Kotaku
By John Gaudiosi
Paul W.S. Anderson is one of a number of Hollywood and gaming creatives that can be seen on Starz Entertainment's new videogame documentary, "Hollywood Goes Gaming," which is in heavy rotation across the movie network. This exclusive interview is from outtakes not seen on the show. Anderson, the man behind the original Mortal Kombat movie and all three Resident Evil films, talks about his process of bringing games to the big screen.
"What I've tried to do in all the adaptations that I've done is really immerse myself in the world, so I'm well aware of all of the different story lines and all of the back stories that exist," said Anderson. "Then I try and carve out an original story told within that universe. I think that's an important approach, because it allows you to tell a story that is a little unfamiliar to the gamers. There is nothing more boring than seeing a movie that is a straight adaptation of a videogame. A lot of hardcore gamers complain that videogame movies don't stick exactly to the games, but frankly that would not be an enjoyable experience because if you've already played the game you know exactly what's going to happen."
Anderson said that although he's usually played the games before he chooses them as an adaptation. That process can be slow.
"I'd spent a long time playing the Resident Evil games because I'm a slow game player," said Anderson. "I don't have magic fingers. I'm put to shame by a lot of young kids, but I'm diligent. I put in the hours. So I get to the end of all of the games but it can take a long time...it might take me a week to get through a game."
When it comes to choosing which games to bring to the big screen, Anderson, who has the option for a Driver movie and also produced the recent box office bomb, DOA, said he's looking for a good milieu.
"The thing about Mortal Kombat, for example is that it was heavily influenced by certain movies like Enter the Dragon, and therefore it was kind of an easy adaptation to turn the game back into a movie," explained Anderson. "Resident Evil was heavily influenced by the Romero zombie movies that I loved as a teenager. There was a whole six or seven years where there was just a new zombie movie every week it seemed. And no one had made one of those movies for 15 years. So when we came to adapting and making Resident Evil, we weren't just tapping into the audience for a particular videogame, I felt we were reinventing an entire genre of movies that just hadn't been done for a long time."
Anderson, who's been a gamer all of his life, said he believes games, as an art form, are still in their infancy.
"When I was playing Pong or Asteroids, that was the equivalent of the very first short silent movies like The Great Train Robbery," said Anderson. "They were primitive, but boy they were captivating. Games are now at the stage that movies were when Talkies were introduced. They have much more sophisticated stories because in that hour and a half you had a lot more dialogue. When you look at some of my favorite games from a while ago, the acting was bad and the dialogue was terrible. Games now are more sophisticated and quite often they use well-known actors to voice character. The dialogue is better the actual narrative is better, as well."
While the focus on "Hollywood Goes Gaming" is on that buzzword—convergence, Anderson believes games and movies will remain separate, but equal forms of entertainment.
"I love movies and I love videogames, but I don't think there is some kind of a hybrid art form between the two," said Anderson. "I think you go see a movie because you want to be told a great story. If you see a scary movie, you want to be scared, you want twists and turns, you don't want to know what's coming, you don't want to make decisions. Sometimes the joy of going to see a scary movie is a character does something that you just wouldn't do. And the same goes for gaming. I play a lot of World of Warcraft and although there are thousands of other people playing with me in this virtual world, I don't want to see them. I don't want to know there's a guy behind that dwarf. It throws off the illusion."
Anderson said that while on the surface there are many similarities between movies and games, they are kind of deceptive.
"There are animated sequences in games that look like movies, so there's a tendency for people who really aren't into games to think they are the same kind of thing," said Anderson. "But I think just the process of playing and interacting with a game make it necessarily different from the movies. I wouldn't know why you would want to combine the two."
Comments
Wait. He's RESPONSIBLE for mortal kombat?
So, he plays Alliance..
It all makes sense!
I enjoyed the first Mortal Kombat movie too.
I still think out of every single video game turned movie, Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil were the best.
I screamed foul when i first saw RE for the whole "It has nothing to do with the game" but later realized that it was still really good without duplicating the video game story.
