City pair gets bite from HBO

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This article was published 23/01/2012 (5031 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A pair of Winnipeg filmmakers who saw their documentary premiere at the Sundance Film Festival over the weekend got more good news Sunday: interest from HBO in a series based on the film.

The major cable network has optioned Indie Game: The Movie for the basis of a half-hour fictional series, filmmakers Lisanne Pajot, 29, and James Swirsky, 34, reported on their Facebook fan page Sunday.

If it goes ahead, the series will be produced by Scott Rudin — the producer behind The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Moneyball, among other blockbusters.

Indie Game: The Movie follows video game developers as they create and release their games to the world, including Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes, creators of the Xbox game Super Meat Boy and Phil Fish, who spent four years in near-seclusion creating the highly-anticipated game: FEZ.

The film also tells the story of one of the highest-rated video games of all time, Braid.

Pajot said screenings of the film have gone well.

“Sundance is crazy… You can’t really plan for it, really,” said Pajot, who was reached by the Free Press late Sunday night in Park City, Utah.

“It’s just been awesome to have people actually watch the film and react to it and see an audience watch it, and laugh in certain parts and cry in certain parts, and then people come up to you at the end and say that it meant something to them,” said Pajot, who called the experience “overwhelming.”

“It is kind-of like a crazy thing (that) two people from Winnipeg (came) here to Park City, with this whole machine and this whole world and have all these people that are interested.

“I feel like we have people, like real film people, that love the film and that’s just a huge, overwhelming thing,” she said.

“The other sort-of element of all this is people have known about our film online for two years, and they’ve been supporting our film through Kickstarter (a fundraising platform for artists) and through pre-orders for two years, and this is kind of like a victory for them too, it’s like, ‘You believed in us when we were nobody,'” she said.

Pajot said Rudin’s interest is exciting.

“It’s kind of crazy to get that kind of vote of confidence from Scott Rudin.”

The film raised its $100,000 budget “through personal savings and the support of the gaming community through two successful Internet crowd-sourcing campaigns,” Pajot told the Free Press last November.

A series is still a ways off, Pajot said last night. “A bunch of things need to line up for them to actually make the series.”

The film will have a special screening in Winnipeg at the Winnipeg Art Gallery Feb. 3. Tickets are available through their website, www.indiegamethemovie.com

Gabrielle.giroday@freepress.mb.ca