aul W.S. Anderson—who wrote, directed and produced the upcoming Resident Evil film—thought he'd left video games behind once he completed the feature-film version of Mortal Kombat. But Anderson was such a fan of the Capcom Resident Evil video game series that he broke his own self-imposed ban on game films to come up with a cinematic treatment of the best-selling series.
British-born Anderson is no stranger to genre films, having helmed Event Horizon and Soldier. But he had a special place in his heart for the undead, having grown up as a fan of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead movies. Resident Evil is the first production of Los Angeles- and London-based Impact Pictures, the company Anderson formed with producer Jeremy Bolt. Anderson is currently preparing to direct Death Race 3000, an update of the 1975 SF car movie Death Race 2000, in a deal with Tom Cruise's production company. Anderson took a moment recently to speak with Science Fiction Weekly about Resident Evil, which opens March 15.
This is the second film you've directed based on a video game series?
Anderson: After Mortal Kombat came out in America—and, you know, it was a big hit here, it was like number one for three weeks—I got offered a ton of video-game, comic-book stuff. And I didn't want to do it, because I felt I didn't want to go back and do the same kind of thing as a director. ...
But I'm a huge fan of video games anyway. I play a lot of video games. And I literally lost like two months of my life playing Resident Evil. I became totally addicted to it. And I played the first three games back to back. And by the time I kind of emerged from my house, completely unshaven and tired-looking after two months, I was like, we've got to make this into a movie. It's just great. So for me, the reason why I did this was passion for the source material, which was the same reason why I did Mortal Kombat as well.
What is it about Resident Evil that you think makes it peculiarly suited for adaptation as a movie?
Anderson: Two things, really. It's a genuinely scary game, which is a real achievement for something that is just a bunch of pixels on a screen. ... It makes you jump. So it had a huge effect on me as I was playing it. I was like a scared bunny for two months. And the other thing that I really liked about it was it's very inspired by movies that I loved when I was growing up. You know, the Romero films? When I was a kid, the zombie genre in Europe was a huge genre of films. They were all over the place. Not just the Romero movies, but also the Lucio Fulci movies. Things like [1979's] Zombie Flesheaters. It was a really valid cinema genre. So I've seen Dawn of the Dead like 50 times. I can literally recite it word for word.
So when I played the game, not only was I very enthusiastic about the game, it also started me thinking, "God, no one has done a proper A-list zombie movie for like 20 years." And it's a really great genre that I think people would really like to see again. So I was excited not only by adapting the video game, but also working in a genre that had really inspired me when I was growing up and I really liked. The whole concept of the undead, the idea that your friends, your family, your loved ones, will come back from the dead, and not only that, but then they're going to try to eat you alive, it's just horrific. So it was exciting thinking that not only would we be adapting Resident Evil, we'd also be putting new life into the undead genre. We'd be reanimating the undead genre [laughs].
Do video games have a stronger storyline now? How does that affect how you adapt them for film?
Anderson: I think things have changed in the intervening six years between [Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil]. With increasingly sophisticated [game] hardware, you've got increasingly sophisticated software. And games become much more character- and narrative-based than they were in the days I was doing Mortal Kombat. But the one thing that remains pretty much the same is that, if you're adapting a very popular game like this, what you have to realize is that there is an incredibly huge and committed fan base, and they know absolutely everything about the world of Resident Evil. Because there are five games, and there's a whole raft of characters, there are backstories.
It's a complicated universe. And as the writer/director, you have to be aware of that universe, because you have to deliver a movie that exists within that universe. If you break the rules of that universe, the fans won't forgive you for it. And I think it's one of the things that we really learned on Mortal Kombat. You have to deliver to the fans, first and foremost. So you have to have respect for the source material. And it always surprises me when I hear ... directors who made video-game movies who've never played the video game, and I think that's a really strange thing. That's kind of like adapting a great book into a movie and never having read the book. Unless you know what people really love about it, how are you going to try to bring that to the screen and reflect that in a movie? And that's where I have an advantage over a lot of filmmakers, in that I'm a really video-game fanboy, you know? You'd be hard pressed to find anyone who knows more about Resident Evil than I do.