@CyN1caL: Agreed.
This coming from the guy that ruined the Resident Evil movies? His stuff is all about flashy effects and slow-motion over-the-top gore. He's almost as bad as Uwe Boll in my book, and the fact that he's got the licenses to some of gaming's bigger franchises just makes me furious.
Let someone else with some real talent develop and produce these properties instead of just smearing your putrid shit all over the celluloid for us to watch!
How about we get someone on par with Christopher Nolan or Bryan Singer to direct these things? What's Darren Aronofsky up to these days? Or Doug Liman?
He's right too. Keep 'em separate. At least concerning the big budget movies. There will always be fan-flicks and machinima and that's good enough.
The man speaks from experience. Convergence is a bad idea that will yield a never ending amount of suck, which is only a good thing if we can use suck as a replacement for gasoline.
That last sentence really threw off everything he said. If you don't why you would want to combine video games and movies, then how come Mortal Kombat, DOA, and the Resident Evil films came out? For shitzngigglez?
What a twat. Seriously, if you're adapting a book you keep the same story.
Honestly... this guy is a hack.
I agree with him: games and movies do not need to converge.
Both movies and games stand on their own, and each excels at things the other can't even touch.
I don't agree with this. I think you can be faithful to the games WHILE making it work for film. It's all about picking the right source material and understanding where you have to cut things that make sense in the game world, but not in the movie world. Completely throwing out stories and characters like he did in the Resident Evil movies is unnecessary.
Interesting read. Is anyone watching the rise of the videogame series on DC. It's alright. They touched on this in last nights ep. The line is growing blurrier. I think in 20 years videogames will be the dominant storytelling medium. With movies going the way of theatre.
@klogg:
No for $$$$$$$$
I think that any involvement with the DOA movie should negate any positive points he gained with MK and RE.
look at those two with their shit-eating grins
How can even you say "that man is right they should be seperate" when he is making his career directing shitty video game movies?
I cant ever recall a movie that actually has faithfully followed a game's plot.
I agree, but with a twist in my opinoin. I not only think they shouldn't converge, but I also think games hsould bury movies so that maybe hollywood can climb it's way out of the piles of shit it's been buried in for years. I get so sick and tired of a plot being furthered in a movie by a character doing something stupid. It gets boring and frustrating to watch as you know that if it were a game, the character you control would have never done anything that stupid, so the plot would have been forced to go to greater length to continue. / rant
@crosswayboy: As much it would be nice to see someone like Nolan, Greengrass, Aronofsky or even second tiers like Liman and Singer try a hand on a video game property adapted to film I don't see these guys doing it. Really, most directors who've already made a name for themselves avoid video game to film adaptations. They'll produce it like Spielberg seems to be planning to do and Peter Jackson has gone that route as well. But to actually direct them usually falls on up-and-coming directors who is still trying to make a name for themselves or at least ones who actually think of themselves as gamers.
I think at times gamers think these video game properties are the greatest stories ever written and thus deserve the best Hollywood can offer. All Hollywood sees in these video game properties are dollar signs and if they can adapt them without having to use a large budget, big name talent to hire then they will do so. As bad as people think Anderson did on the RE film series they did well enough to make its budget and marketing money back and still pull in decent to very good profit for the studios.
This is why any talk of a Metal Gear Solid movie will never get off the ground because people in charge of the property know that it won't get treated correctly. This is why the Halo film project has been in limbo. Jackson knows the only way to really make a Halo movie to please the fans is if the studios finance it like a big blockbuster instead of a hand-me-down property like most game-to-film adaptations.
agreed.
I thought the first mortal kombat was pretty cheesy, but at least the Goro costume was good for some laughs.
Mmm... occasionally you should get some game in your movies and some movies in your games. *in the form of movies based on games and CG-cut scenes.* By in large however, yeah, the two mediums are different enough that converging them would be highly detrimental to both.
