Driv3r is a revolutionary video game that allows players to “direct” their own racing sequences. Graham Leggat and filmmaker Derek Cianfrance take it for a spin.

Screenshots from Driv3r, Atari's new interactive driving game.

The Driver games were conceived in the back of a car, Popeye Doyle’s commandeered brown 1970 Pontiac Le Mans, or maybe Det. Lt. Frank Bullitt’s highland-green 68 Mustang GT Fastback — the exact paternity’s sketchy. But it’s clear that the franchise was fathered by classic car-chase films such as Bullitt, The French Connection and Gone in 60 Seconds and television shows such as Starsky and Hutch and The Dukes of Hazzard. When, in the games, you see a rogue cop chasing an elevated train, cars exploding through garbage cans in alleyways, and screaming wheel-cam points of view, their basic 1970s-era screen heritage is never in doubt.

The first two Driver games were big hits, selling 12 million units worldwide and legendarily influencing the video-game landmark Grand Theft Auto 3. Now the much-anticipated new entry, Driv3r (pronounced Driver 3), is due in June from Atari after three years in development, and it too is steeped in film culture.

The game’s photorealistic physics system models the car handling not merely on real cars, � la Gran Turismo, but, according to series producer Martin Edmondson, on the way real cars react in films. Michael Madsen, Ving Rhames, Michelle Rodriguez, Mickey Rourke and Iggy Pop voice the characters. And Atari commissioned Ridley Scott Associates to make a three-minute live-action film, Run the Gauntlet, directed by Sean Mullens along the lines of BMW’s “The Hire” series, as a trailer for the game. What is most interesting about Driv3r, though, isn’t what films and filmmaking contribute to the game — it’s what the game might contribute to filmmaking.

Driv3r comes with a built-in Film Director Mode, a flexible and powerful suite that allows players to rephotograph any game-play footage, both in and out of the cars, using a wide array of camera options and effects. This includes vehicle-mounted hood, rear-bumper and wheel cameras; independent follow, tracking, crane and handheld cameras; as well as variable zoom lenses and variable slo-mo and motion-blur effects.

These cameras can be placed almost anywhere in the game’s three cities (Nice, Istanbul and Miami) to take advantage of numerous locations along 156 miles of roads and among 35,000 individually rendered buildings, with a choice of light at four different times of day, including a never-ending magic hour, an unchanging eternal dusk. For filmmakers, Driv3r isn’t a game at all. It’s a multimillion-dollar film set in a box. At least that’s how it seemed to me when I saw the demo. But I thought I should get a second opinion.

Last year Derek Cianfrance spent several weeks shooting outlaw Filipino street racers as they tore up the Los Angeles roads, making Sundance award-winner Quattro Noza with director Joey Curtis. (The two first collaborated on Cianfrance’s excellent directorial debut Brother Tied in 1998.) As d.p. on Quattro, Cianfrance deployed more than two dozen DV cameras on various rice rockets and overpowered domestic machines. During that time, he saw plenty of speed chases, crashes and close misses. I figured he would know if Driv3r’s Film Director was worth its salt.

Cianfrance was in preproduction on his next directorial outing, Blue Valentine, but he had a free morning on a rainy Friday in February in New York. Atari generously agreed to let us test-drive an early version of the software and reshoot the gameplay in Film Director.

We started by causing trouble in downtown Istanbul, banging up cars to get the attention of the police and then tearing away with the sirens in our ears, the blue-and-white in hot pursuit. We thundered up the boulevard against traffic; made a quick left under an ancient arch into a dockside warehouse area; busted through wooden crates, oil drums and a three-story scaffold; zigged past a hurricane fence; and flew up a ramp and over a 20-foot gap to safety. The cop wasn’t so lucky. He ended up a mangled wreck in the concrete pit at the foot of the ramp.

We played this section using a simple default follow cam. Then we went to work on the footage. Derek set up the first collisions in medium range using a tripod. As he did, he noticed for the first time a hapless pedestrian flying through the air and reset the shot to catch the arc of her flight. Next he moved the camera up the boulevard so our car flew toward it, crashing into an oncoming vehicle in close-up as it entered the frame.

