The film “The Legend of Zelda” has to be “down-to-earth” and “real,” says the director

Nintendo’s “Legend of Zelda” film won’t rely as heavily on motion capture as director Wes Ball once imagined.

In 2010, long before Nintendo announced Ball as the helmer of the long-awaited fantasy adaptation and before he had even directed his first feature film, The labyrinth runnerthe director tweeted that he thought, a completely mo-cap version of it The Legend of Zelda, modeled on James Cameron Avatar, would be a great idea. But after collaborating with Weta FX on May’s mo-cap intensive film Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

it seems he has other things in mind for Link.

In an interview with Polygon, Ball said with a laugh that a fully filmed version of The Legend of Zelda “probably isn’t his choice.” Instead, he said the project needed to be a little more “down to earth” and “real.” But Ball was also careful to stress that he couldn’t say much about the film yet.

“We’re working hard and we’re going to do something great,” he said, before joking that if he said any more, “Nintendo will jump out of the bushes and want to snatch me away.”

Ball is a big supporter of animation and made a breakthrough in the industry with his stylized CG animated short film ruin

before directing three Maze Runner films. After completing the trilogy, he developed an animated version of it The Mouse Guardian, although the ambitious feature failed after Disney acquired 20th Century Fox. But the studio was clearly a fan and put Ball in charge of the next chapter in the Apes franchise – a film that would reunite him with Weta and test his rare talent for live-action and animation. Ball may have envisioned a fully animated Legend of Zelda movie 14 years ago, but he’s essentially realized his Avatar dreams Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes .

“How Avatar, and unlike the other previous Apes films, there is about 30 or 40 minutes of full CG in this film. Like every leaf, every piece of bark, you know, full CG. So I got to get a little taste of it Avatar Experience that was just actors on a mocap stage pretending with all these crazy boxes and proxies for objects. That was really fun.”

There’s no word yet on when we can expect this The Legend of Zeldawhich was just announced last November, but Ball’s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes hits theaters on May 10th.