"It's Not Like Star Wars"

"I just thought if you're doing a fantasy film, the first thing about it was to have something seeded in some sort of scientific world," Michael Fassbender said as we sat around those aforementioned picnic benches. Fassbender, who seemed fairly relaxed before shooting that day's fight scene, was not in costume and appeared at peace well into the middle of his 80-day shoot on the film, which had begun with production in Malta's capital city of Valletta (it's doubling for 1491 Seville).

"I just thought that was a really interesting catch and I thought that was a very plausible theory," Fassbender elaborated. "I think if you can bring something like that to a fantastical world, it just hooks the audience in even more and makes the journey even more immersive."

Fassbender has been developing the Assassin's Creed movie with Ubisoft for four years before it came to Pinewood. While he has had other blockbuster vehicles in the X-Men movies, and the well earned Oscar nomination for his enigmatic turn as Steve Jobs, he has been resolute on bringing Assassin's Creed to the screen as his first solo, mega-budgeted movie with his name above the title on the poster. And as he shook hands with every journalist in this fictional common room, the cautious expectation he has for the project bled through too.

"I just loved the idea of Templars versus Assassins," Fassbender remarked about why he has been so patient about this movie's development. "This idea of an elite group of people sort of struggling with the idea of free will and these sort of rebels, if you like, this kind of elite force trying to struggle for humanity, essentially. The idea that the original Assassins were Adam and Eve, and the Apple in the Garden of Eden, I thought that was really interesting. And also, what I liked about it is it’s not like Star Wars where you have the Dark Side and the Light. Both of these factions, they contradict each other all the time; they contradict themselves all the time, and they're hypocritical of their beliefs... So morally, you have a very gray area that they are working in, and I thought that was unusual for this sort of type of film."

In that vein, Fassbender and company seem very aware that as the Assassin's Creed games progressed, the Assassins and Templars' differences and distinctions have further blurred. If that level of murkiness can actually be adapted in a film of this blockbuster scale, it'd be a very unique special effect all its own.

to be continued...