Screen Rant recently sat down and talked with Navid Khavari, the narrative director on Far Cry 6, and discussed things like casting, the game’s politics, and much more. Khavari has been with Ubisoft since Splinter Cell: Blacklist and has worked on every mainline Far Cry game since Far Cry 4. Needless to say, he’s well-versed in the storytelling of Far Cry, and has a lot of insight into how these massive games are crafted from the ground up.
From the setting to the cast, Far Cry has set a number of expectations for each entry. One of the key selling points for the series has been the villain, and Far Cry 6 is no exception. Breaking Bad’s Giancarlo Esposito will star in Far Cry 6 as Anton Castillo, the dictator of a fictional island known as Yara. Players will be tasked with leading a revolution against Castillo and his regime, leading to an explosive and politically charged battle for freedom and democracy.
Far Cry 5 dabbled in some hot topics in America, but Far Cry 6 seems to be taking those themes even further and examining them on a more global level. Far Cry 6 narrative director Navid Khavari spoke with Screen Rant about the not-so black and white nature of its story and politics, casting, tone, and much more. Khavari also talked a bit about his time on Splinter Cell: Blacklist and his hopes for a return from Sam Fisher.
Did the pandemic affect anything? Had you made plans to release in 2020, or did you have the bulk of the game done and smoothly shift into work from home?
Navid Khavari: We definitely had to delay, and it was the right call. Essentially, everyone was caught blindsided by the pandemic. Thankfully, I think everyone realized that people’s health was most important, and we made sure that we tried as much as possible to keep a healthy work-life balance. We just tried to adjust to remote work.
The real kudos is not only that the team is able to deliver this game during the pandemic – it’s not just the Far Cry team, it’s IT who managed to onboard all these systems so quickly. Not everyone knows this, but we were actually shooting Giancarlo, who plays Anton, on his final day of shooting when the studio closed. His final day of shooting was on Friday, and then the studio closed on Tuesday. As we were shooting, we weren’t sure if the studio was gonna shut down.
Beyond that – just put that aside – we weren’t sure if he was gonna be able to get out of the country. As we’re shooting his final scenes, I’m standing next to him – he was great; he’s fantastic – and you could just feel the tension. There’s a storm coming, and we feel very isolated from it in this mo-cap room. But thankfully, we managed to shoot him out. It’s a miracle that happened, and fate worked out there.
Was Giancarlo Esposito who you had in mind when creating Anton?
Navid Khavari: Anton took a whole lot of different shapes and forms, and there’s a lot of pitches at the bottom of the drawer that I’ll save for other games.
We did a wide casting net, but we started to hone in on knowing that Anton was going to be a father, knowing that we wanted someone with the versatility to switch from charismatic to staring into your soul terrifyingly, and we started to land on Anton as a person of color. Giancarlo was always there as a dream casting, but then suddenly, something happens where you realize you’re writing to his voice on the page. And then it becomes a little scary, because you’re like, “Oh, my God. I hope he is wanting to do this, otherwise, we might be in trouble.”
When we met with him, it was like a four-hour meeting. It was just a match made in heaven, and we knew that we’d landed on something special.
Diego hasn’t really been talked about a lot, in terms of marketing. He’s still a very big mystery. What is his role in the game exactly?
Navid Khavari: What’s the deal with Diego? Diego is critical to the story, and I think it’s something that is uniquely fresh to this Far Cry. The way I always saw it is that Anton, Dani and Diego are part of this triad – and Diego is caught in the middle. Do they forge their own future? Do they rebel against Anton? Or do they follow their father’s footsteps?
That’s almost why, at the start of the game, he’s running. Because he can’t decide, and he doesn’t know what his place is. All he knows is that what his father is doing, deep down he knows it’s wrong. But at the same time, he loves his dad, and he can’t reconcile those things.
Over the course of the game, Diego is at the center of this journey, and at a high level. We wanted to add that nuance as well, and that was something that was really important to Giancarlo and to us – and to Anthony Gonzalez, who plays Diego. Anton isn’t a villain – I actually try not to use the word villain; I say antagonist. He’s a father as well, and the only person that remotely understands what Diego is going through is Anton. While it’s easy for everyone else to tell Diego, “Your dad’s a monster. Your dad is evil,” he still loves his father. You’re gonna see how those dynamics play out, and I’ll leave it at that.
I will tell you one thing, though. I have writer’s brain, but I just find it hilarious that Anthony Gonzalez was the lead in Coco, and is alongside Giancarlo Esposito, who was the bad guy in Breaking Bad. Having those two together? There’s always a part of me that smiles when I think that we pulled that off.
