With coloured bricks jigsawing their way down the screen, Tetris is unquestionably one of the most iconic video games of all time. Simple, fiendish and, in short, a work of pixelated genius. But it wasn’t this that first drew in Scottish filmmaker Jon S Baird (Filth, Stan & Ollie) to its backstory. ‘I wasn’t a huge gamer,’ he admits, when we speak over Zoom. Rather, he was taken by a true tale that takes place behind the Iron Curtain in the late 80s. ‘I was very much interested in the Cold War thriller aspect of the story.’ 

A former politics student, Baird was hooked when he read Noah Pink’s script for Tetris, which covers less the creation of that game (by a Russian computer wizard) and more the fight for international rights to distribute it. Various parties compete, including late newspaper baron Robert Maxwell (played by Roger Allam under remarkable prosthetics) and go-getting American businessman Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton) who convinces Nintendo to nab Tetris for the launch of its soon-to-be-huge hand-held Game Boy console. 

With Henk betting all his chips on pulling the deal off, what really stuns is how he heads to Moscow, without paperwork or permissions, to negotiate with the Soviet authorities as communism meets capitalism head on. ‘I don’t think Henk is scared of anybody,’ says Baird. ‘You meet him as a real person and you understand why he could do this because that’s who he is. He’s really a guy who backs himself and puts himself forward. I think he’s got so much self-belief.’

The same could be said for Taron Egerton, who shot to fame in the Kingsman film series and then wowed audiences as Elton John in Rocketman. Baird, who had been working on a script for a yet-to-be-made Kingsman sequel before pivoting to Tetris, immediately felt Egerton was right for Henk. ‘I was a big fan of his, of Rocketman especially. I like how much energy he puts into performance. And I think you just needed that with Henk. He had to be on the whole time.’

While Henk is the story’s hero, there’s no question that Maxwell is the ‘literally larger-than-life villain’. The film touches on Maxwell’s financial irregularities, swindling millions from his companies’ pension funds before his mysterious death in 1991. ‘That’s the thing that really brought them down,’ says Baird.  ‘I think we could have gone harder on Maxwell to be honest.’

Shooting during covid, Baird couldn’t film in Eastern Europe but found an elegant solution. ‘The University Of Aberdeen, where I went, has got some incredible brutalist buildings,’ he explains. The college’s zoology centre, in particular, provided some key exteriors, although the acid test came when Baird hired several Russian theatre actors to play secondary roles. ‘One of the great things was when you took the Russians onto sets that were supposed to be Moscow and watch them go “OK, wow, that feels like home”.’ 

After a career that’s seen him bounce between directing film and TV, including the Martin Scorsese-produced Vinyl and recent ITV drama Stonehouse, Baird was simply delighted to give his former home a well-deserved close-up. ‘Aberdeen hasn’t really been used as a film location. It was great to go back up there and put it on the map because they’d never really had a big movie up there.’ Now it’ll forever be associated with Tetris, a game that Baird has unsurprisingly become more fond of these past two years. ‘I play it on my iPhone,’ he admits. ‘I’m kind of addicted to it!’

Tetris is available on Apple TV+ from Friday 31 March.