Netflix has a huge film series problem. The streamer can churn out TV franchises that keep fans coming back, from Love is Blind to Squid Game, but replicating the blockbuster movie has always remained elusive. Rian Johnson has somewhat found a footing with the most recent Knives Out installment, but Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead and Rebel Moon never really took off.

So when the streamer announced Avengers: Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo — who had previously worked with Netflix on The Gray Man and both Extraction movies — would direct an ambitious sci-fi epic based on Simon Stalenhåg’s The Electric State, I was wary. In fact, I’m cited in the movie’s Wikipedia page as someone who “expressed concerns” that the first-look images “were confirmation that the film would seemingly be unfaithful to the original book.”

My concerns were, in fact, warranted. For the most part, The Electric State looks like a lot of other sci-fi action movies, with flat lighting and crowd-pleasing shot composition. But underneath its samey story and MCU-quip-a-thon dialogue is something that’s increasingly rare to find in movies with a similar standing: originality.

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Josef Fares, an outspoken game designer, emerged in the industry 25 years ago as a Hollywood outsider. But the love of gaming has always been there. He remembers having one of the first Ataris in Lebanon. Pong was his passion and his first time experiencing a video game. Then life hit. At age 10, Fares fled the Lebanese Civil War and immigrated to Sweden with his family. Still the video games followed him, and he managed to get a Nintendo Entertainment System that he’d stay up all night playing Super Mario Bros. on.

He has always been a storyteller. It’s what came natural and helped him to make sense of his world from an early age. “Obviously there were challenges in school, being an immigrant and I was quite alone, and being an outsider, was part of the reason, maybe I went deeper into that creating stuff and being creative,” Fares tells Inverse.

Now 47, Fares is one of the rare game directors who speaks his mind and does his own thing, while pumping out hit after varied hit, in collaboration with big video game conglomerate, Electronic Arts. Despite the shareholder expectations that come with a job like his, Fares sticks to worrying about the passion, speaks his mind, and all but ignores the business models that help games get profitable.