And not to ramble on with it, but the performance of Anthony Gonzalez is really special. When I met him during casting, he just had a constant smile on his face. It was just this huge smile, and immediately, I was like, “No way.”
It’s a strong contrast to what we see in all the trailers.
Navid Khavari: Exactly. I was like, “This isn’t gonna work.” But he did a casting script for a scene with Diego and a therapist. He was smiling and talking, and then it came time to do the scene, and his body just changed. All this weight landed on him, and we were just completely blown away. He’s gonna be huge – I mean, he already kind of is. He’s got a real ability; it’s really special.
I think the saying is “Don’t ever work with dogs or kids,” but we’re getting more in games like God of War or Far Cry. They’re in such a tough environment too, where there’s nothing to really act off of but the person in front of you. It’s pretty impressive what these kids are capable of.
Navid Khavari: Yeah, and Giancarlo is so supportive of that. I have a distinct memory of him with Anthony, and we were trying to get a scene. It’s so distracting on a mo-cap set, because like you said it’s not a real place – and then on top of that, you have tennis balls and dots and the suit that is just so uncomfortable. We weren’t quite getting the scene, and then Giancarlo just put his hands on Anthony’s shoulders and said, “Look at me. It’s you and me here; just you and me. That’s the only thing that matters,” and then he nailed the scene right after. It was really beautiful to watch.
Where do you start when you’re planning a Far Cry game? The villain is obviously the thing fans think of first, but is that where you start? Or do you go to the setting, or do you just start spitballing?
Navid Khavari: It started with the setting, for sure. We knew we wanted to go back to a tropical island. However, what might surprise you is that when I joined this Far Cry, I wanted to really focus on the heroes. I had this chip on my shoulder – it’s my fourth Far Cry, so I think I’m allowed to have a chip on my shoulder. So much time and focus is always put on the villains. I had a thing I would say, which is, “Draw them in with the villain.” We know that we’re gonna have to have a kickass villain, so it’s, “Draw them in with the villain, but make them stay for the heroes.”
It’s a little bit of a bait and switch that I hope works. Let’s see what happens. But what was sort of the lightbulb moment for us was looking at revolutions. When you think of revolution, and you look at the world right now, everyone wants to say, “good person, bad person.” And Anton does the same thing; he says true Yara and fake Yara: two sides fighting each other.
But when you look at revolutionary movements, it’s anything but. These are such complicated organizations with different factions, different personalities, and different motivations. They don’t agree with each other. In the western part of Yara, they’re just obsessed with protecting the farmland; they don’t care about the rest of Yara. In the eastern part of Yara, you have university students who want to go more militant than Dani or Libertad.
That was a real lightning point for me: to try and make the hero stand toe to toe with our antagonist.
In previous games, they have faces, but you don’t really get a sense of them. But in this game, you get the third-person perspective, the cutscenes, and gameplay stuff. It definitely feels like there’s more focus on Dani and not “faceless protagonist number 2.”
Navid Khavari: Exactly and it’s interesting. There’s something that happens when you go to third person, and I was surprised at how natural it felt. In an interesting way, it actually makes you feel more connected to the world, because you see your character with their arsenal and their loadout and their gear, interacting with the other people on the island. You get that breather to see that, so it really is amazing.
I thought it would be a bigger uphill climb to make that work, but it works.
Far Cry 6 is probably one of the most over-the-top games in the series. There’s a dog with a wheelchair, a jet pack that shoots rockets like Boba Fett, and all this [wild] stuff. How do you balance the tone so that you don’t interfere with the story?
Navid Khavari: It’s a great question. This is one of those things where you have to just play the game. You know what I mean?
It’s really interesting, because we’ve had some demos and trailers and stuff like that. But it’s something that we work toward, where you need to play it as a cohesive whole. I’d be really curious to see how you feel after you after you play it, because what we tried to do was ground these crazier and wilder fantasy elements in the world as much as possible.
And I’ll give you an example: you have the supremo backpacks. Those things look crazy, and you’re like Iron Man suddenly. But we grounded that with the character of Juan Cortez, this revolutionary whose job was basically to break regimes for years and years. And while he’s the in the mud, waiting to attack convoys, has this flash of inspiration because he’s reading comic books. And he’s saying, “If I could just fashion together this piece and this piece, using this idea of resolver that we were really inspired by – this idea of making do with what you have – I can fashion these backpacks.” And then that story funnels into the look of the backpack. You have a fire extinguisher that’s been emptied, and it’s filled with jet fuel. And then when you pull out into third person, you can see all the elements coming into play.
