In the fatal crash last year with Avary at the wheel, a hundred mph drunken driving crash left Avary's friend Andreas Zini dead and his wife in critical condition. Zini had recently wed and was visiting from Italy. His wife, Maria, was in another car.

Avary has settled with Zini's family in a civil suit for $4.1 million.

"It has profoundly altered me to the very core of my being," Avary said in the Ventura County Court.

Earlier this month, Avary signed on to write upcoming film Silent Hill 2.

Pulp Fiction screenwriter jailed for fatal crash [Reuters]

The Hollywood Reporter reports that filming will begin next year after Hadida and his studio Davis Films finishes Resident Evil: Afterlife with Milla Jovovich.

Earlier this Spring, actor Radha Mitchell — who starred in the first film — stated that the first film's director Christophe Gans most likely wasn't attached to the sequel. "A shame because he's a nutter but he's so passionate about the game," says Mitchell. "I think he should do it if they do it again."

Samuel Hadida has produced the Resident Evil films as well as True Romance. Avary, who won an Oscar with Quentin Tarantino for the Pulp Fiction screenplay, is also working on the film version of Return to Castle Wolfenstein for Hadida's production company.

In January 2008, Avary was involved in a car accident which saw his wife hospitalized and his friend, 34-year-old Andreas Zini, killed. The director entered his plea in a Ventura, California court in late August. He will be sentenced on September 29 and is currently free on bail. And next year, Silent Hill 2 will begin filming.

Duo make a return to 'Silent Hill' [Hollywood Reporter]

The filmmaker penned the Silent Hill script and was slated to make a big-screen version of Wolfenstein.

In January 2008, Avary was involved in a car accident which saw his wife hospitalised and his friend, 34-year-old Andreas Zini, killed. The director entered his plea in a Ventura, California court this past Tuesday.

He will be sentenced on September 29 and is currently free on bail.

Arts, Briefly - ‘Pulp Fiction' Writer Pleads Guilty in Crash [NYTimes.com]

Avary also penned and directed the movie version of Bret Easton Ellis book The Rules of Attraction. According to an interview with his pal Ellis, Avary is doing Silent Hill 2. Here's the exchange regarding Avary and Easton's novel Glamorama:

Q. Is he [Avary] still attached to direct Glamorama?

Ellis: He's going to be shooting Silent Hill 2. As far as Glamorama, it's just very hard to get the money to make it.

This is hardly official confirmation — though, Ellis did he and Avary had dinner together recently, so it could just be unannounced.

The monkey wrench in this Avary-is-doing-Silent-Hill-2 chatter: The filmmaker was charged with vehicular manslaughter last December, and if convicted, he faces 11 years in prison. That is, if Avary wasn't in the movie business and this wasn't California.

Bret East Ellis [The Cult via Bloody Disgusting via Dtoid via GoNintendo]

Long before Hollywood screenwriter (Pulp Fiction, Silent Hill) and director (Rules of Attraction) Roger Avary was writing movies, he was writing code. Avary, who co-wrote Robert Zemeckis' 3D computer-generated Beowulf with Neil Gaiman, never published a game, but he shared many with his friends.

"When I was a kid, Star Raiders on the Atari 800 was the be-all, end-all game," said Avary. "It was Star Trek and Star Wars rolled into one. You had a map and you could refuel at star bases and defend them. I'll never forget what it was like to warp from one location to another and try to keep centered or else I'd fall off course. I bought an Atari 800 computer because of that game and learned how to program on that computer using 6502 Assembly.

Avary regrets never submitting his biggest game, Shuttle Crash, to the Atari Program Exchange, which published games created by users. The game was an interpretation of Lunar Lander, but gamers had to perform a forced landing while doing as little damage as possible to the ship and keeping the crew alive.

"I was big into Dungeons & Dragons and my friends and I did all sorts of character-generation programs on the 800 that would do dice rolling for us," said Avary. "We also had dungeon creators that would generate halls and traps for us so that we could play without a Dungeon Master."

Avary never lost his love of gaming. In fact, he now collects and restores Atari vector machines like Tempest (for sheer balls-out adrenaline this was one of my favorites") and Battlezone ("this game is as fresh and playable today as when it was released").

