In the Lost Lands Stars and Director Talk Adapting the George R.R. Martin Adventure

Back in 2011, HBO made a major splash by delivering audiences the first season of Game of Thrones, an adaptation of the first book in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. The success of the series introduced countless fantasy readers to Martin’s works, resulting in their discovery of just how many ambitious and compelling adventures he’s chronicled over the years. One of the untapped universes that laid dormant for years was “In the Lost Lands,” which was published in a collection of short stories in the early ’80s. Now, filmmaker Paul W.S. Anderson has channeled the excitement of the narrative for an all-new movie starring Milla Jovovich and Dave Bautista. In the Lost Lands hits theaters on March 7th.

“It took a while to develop the scripts because it was a short story, so we had to build out the short story. We had to do it in a way that George approved and was a fan of,” Anderson recalled to ComicBook of the development process. “And also we wanted to push the envelope and … develop a world no one had ever seen before, which required shooting in a very specific way. And also, neither of us has really done a straight fantasy movie. I really see this as an adult fairytale, so it was a kind of storytelling that neither of us have specifically done. We wanted to take our time over it.”

Jovovich added, “As filmmakers who have worked for so many years together and who have a fan base that expect a certain type of movie from us, which we do well and we love to do, it was this real intricate process of keeping George’s short story, the basis of it there, but then allowing us and especially Paul to build a world around that was very, very different from the world that’s in the book. To try to do something unique for George, as well, because he’s had such success with Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon on TV. This is, like, his first real movie, so to be able to give him something that resonated with him as a creator and as an artist, but also was different from the Game of Thrones world, as well, because we didn’t want to repeat that. We wanted to do something completely unique for George and something that would be as powerful, but in a completely different way conceptually.”

Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson and based on George R.R. Martin’s short story, a queen sends the powerful and feared sorceress Gray Alys (Jovovich) to the ghostly wilderness of the Lost Lands in search of a magical power, where the sorceress and her guide, the drifter Boyce (Bautista), must outwit and outfight man and demon.

The project allowed Bautista to lean into the archetype of a gunslinger, as he found ways to pay respects to the history of such a figure yet with a new spin.

“Clint Eastwood is always my go-to guy. There’s something just very cool about the way he played a cowboy. A lot with his eyes, a lot with the squinty eyes. A lot with him just being too cool for school, not being rattled by anything,” the actor recalled. “He’s always going to be my gold standard of a cowboy, so I definitely thought back to some of those old Clint Eastwood, spaghetti-Western-type films.”

He continued, “But I have to say that Paul, the director, Paul Anderson, was always just so adamant about making boys cool … So this is the first time I’ve had a director say to me, ‘I want to make boys sexy.’ Like, ‘I want you to be sexy.’ I’ve never … people just don’t look at me and think, you know, sexually.”

In the Lost Lands hits theaters on March 7th.