'A movie completely made by lunatics': Borderlands stars unearth secrets from Pandora

The story of Borderlands the movie is really a case study in madness.

And perhaps you need a touch of lunacy to spend over a decade bashing your head against the wall trying to translate the psychedelic video game world of Pandora (not the Avatar one) and its many treasure-seeking Vault Hunters for the big screen. But for the film's cast — an unlikely assemblage of icons across the comedy, horror, prestige drama, and even Barbie spaces — it was more like cabin fever that drove them to it.

"It was seriously lockdown madness," Cate Blanchett says of signing on with the likes of Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Florian Munteanu, and up-and-comer Ariana Greenblatt. "It was nothing I thought would ever cross my path, something as bonkers as this."

With his stars on board, director Eli Roth was ready to begin production on his movie about an oddball group of misfits haphazardly thrown together on a quest to rescue the daughter of the most powerful man in the universe and find a lost vault containing ancient alien technology. At the time, the first wave of COVID-19 vaccines was only just becoming available, and everyone, including the soon-to-be castmates, was itching to re-enter the real world and stop disinfecting their groceries. "It was a chance to be physical and to be in a room with people, running around being stupid," Blanchett continues. "We only had each other, so work was an absolute, joyous escape."

That loopy energy of breaking COVID isolation spilled directly into the movie, which was just what Roth encouraged. Case in point, Greenblatt was told to "go feral" for one take filmed in the lair belonging to her character Tiny Tina, a bunny ears-wearing, mentally not-all-there, grenade-throwing member of the team. Roth had chopped the head off a mannequin on set and filled it with spaghetti — gluten free, for Greenblatt. "Eli was like, 'Throw the spaghetti at the camera, throw it at me, throw it on your face,'" the Barbie actress says. "I've never gone so wild in a scene before. It wasn't even scripted. We were like, 'Let's just do this.'"

The sequence isn't in the final cut, but it captures the essence of the film (in theaters Aug. 9). "I wanted to make something totally bonkers and bat-s--- crazy, that has the insanity of The Fifth Element or Escape From New York," Roth says. "I think there's a spirit of anarchy and absurdity in the game. I wanted the movie to have that same spirit as well: a movie completely made by lunatics."

Psycho paths

The road to making Borderlands feels just as crazy. The first video game in the now-popular franchise dropped in 2009 and quickly became notable for its stylized animation that looked like a comic-book drawing come to life. "It captured the energy of my favorite genre, which is post-apocalyptic action-adventure," Black says when recalling the first time he played the game, which flaunts an array of kooky characters — from Krieg, a brute force with a split personality, to Tannis, a whip-smart scientist in a relationship with an inanimate gadget. "Road Warrior comes to mind."

Two years later, Randy Pitchford, the CEO of Borderlands creators Gearbox, had his first conversation about a possible movie with Avi and Ari Arad, two producers who found success bringing Marvel to Hollywood, starting with 2000's X-Men. "I'm a video-game maker," Pitchford says. "There's always people from Hollywood coming to knock, and I usually just say, 'Thank you, no thank you.'"

And no wonder eyes were on Borderlands; with seven games total, it's one of the highest-grossing gaming franchises of all time. What changed Pitchford's tune was how Avi and Ari's past projects "showed the world that you can do adaptations that sincerely care about the source material," the CEO explains. "I liked the thesis that they came with."

The press initially reported director Leigh Whannell (The Invisible Man) would helm the adaptation, then Aaron Berg (Section 6) was said to be working on an R-rated Borderlands movie. "I don't think at any point any of the above-the-line people, including myself, thought that the right play was for it to be an R-rated movie. That said, all the time we were flirting with stuff," Pitchford remarks of the hunt for the right director before landing on Roth. "A lot of it was us finding where this movie would live. It took us a while, but we found it."

"He put Ari through the ringer," Roth says of Pitchford. "They spent seven years trying different storylines with different characters until they landed on this particular one with this particular group."

Pandora pandemonium

Blanchett leads that group as Lilith, known in the game as a Siren, one with incredible powers. In the film, she's an intergalactic hired gun who reluctantly heads back to her homeworld of Pandora when she's tasked by Atlas (Edgar Ramírez), the head of an arms-dealing megacorporation, to extract his missing daughter. Lilith is one of the more popular figures from the video games, and not just because of her signature flaming red hair...though it certainly helps. After playing Borderlands briefly with her sons ("When it comes to video games, I may as well be playing with my feet," she jokes), Blanchett fell down a rabbit hole of Lilith cosplayer photos online.