Film Director was easy to use and enjoyable right out of the gate. Derek chose a camera and set it up, let the footage run, then chose another. A moving timeline and icons on the bottom of the screen showed his progress, like a simplified Avid or Final Cut Pro.

“There are kids who will learn to be filmmakers with this,” he said, eyeing the screen. “It’s easy and it’s neat. But there are limitations, which is what I like. If you don’t have them, you turn into James Cameron, and you lose sight of things.”

His next cut was from the sidewalk, showing more of the crash as a second pedestrian sauntered coolly past (those unflappable Turks). He cut next to a wheel cam as the getaway car screamed through the arch, barreling into the z-axis like Luke Skywalker’s X-Wing fighter running the Death Star, crates and drums smashing through the frame.

He cut away to a static medium shot of the scaffolding, at right angles to the direction of the chase. Just a set-up shot of the scaffolding and the houses behind it — like a picture postcard, nothing else in the frame. Then the two automobiles went howling past, scattering the metal poles like a house of cards. Derek held the shot after they had gone: a frieze of beautiful old row houses beneath an easy late-afternoon sky.

He cut next to a tripod shot in the path of the oncoming cars. As they burst through, some bug in the early version allowed the camera to pass through the skin of the car, through a nicely rendered engine block, into the passenger compartment, through a driver hollow as a chocolate Santa, and out through the empty trunk. Then the process was repeated with the chase car. “Whoa,” Derek said. “You can’t get that in a film.” (You can, of course, but it’ll cost you.)

Next was a follow shot, setting up the ramp jump. Derek tried to set the camera at the top of the ramp, but it fell off into the pit below. So he left it there and shot the getaway car soaring over the gap in slo-mo. Whistling in admiration, he let the camera run. And then, all at once, there was the cop car, which he had forgotten, missing the jump and diving nose-first into the cement. The final shot, craned about 10 feet off the ground, captured the getaway car on the other side of the gap, fishtailing to a stop, the driver turning in his seat to make sure he was safe. Derek zoomed to a shot of the driver’s face through the rear window. End of scene.

Then he went back and did it again, refining the marks and the timing, adding more shots, changing set-ups, panning, zooming, tracking — working the footage. “You see Bad Boyz II?” he asks. After about 20 minutes of meticulous revision, the system crashed. The problem was a bug in the preview that won’t be in the finished game, but it hit a familiar note. “Man, that’s just like a real edit,” Cianfrance said. “You put an hour of work in and then you have to do it all over again, and it’s never the same.”

He abandoned his quest for the perfect chase scene and started fooling around, looking for accidental narratives and compositions. “Kids will push the game. They’ll just make things up.” He photographed the sky. He built single shots of house fronts — “You remember in Stranger Than Paradise?” He went back to find the original flying pedestrian. “You could tell her story.”

He changed the lighting to dusk and just looked at it for a while without doing anything. “Days of Heaven,” he said. “Took ’em two years to shoot it because they’d only shoot during magic hour, 40 minutes a day.” He gave me a look. “I don’t know if I believe that.”

We packed up, said our thanks. Over coffee in nearby Grand Central Station, Cianfrance summed up the experience: It’s neat. It’s really interesting. It’s a lot of fun. It will teach kids craft. It will teach them the technical grammar of filmmaking. It reinforces Hollywood production values, on the one hand, and on the other, it allows discoveries to be made — it depends on who’s playing around with it. It could be used for preproduction, as a form of storyboarding. It will get someone thinking about cameras and technique. It is superflexible. It will evolve quickly into an incredible tool. It will teach certain forms of narrative, and it will allow more creative minds to have a blast just fooling around. And: it really is like a film set in a box.

A week later I called and asked if he had had any other thoughts. “It has pretty much left me as an experience,” he said apologetically. “Don’t get me wrong — I really enjoyed it, and I think it’s an amazing tool, but there’s no risk involved. There’s no real-life consequences. I guess that’s the difference between the virtual world and the living, breathing world, right?”

I guessed that it was. Good as Driv3r’s Film Director is — and it is pretty exceptional — when it comes to actual filmmaking, things just don’t count as much unless you have some skin in the game.