That’s how we approached is: as wild as it may be, can we make this feel like it’s in Yara? And then, on top of that, it’s the experience, of the guerilla [warfare] and revolution in particular. I use this anecdote with the team all the time, but World War II or the Civil War were such short periods of time, if you think about it – 2 to 4 years. But the range of experiences and stories – some that are believable, and some that aren’t – actually happened. That’s what we need to try to do: no matter what’s happening; no matter how crazy it is, or how off the beaten path the character might be or the element might be, it’s all happening in the context of the revolution. We’ll see how people feel.
Was there anything you cut because it was pushing it? Where you were like, “I don’t know if we can get away with this?”
Navid Khavari: That’s a good question. No one’s ever asked me that.
No, to be honest. I don’t think there was anything – not off the top of my head.
As much as possible, we wanted it to just feel cohesive; whatever was there. We were all working together for the same thing.
Initially, you said the game doesn’t wish to make a political statement. It seems you changed your stance on that, but I don’t put words in your mouth. Why was it important to correct that original statement to you?
Navid Khavari: This is a really important thing to clarify. I did an interview, and I was actually misquoted. I’m not gonna go too deep into it, but they actually chopped what I said in half to make it look like I was saying, “We’re not making a political statement in this game,” or “We’re not talking about politics.”
So, for me, it’s not a correction. It’s actually in line with what I was saying what we’re trying to do. Any game about revolution is going to be political – any piece of art, honestly, has a political stance. What I knew we weren’t going to do was do some kind of black-and-white thing that says, “This is cut and dry. This person is bad, period, and this person is good, period.” And that got misinterpreted as, “Oh, they don’t want to make a political statement.”
In fact, this game is loaded with politics. It’s just a lot of different views on the conditions of the rise of fascism, or the conditions that result from a blockade; conditions that folks are feeling to this day, and even LGBTQ+ rights. There is a wide range of opinions on those things that we tried to capture within our characters. And it goes back to what I was saying earlier, in terms of revolution. I didn’t want to make something that was binary; I wanted to make something that was more like a novel. That’s the best allegory: something that was more novelistic and more nuanced than something so binary.
Unfortunately, that got cut and chopped up and thrown as a headline. But I felt really compelled to make the statement. I could have not said anything, and it would have been easy to just let it ride. But I felt compelled to explain that, even just based on my own family history. We fled Iran; my parents fled the revolution there and experienced a lot of things as a result of that. So, I inherited or ingrained those debates and conversations, and we had arguments about them. So, I think it was important to me to try and capture the nuance of that within the politics of Far Cry 6.
I know that’s a long-winded of explaining it, but it’s an important topic.
Following up on that, do you think it’s difficult to market a game with those themes without being able to just lay it on the table? Maybe some people don’t have trust in games, because they don’t feel the writing has matured enough to tackle subjects like that?
Navid Khavari: It’s interesting, because all cards on the table, I was really caught off guard by some of the reactions I saw. In terms of the ability of narrative teams to produce meaningful stories, I was surprised at how much negativity was out there.
And I don’t know why that’s the case, or it would be presumptuous to say why. But I know that some of the most powerful stories I’ve experienced have been from games, just in the last 5 years. One of the things I hope is that – and I implored this of our team – no one was going to tell us how to write this game. No one was going to tell us how to write this story. I wanted us to be fearless and just tell the story that we wanted to tell. or felt needed to be told.
I think there is so much room for new kinds of stories in games, and there’s plenty of folks fighting to tell those stories. The main thing I would say is there’s a certain amount that you just have to play to experience. I think part of those reactions might have to do with the fact that these games are so massive. The narrative breadth you’ve got to cover is so huge, and we can only show snippets of it.
So, it’s tough. Absolutely, it’s tough. But I’ve done a lot of learning over the course of this, and I know that I stand by the work. I think that the game will speak for itself.
My last question is not Far Cry-related, but I had a look at your credits and saw that you worked on Splinter Cell: Blacklist, which is one of my favorite games. Everyone’s a little sad that we haven’t gotten a follow-up or something.
Navid Khavari: I think I know what your question’s gonna be.
Yeah! When are we getting another Splinter Cell, and would you like to be the narrative director on another game?
Navid Khavari: Oh, man, that’s a double whammy. All I’ll say is I would love to see another Splinter Cell. I learned so much working on that game. That was my first triple-A as a writer, and so much love went into that game. I have folks come to me every once in a while saying exactly what you said. There’s hopefully a little cult following there. But I would love nothing more to see Sam Fisher don those goggles once again. I’ll be excited to see what comes, and I’ll leave it at that.
Far Cry 6 releases on October 7, 2021 for Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, PS5, Google Stadia, Amazon Luna, and PC.