Ghost of Tsushima director talks making the film adaptation in Japanese

Ghost of Tsushima was praised upon its release for the beauty of its environments and the cinematic style that dominated much of the game’s battling and exploration. It makes sense, then, that Sony wants to make the hit game into an actual movie.

Chad Stahelski, the director attached to the project and brain behind the John Wick franchise, has big plans for the Ghost of Tsushima movie. And they include making the movie as historically accurate as possible, including using a Japanese cast and making the movie in Japanese.

In an interview with Collider, Stahelski talked up the Ghost of Tsushima project, noting that despite the perceived challenges of marketing a non-English movie to Western audiences, Sony was already “so on board” with Stahelski’s ideas and concepts for a Japanese-language film. Stahelski also noted how frequently he has traveled to Japan since he was a teenager, and how his love of Japan, the Japanese language, and legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa all coalesced into his vision of making Ghost of Tsushima a Japanese story and not a Western version of Japan.

Some will still raise their eyebrows at the decision not to make the movie in English, despite the international popularity of many film and television programs that have come out of Japan and South Korea over the past several years, in particular. Despite the challenges of making a foreign-language film popular with Western audiences, Stahelski seems set on meeting those challenges head-on.

“Will they show up to the theaters for that?” Stehelski’s hypothetical question he poses in his Collider interview is the most pressing question there is when a director says he wants to make a big-budget international film not in English. But he’s still confident he can get the job done: “I think it could hurt me or hurt the property if you’re failing a little less in each, visually it’s not great, the action is okay, the story is not clear. Look, if I nail all the other bits, I think I can inspire you enough to get in the car and go to the theater.”

The Ghost of Tsushima film is still in pre-production and, as such, has no release date. If people want to find out what the movie may have in store for them this early, however, they can always go play the game on PlayStation.