Paul W.S. Anderson is perhaps the greatest adapter of video games to the movie industry, having filmed the first Mortal Kombat and the four Resident Evil films. With Resident Evil: Afterlife grossing over $278 million worldwide and a fifth film already in the works, Anderson talks about his keys to success.
As a filmmaker, I’m definitely immersed in the world of Resident Evil, so even though we’re choosing to tell slightly different stories and introduce some different characters, the movies are very much immersed in the video game world, described Anderson. You can see it from the way they’re shot to what the production design looks like, to what the costumes look like. This is clearly a franchise made by people who know the intellectual property that it’s based upon very, very well. I think it infuses the whole movie with the feeling of Resident Evil that I think the fans know is authentic.
It always surprises me when sometimes people who direct video game adaptations say that they never played the video game, he added. I’m like, ‘No wonder you didn’t manage to capture what the fans like about the video game.’ It didn’t surprise me when Prince of Persia — I haven’t seen it yet, but people say it’s very disappointing — didn’t do the business they were hoping. The director (Mike Newell) was very vocal about the fact he never played the video game. And for me, that’s like adapting a book without reading the book or adapting a stage play and never seeing the stage play. I think it’s disrespectful to the medium, and it’s disrespectful to the original source material, and ultimately, it doesn’t make the best movie.
Anderson is also in love with 3D filmmaking, saying, We were the first people to slave two Phantom slow motion cameras together for 3D. These cameras allowed us to do uber-slow motion. They were developed by NASA as a scientific tool to detect minute cracks and stress fractures in the heat resistant tiles on the space shuttle. To give you an idea, your average high speed film camera will go up to 120 frames per second. This will shoot 1,000 frames per second, which is unbelievable for rainfall and explosions. We really captured a lot of stuff in 3D that looks truly stunning. The opening of the movie is in Shibuya and it’s all in the rain and it looks so beautiful. And the fight scene between the executioner and Claire Redfield (Ali Later) and Alice (Jovovich) is done in a mix of slow motion and real-time and I think it’s just fantastic.
Source: Crispy Gamer