Although he considers himself a "Wii guy" and has been an ardent Nintendo fan for years ("Nintendo 64 is the best game console ever made"), Ubisoft sent Avary an Xbox 360 and a copy of the Beowulf game for him to test drive.

"Beowulf, like a number of recent film-to-game projects, is interesting because we were able to share a number of assets with Ubisoft right up front, allowing the game and film to release simultaneously," said Avary. "I spent a good part of last night battling sea monsters and learning the control schema."

Avary loves the fact that the development studio explored 30 years of action not covered in the film. As he progresses through the game inspired by the movie he co-wrote, he'll be able to fight new monsters and go on new adventures that weren't in the original poem or 3D film adaptation.

"I'm totally going to take my 9 year-old son to see this movie at IMAX in 3D," said Avary. "He's a big gamer like me. I've been trying to explain the movie to him and I said it's like being inside the biggest and best videogame you've ever seen. I don't see that as a negative. I see that as a natural evolution to the form. What we're seeing is gaming consoles that are vastly becoming the predominant art form on the planet, is merging with cinema. Everybody should be happy about that because it flows in both directions. Games will get more cinematic and movies will get more limitless in what you're able to do. This movie is a beautiful hybrid of all of these disciplines I love."

Avary finds it weird that so many people who have only seen the Quicktime trailer of Beowulf say the movie looks like a videogame cut scene.

"I don't know of any game that looks like this movie," said Avary. "And if Robert Zemeckis was directing cut scenes in games, then maybe that would mean something.

There are plenty of haters out there who love to criticize something. That's like saying this movie is too much like a book or this book is too much like a movie. I see graphic entertainment as graphic entertainment. When you're given sensorial entertainment you just give yourself to it. Everything has its influence. Early movies look like theater with a singlewide shot without sound. The invention of the cut and the close-up was revolutionary. Television has had its impact on cinema, and I don't think it's necessarily been bad. And obviously, videogames are having a massive impact on cinema and vice versa. When I play the game, one of the things I can't help but wonder is how long is it going to be before games look like Beowulf. How long is it before we'll be able to share all of our assets seamlessly."

Avary believes what Zemeckis has done with his performance capture technology, which has been used in The Polar Express, Monster House and now Beowulf, is a magnificent task.

"Robert Zemeckis has collected a number of tools both hardware and software to create a work flow that allows for a film-like production that renders in this format and allows for performance and for story," said Avary. "It's literally like creating a production process. There will come a time where the development of the game will be able to use all of the elements. We were sharing a lot of the film elements with Ubisoft for this game and they ended up creating a lot on their own because they were far-reaching with what they wanted to do with the story. There will come a time where the exact elements and backgrounds that you render for a movie will seamless be able to travel into someone's home on their gaming system and you'll be able to have a nearly identical interactive experience to the passive experience you get in the theater."

While movies will continue to evolve—Beowulf is the largest 3D opening in Hollywood history—they won't go away, according to Avary.

"Sometimes you don't want to be an active participant in a game," said Avary. "Sometimes you just want the story to be told to you and it's a different discipline that people love. It's what works best in a big room and it's why we love to get together around a movie screen and watch a story. Other times you want to become an active participant in the story. It's no better or no worse than being a passive participant. What will be really interesting in the future will be sharing in a much bigger way."

When it comes to performance capture, Avary believes the future of convergence between Hollywood and game creation lies in Zemeckis' pioneering technology.

"I think the next step in Zemeckis' process should be to further strengthen the ties between the developers you're working with and the actual film production," said Avary. "By inviting the developers into the production, they will bring a lot of skills that are out there in the game development community that could really apply themselves to Zemeckis' particular production process. They call it performance capture but I prefer to call it digitally enhanced live action. I think it will benefit us in the future in a great way. We're on the cusp of change and I think it's going to be really good. It's going to deliver a much more cinematic gaming experience and a much more limitless cinema experience."

Avary, who wrote Silent Hill and was once attached to direct the Driver film, will write and direct the big screen version of Return to Castle Wolfenstein for his next project.

I'm doing an adaptation of the game Return to Castle Wolfenstein. I just love the World War II guys-on-a-mission movies; to me, 'Castle Wolfenstein' is all of that, plus monsters and horror and all that craziness jammed together. It's my dream film.

