A Minecraft Movie director Jared Hess on why if you can find the time to play and create, it's worth it

Depending on how you measure it, Minecraft may just be the most popular video game of all time. The pixelated phenomenon has sold more than 300 million copies since its 2011 launch – fewer than Tetris’s half a billion sales, but these are divided between multiple licensed variations. In the battle of the blocks, Minecraft comes out on top. 

For the uninitiated, Minecraft is just another computer game, albeit one with a recognisable Lego-like aesthetic. But for the huge and devoted fanbase, it’s a way of life. So how did director of A Minecraft Movie Jared Hess feel about bringing it to the big screen?

“Oh my gosh. Huge pressure!” he tells Big Issue. “Better not screw this up. I mean, especially for my kids.”

Over a decade since it was initially announced, the film has arrived with a star-studded cast including Jason Momoa, Jack Black, Danielle Brooks and Jennifer Coolidge. Three directors cycled through the Minecraft project before Hess – perhaps best known for co-writing and directing cult classic Napoleon Dynamite – signed on.  

It was a daunting brief. Minecraft has no storyline, and no characters with plotted backstories. The game has zero fixed objectives. The open-ended landscape allows players to create whatever they feel like – from simple homes to sprawling cities. Great for players, perhaps more difficult for the creative team. 

But Hess was undeterred: “I think the process in many aspects is very different [to a film like Napoleon Dynamite],” he says. “But at its core, you’re just trying to tell a story with compelling characters and just really engage people and make them care about these people.”

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Players can build anything in the game: replications of real-life cities, fictional worlds, houses underwater or inside geodes. Players have built Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night and the Titanic. In 2010, a user created the first working computer circuit within the game; meanwhile, the largest Minecraft project is an ongoing attempt to build the Earth at 1:1 scale.

The game is all about creativity, explains Emma Myers, best known from Netflix’s Wednesday, who stars in the new film. “I like to describe Minecraft as a sandbox game that’s very diverse,” she says. “And you can play it however you want to. There’s not one set way, and there’s not one set of rules, and it’s a mixed bag.”

The new movie is all about harnessing this kind of imaginative power, says Hess. It follows four misfits – “people who don’t have it all together” – who accidentally open a mysterious portal into the Minecraft game world. “They have to use creativity to survive and collaborate and work together to defeat insane odds,” he adds.

It’s not always easy to be creative in the modern world, says Danielle Brooks. Brooks, who stars in the new movie, is perhaps best known for her breakthrough role as Tasha ‘Taystee’ Jefferson in Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black.

“We’re taught pretty early to mature up. I think it’s kind of sad that people lose the play of life and imagination,” she tells Big Issue. “We’re all just trying to survive out here.” 

Brooks’s character Dawn keeps multiple jobs, supplementing her income as a realtor by running a mobile zoo. The actress remembers juggling a similar number of odd jobs herself.

“After I graduated college, I went back to school just to work in Student Affairs to make money. I braided hair on off-Broadway shows, I was a dog sitter. I was a typist for this elderly lady. Just random stuff. I worked at a restaurant. I was a horrible waitress, really bad. I had a ton of different jobs, I babysat, I did everything you could possibly do.”

This problem – how economic survival interferes with creativity – recurs over and over in the movie. As Garrett ‘The Garbage Man’ Garrison, Jason Momoa plays a business owner teetering on the edge of eviction. Myers’s character lives in fear of losing her job.

And the story’s villainous ‘Piglins’ threaten the utopian game world with their rapacious lust for profit. It’s not exactly The Communist Manifesto. It’s a kids’ movie; the product of a multi-corporation collaboration. But does Hess think it has a covertly anti capitalist, radical message? 

He laughs. “For sure. I mean, the Piglins are obsessed with gold. Gold and conquering everybody. We don’t really know why, but that’s their jam.”

But there is another message: that if you can find the time to play and create, it’s all worth it.

“We get so burdened with the responsibilities of life and adulthood that we forget to take time to chase our dreams and our passions and to be creative,” the director says. 

“Jack [Black’s character] kind of sums it up. He says it’s harder to create than to destroy. That’s why cowards tend to choose the deuce, you know? And it’s such an important message. We’ve all got to have the courage to be creative and put your art out there, put yourself out there.”

A Minecraft Movie is in cinemas now.

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