffman: "My dear boy, why don't you just try acting?"
A Minecraft Movie does not feature Hoffman, but it turns out the film's all-star cast also took something of a method approach to bringing the game to life: a private server for the whole cast and crew, in which Jack Black decided he had to prove himself a "real Minecrafter."
Going by the experience with my kids, a real Minecrafter is someone who builds pits filled with zombies and then punches villagers in from above. But in Black's case it meant building something beautiful: a mansion atop a mountain, complete with basement art gallery.
"It was so much fun," A Minecraft Movie director Jared Hess told IGN. "Jack [Black] was super-weirdly method with the game. He was in his trailer harvesting lapis lazuli and always building stuff. [He] was geeking out on the game and would come back with ideas. It was a constantly evolving thing where everybody was contributing in their own fun, unique way."
"I had an Xbox in my trailer and I did play because an actor prepares," grins Jack Black. "So I got as many hours as I could on this Minecraft server, which had tons of props from all the different departments.
"The cast and crew on the server were building some insane structures and I wanted to stand out. I wanted everyone to know that I was a real Minecrafter, so I said I was going to find the biggest, highest mountain in this world and build a stairway to Steve and a mansion up on top of that hill. I had a basement in there with an art gallery and... I don't even know if it's still there!"
A Minecraft Movie producer Torfi Frans Ólafsson says that the server is still live. "I kept it up and I extended it for a year," says Ólafsson. "I popped up in there a couple days ago and I said, 'Wait, there's somebody online!' I went in, and there were these two security guards who worked the gate on set and and they're like, 'Hey, welcome!' I said, "You guys are still in here?' and they said, 'Oh, yeah!'"
Sadly there's no screens of Jack Black's magnificent mansion, but then maybe it's best left to the imagination. A Minecraft Movie has proven a hit anyway, and its winning translation of the game's aesthetic can be seen everywhere at the moment (and the director's already making noises about a sequel). The secret to starring in such a film is clear: my dear boy, why don't you try Minecrafting.
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