Borderlands director Eli Roth says his shy dog inspired his pitch for the live-action video game adaptation in the strangest way.
“Whenever I take her for a walk and she has to go to the bathroom, she won’t let me look at her,” Roth tells SFX magazine in the new issue, which hits newsstands on July 10 and features Doctor Who on the cover.”I have to look away because she gets really shy. But one day I filmed her. She had that shy look on her face and I was like, ‘That’s Claptrap.'”
Claptrap, who’s widely considered the mascot of the Borderlands franchise, is the player’s fast-talking, intentionally annoying and hilarious robot companion. Roth was approached by Randy Pitchford, CEO of the games’ developer Gearbox Software, to direct the film – and he had quite a few questions about the walking talking robot.
“My first question was, ‘You can’t kill Claptrap, but you can shoot him hundreds of times?’ He goes, ‘Correct. Because there’s a scene where Claptrap gets shot up after being a decoy.’ I said, ‘So, what happens to the bullets?’ Randy goes, ‘I don’t know.’ I go, ‘Could he shit out the bullets, like we’re in a Mel Brooks movie?’ He goes, ‘Yes, he could.’ And I felt we needed to see that.”
And that’s where Roth’s pooping dog comes in: “But rather than escape, they’ve got to deal with this robot that needs to expel the bullets. And that was my pitch to Lionsgate. They were laughing so hard.”
Jack Black provides the voice of Claptrap in the film, with Cate Blanchett as protagonist Lilith, Kevin Hart as Roland, Jamie Lee Curtis as Tannis, Ariana Greenblatt as Tiny Tina, and Florian Munteanu as Krieg. The story follows Lilith as she is forced to return to her home planet of Pandora on a mission – but it doesn’t go as planned. Instead, she teams up with a group of unlikely heroes and the group embarks on an explosive, treacherous adventure.
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Borderlands releases on August 9, 2024. Read more in the latest issue of SFX magazine, which features Doctor Who on the cover and is available from Wednesday, July 10.
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