Games, are an active interactive experience. You need to pay constant attention, and interact with the game and the gaming-environments. Movies, are passive-non interactive experiences, you sit, relax, watch, and absorb the story.
So in terms of what people are doing, games and movies are almost polar opposites. Thus, true convergence of the two, I feel would be a bad idea.
As an apocryphal aside, supposedly he calls himself Paul "W.S." Anderson because he was sick and tired of getting director Paul Thomas Anderson's mail. But as a result, W.S. now gets Wes Anderson's mail.
Anyhow, W.S.'s movies are terrible... Though I'm embarrassed to admit that, at one point, I did kind of enjoy the first Mortal Kombat movie.
@Tull: Couldn't have said it any better.
@WolvenOne:
I prefer porn in my movies...and games in my games
Ok. If you suck as a director like Paul WS Anderson, then you will be able to make statements like "I love movies and I love videogames, but I don't think there is some kind of a hybrid art form between the two."
This is because HE cannot make a hybrid of the two. If anyone looks at the development on a title like the HALO feature with Neil Blonkamp and Peter Jackson.. we would have had a great videogame/movie feature. What if Quentin Tarantino made Half-Life? I'm pretty sure these combinations would make some f'ing bizzare ass movies but it would be great!
Paul should stick to traditional movie storylines like his more entertaining flicks: Event Horizon and Soldier. Hopefully his statement will lead him down that path.
The first Mortal Kombat movie -- nay, film -- was the best achievement in game-to-movie translation.
First of all, the resident evil movies suck. They have so little to do with the games, it's pathetic.
The reason most video game movies suck so bad usually falls into one of two reasons:
1 - The game has an awesome story, and would lend itself to a movie very well except the film developers want to be too creative and change too much, therefore alienating the game fans to appeal to a wider audience. (resident evil is prime example).
2 - It is a game that wouldn't make a good movie, and by attaching a storyline to it, they just stink up the franchise (street fighter/DOA/Mortal Kombat, Super Mario Brothers, the list goes on forever). - Now, I didn't HATE MK, but it was a mediocre movie at best.
The problem is, that the games that are interesting enough and cinematically robust enough to be worthy to have a movie made about them are already movie-like enough - What would the point of a Metal Gear Solid movie? If you made it different from the game, it would be destroyed by fans, and the game is movie-like enough that a faithful movie would be very similar to the game.
I really was hoping the Hitman movie would buck the trend. That is a very interesting premise that had no story, so it seemed to lend itself to a movie well. It's easy to be faithful to a game that doesn't rely on story so much, but one where your interest is tied in with the character and his/her actions.
Mortal Kombat wasn't half bad. Resident Evil series was actually enjoyable if taken as seperate from the games. No, the one thing that always angers me about Mr. Anderson is Wing Commander. GOD that was aweful. I mean really REALLY aweful.
[video.google.com]
I dunno this was pretty AWESOME!
Convergence is doomed to fail
As for Anderson as filmmaker I wouldn't put him in the same Circle of Hell as Uwe Boll. I thought Event Horizon was actually pretty good. Not the greatest haunted house in space kind of movie but it had a very good cast and the story was done well enough that there wasn't much in the movie to really say was truly awful.
I still don't forgive him after that atrocity that was AvP.
I still like the MK movie though. I realized how much RE (the first one sucked) after watching it a 3rd time. I should've stopped while it was ahead. lol
Paul W.S. Anderson says: "Segregation now! Segregation Forever!!!" Little movie children and little video game children cannot play together.
So he thinks straight up page for page adaptations are boring?
Maybe he hasn't seen Sin City or 300. But who knows?
@mekklesack2:
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!
How did this schmuck end up with Milla? Milla and Sienna Guillory are the only reason that the RE movies are bearable and Sienna is only in the second movie.
One could argue that RE: Apocalypse is so horrible that Anderson knew he'd need twice the hotness factor.
@DEF PD Me neither.
He is a straight up hack. He has been bringing mediocrity to the big screen for far too long. Thankfully he has nothing to do with AVPR. I'm hoping this will get the series back on track.