"It was the fan base that I found so fascinating," she says. "The whole idea of cosplay — how idiosyncratic it is, the way different people would riff and give their Lilith — that I found really inspiring. It was a big cut-and-paste for me in trying to put her together on screen."

Curtis didn’t even have to read the script to know she wanted to sign on to the film. “It didn’t matter to me,” she says. “I went to Budapest to be in a movie with Cate Blanchett.” The Halloween icon plays Dr. Patricia Tannis, a scientist and an old friend of Lilith’s mother. Curtis says she learned everything she needed while sitting next to Kristy Pitchford — Randy’s wife, and the creator of the Tannis video game character — on the flight to Hungary. “She explained that Tannis had objective sexuality, that she had autism, that she was not neurotypical, that she had these interesting points of view,” the actress recalls. “It helped me so much.”

Joining Lilith and Tannis on their mission are the android Claptrap (Black), the mercenary Roland (Hart), the berserker muscle man Krieg (Munteanu), and Greenblatt's spaghetti-throwing Tiny Tina. Greenblatt likens Tina to Harley Quinn (played in the DC films by her Barbie costar Margot Robbie) noting those "crazy eyes and crazy vocal inflections."

Black had a different image in mind when voicing his zany R2-D2-esque droid in the recording booth: "It's kind of a weird reference, but David Lynch. It's a little old Americana, but he's also got a twisted, surreal look on the world."

For Roland, Hart was eager to embrace a different role than what fans of his comedy may be used to seeing. "This is the first time I was responsible for action and only action," he says. "Roland is a handler. He gets it done. He knows where to go, and there's a reason why you get behind him. He's a leader. He's a soldier. And he's a good one."

Though Krieg is a man of few words compared to these other figures in his orbit, he is, in some ways, the face of Borderlands. As a reformed Psycho (the name given to the variety of deranged maniacs that litter the world of Pandora), his mask typically adorns the cover art for the video games. Munteanu's version takes a slight turn from the games by serving as Tina's bodyguard, though the actor maintains reverence for the source material as a fan himself.

"This was basically the first time where the goal was to just let loose and not think at all, because that's how the craziness of this role plays into it," he explains. "The games have a certain tone. It's very brutal, but in a very comedic way where you just find fun in the brutality."

"I knew I was in for an outrageous ride," adds Ramírez, who plays the film's central villain, a personification of Atlas Corp. from the games. "Eli invited me to have fun with the concept of this guy whose ambition has no limits — who, in a way, becomes a slave of his own ambition."

You might say the cast was an embarrassment of riches. Roth puts it a different way: "There was so much chemistry on set, you felt like there was going to be a meth lab explosion."

Happy Vault Hunting!

Borderlands won't be a strict adaptation of the games, and — like the spaghetti chaos — not everything they shot ended up in the movie. In addition to scenes depicting Tannis in a relationship with an office chair that nobody was allowed to sit on, as well as her complicated romantic history with EchoNet (her handheld gadget for tracking and communication), Roth also filmed a whole wedding scene between Wainwright Jakobs and Sir Hammerlock, with Cheyenne Jackson and Charles Babalola playing the two notable game characters.

"We all loved it. The scene itself turned out great. But in the overall mission of the film, it felt like a detour that stopped the mood," Roth says of the nuptials. "There'a a lot of stuff that you try to do, but you never really know until you sit back and watch the whole thing."

"We're not retelling a story that we've told in the video games," Pitchford explains. "We've created a cinematic universe that lives in parallel to the video game universe and can live in an independent timeline. It feels like Borderlands, but you don't know what we're going to do."

Cinematic universe? Does that mean there are more movies or even a TV show in the near future — on top of the next Gearbox game, which doesn't have a release date but Pitchford says is "the best thing we've ever done"? "We have a lot of room for growth on the video game side, and on other mediums, including film and television," the CEO teases. "I don't know where the ceiling is, but I know I don't want to stop until we bump our heads up against it."

Hey, crazier things have happened with Borderlands.

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Footage by Lionsgate; VFX by Studio Khimaira