I mean, what's not to love? It's a WWII "guys on a mission" movie, which means you're going to be blowing shit up, storming bunkers, busting dams, derailing trains, and killing Nazi's. I love WWII films, but with Wolfenstein we get the creature effects as well, and the guys at id Software have already done all the heavy lifting for me in that department. They went to the imagination well and pulled up buckets of craziness — and as you know, I respond to crazy.

In a recent interview with French site dvdrama, director Christophe Gans stated that Silent Hill 2 will be penned by Roger Avary and fantasy author Neil Gaiman.

Not so says Gaiman. On his personal site, he blogs:

I'm afraid that I don't think I am — I mean, it's the first thing I've ever heard of it, and I'm sure that if they make a sequel Roger would want to write it himself. I am writing Black Hole with Roger (we're one draft in right now), and we already wrote next year's Beowulf. If I get home to find an invitation to write Silent Hill 2 with Roger is waiting for me I'll let you all know, but for right now I think it's a discredited internet rumour.

Discredited internet rumors that apparently start with movie directors or just miscommunication clusterfuck? Love it! Brian Ashcraft

Not Me, Dude [Neil Gaiman, Thanks Dean!]

Starting tomorrow, Silent Hill scares small children and, according to early reviews, pleases gamers. Sneak reviews of the PS2 adapted flick are popping up online, and the consus is: Silent Hill will be good. The reviewers aren't exactly Andrew Sarris, but offer a glimmer of hope. A *cough* fanboy over at Rotten Tomatoes writes that the super gory film "is, bar none, the best video game adaptation yet, and possibly the best horror movie in years." And the appropriately titled Horror Channel gave the movie four and a half Mugs O' Blood. (Five is perfection.) Good news is that this could be the game-adaption we've been waiting for. Bad news is that if it's a hit, Hollywood will start adapting more. Talk about scary.

Full Review [Rotten Tomatoes]
Full Review [Horror Channel] Thanks, asTer0id!

Director and gamer Roger Avary has signed to write and direct the upcoming film adaptation of Driver, the driving-action title from Atari. The Silent Hill scribe says the movie will be produced by Constantin Films and Universal's genre brand Rogue Pictures. No word on when filming will commence. Avary's had bad luck with films falling through. He's worked on a number of promising projects that have panned out, never coming to fruition. Sincerely hope this ain't one of them.

Full Story Here [Firing Squad]

In a recent interview, Silent Hill scribe Roger Avary gushes, we mean gushes about gaming. He says,

I've long been a Silent Hill fan — since the PS1 days. I've been gaming since the 70's, when I built my first computer, a Rockwell KIM-1. My first program was a modification of Wumpus, which I had seen on mainframes at Hughes Aircraft. It was machine coded with a hex keypad, and an LED readout. No storage, when you turned it off your program vanished. Before this time I was privy to be one of the first people to play the original Pong at the Dutch Goose in Menlo Park, which had begun my love affair with videogames. Nolan Bushnell, the inventor of Pong, has long been one of my heroes...right up there alongside Kubrick. It was my love affair with the Atari 800 that nearly diverted me from my future as a film maker. But the fact of the matter is that there's less math in film, and I'm kind of a people person...so I followed cinema. Little did I know that the two worlds would converge for me. I love movies, but I also love videogames. I collect and restore vintage Atari XY monitor games like Lunar Lander and Battlezone — only vector, only Atari. I also have a massive collection of Atari computers. Gaming is in my blood — so it's only natural for me to adapt games into films and vice versa.

...and...

I hope the fans love it. I have been a little concerned with the build up. I mean, some people make it seem like the future of game to film adaptations rests on the success of Silent Hill. When there's so much expectation to nail something that so many hold beloved — well, you can imagine the anxiety. I'd like the movie to be judged by the fans as a movie. Cinema is a passive experience, and the interactivity of a game is an entirely different experience, with its own strengths and weaknesses. The gamers need to remember that they give up control in a movie theater, "we control the vertical..."

Holy mackerel! If the film is half good (and the film is not butchered by studio bigwigs), Roger's our boy. Kick Uwe Boll from his throne of clay and tell the gaming gods, we've found a new king. Avary is currently adapting a video game for himself to direct. "It's for Atari," says the writer/director. We're hip just as long as Marc Ecko is not involved.

Full Interview Here [FiringSquad]