Just to be clear, I've seen most of his movies. Some are bad, most are entertaining, but none are good.
Y'know what's wrong with video game movies for the most part? They're adapting the wrong games. Nobody likes to hear it, but it's true: A LOT of games, even good ones, are basically unlicensed ripoffs of stuff that was already a popular movie, TV show, whatever. At the end of the day, "Resident Evil," for example, is just an interactive knockoff of the Romero zombie cycle - so when you make it into a non-interactive movie you end with a 2nd generation Romero xerox. Ditto Hitman, ditto GTA, ditto Tomb Raider, and so on. There's good material out there if someone were to take a serious pass at Mario, Zelda, God of War, Metroid, maybe even Sonic, Kirby... hell, you could do a live-action Pokemon and make it work if you ever felt like being elected Dictator For Life of Akihabara.
Give Anderson credit (and for a change not JUST for marrying Milla Jovovich) though, he's a pretty good genre director when he puts his mind to it (if nothing else, he's a thousand times the talent Michael Bay is) having done both "Event Horizon" and "Alien vs. Predator." And the plot-"pitch" that got out for the "Castlevania" flick he's producing (not directing) is all kinds of win: Simon Belmont, magic vampire-killing whip, Dracula, castle called Castlevania, assorted monsters, even mentions Death as a character. Damn good start right there.
Sad SOB screwed up AVP royally. That movie would have been better if it had been a straight up movie version of the game.
The guy makes garbage movies, through and through. Asking him his opinion about film or games is like asking the CEO of McDonald's about fine dining.
The first RE movie I thought was tolerable, but was still a piece of garbage. RE 2 was another story....one of the worst movies I have ever seen hand to hand with the nemesis come on people. Every time Alice moved anything you heard a whooshing noise. In my opinion I think Anderson is a notch above Boll.
@moviebob Event Horizon and AvP were very bad. Watch them again if you don't believe me, but pay attention this time.
Bay is very good at action sequences, but that's it. He shouldn't try to direct.
Anyway, my point is that I actually agree that movies based on games should only tell a story in that games setting. Use the characters, but make the story unique. Otherwise, what's the point?
@SamuelRPGstory: the super mario bros. movie seemed to follow the game's plot well enough.
This guy can't direct movies, glad he's going to stay away from video games.
too bad he sounds so normal and nice. Because his Key Performance Indicators are in the toilet.
It's staggeringly naive of some of you guys to go "well the game had a great story so the movie shouldn't touch it". Games often have 20+ hour stories delivered breadcrumb by breadcrumb, and when you compress that down to something resembling a constant narrative that doesn't use stretches of gameplay mechanices as its punctuation, there's basically no way in hell you can avoid making a butchery of the original story.
The Resident Evil movies sucked yes, but not because the games were amazing narratives that blew everyone's mind. As much as i love RE, good luck have fun writing a better script of the games than they did with the shit movies, because the storylines without the gameplay are hilariously bad, uniformly.
You guys are chock full of bile when the sad thing you fail to realize is that this guy is responsible for the only PASSABLE video game flicks out there. I'd say he's the one guy that's even remotely managed to make a video game movie come close to actual entertainment.
I know a lot of people got their panties in a knot over the Halo movie, but i'll go out on a limb and say those people have probably never read a proper book in their lives, and thus lacks the frame of reference to identify the Halo plot as one of the worst of recent times. It's wafer thin stuff filled with clichèed cartoon characters and inconsistencies, and the only, ONLY way Jackson & co couldve made that plot passable at best as a film would be to, you guessed it, butcher the hell out of it.
There is a yawning chasm of difference between the way games tell stories and how movies do it, and it's flat out ignorant to think the transition is going to be made without pains. IMHO the best we can hope for is accurate portrayal of character personalities and visual design; the narrative WILL be cut to bits.
The man picks horrible franchises to base his movies on, and then makes movies which are subpar in every department. Admitted, he's no Uwe Boll, but he's close enough. <