You've conceptualized the movie as a prequel to the games?
Anderson: The very first Resident Evil game takes place in a forest, and there's an abandoned Gothic mansion. And beneath the mansion is a top-secret research facility. And both the mansion and the labs underneath it are overrun with the undead and with mutated creatures, because clearly there's been some kind of accident there. What's never explained in that game is how that all happened. So what we've done is we've made the prequel to that game. So our movie takes place one month before the first game and acts as a prequel to the whole series of video games. It's original in one sense in that it features a fresh set of characters. But it totally feeds into the game in that those characters are moving through locations and situations that are very familiar to the game's players. And the movie kind of eventually segues straight into ... [and] actually meets the world of the video games at the end of the movie.
Are there characters who show up in the movie that end up in the game?
Anderson: I don't want to give that away. We tested the movie several times, and I've got to say, the fans really, really like it.
For people who haven't played the game, will it work for them as well?
Anderson: Well, that was the good thing about the audience reaction so far. ... If you know Resident Evil, it really works, because it ties into the world and the universe of game. If you don't know Resident Evil from a hole in the head, it's a really cool action-horror movie with zombies that's kind of reinventing the zombie genre, and that's a very cool thing as well. And I think that's the advantage of having done the prequel. You don't need pre-existing knowledge. It's kind of like a genesis story. Because it's the genesis of the T-virus. ... That's one of the reasons we chose to do the prequel.
How have you made sure that the film resonates with the fans?
Anderson: If you know the game ... you'll recognize pieces of hardware and sets from the game. We rebuilt some of the sets from the game. Like in Resident Evil 2, there's a big train. We built that train. There are story points and references to characters. It really operates within the world of the video game. And like I said, that's a very detailed and complex world, because it's been going for a long time now. ... Although the characters are new, per se, they're very much archetypes from the game. That's an interesting thing about the game. It's not like Tomb Raider, where every time you play a Tomb Raider game, you're always playing Lara Croft. ... In Resident Evil, within the same game, you'll frequently play different characters, and between the games, characters often change. So Resident Evil 2, for example, doesn't have any of the characters from Resident Evil 1 in it, but it's a continuation of the story. So the world of the Resident Evil games is an ever-expanding world, where you meet different characters, new locations. And that's kind of how we planned the movie to be as well. ...
One of the archetypes is the really strong, young female. And although in some of the games, you play different women, they're basically the same character. And that's very much reflected in the movie. This is a really female-driven action film. Both Milla [Jovovich] and Michelle [Rodriguez]'s characters are very strong women.
In the Romero movies, you always have the really strong, black guy who's the really strong guy in the movie. And that's actually reflected in this movie as well. There's an actor in it called Colin Salmon, whom you may recognize from the Bond movies. He plays Q's sidekick. Really great actor. And he's like the strongest male in the movie. You need to be a strong guy to stand up to Milla and Michelle.
The movie also features signature creatures from the games?
Anderson: We kept the signature creatures, absolutely. I talked to a lot of fans before I started on the script and also on the movie. It became obvious that some of the creatures, like the zombie dogs, were like everyone's favorite. You can't make Resident Evil without the zombie dogs. And you can't make Resident Evil without the Licker. So you find like everyone's favorite creatures from the games are in the movie. ... But it also has one special one that we've designed just for the movie. Because the idea is, for the games' players, it's like added value. You see things in the movie that you don't see in the games. You know, you see reflection of the games, but you also see something bigger and better. ...
We have things that people have never really attempted before. The whole scene with the zombie dogs is something that no one's every done before. And we know that, because we used the top dog trainers in America, and ... [when] I told them what I wanted to do with these dogs, they went, "Well, no one's never done before." ... For me, that's one of the best things in the movie, this dog scene. That was really pushing the boundaries. It was working with dogs that had to have a huge amount of makeup applied to them, that then had to be put into a really major action scene. It's not just dogs snarling at somebody, which is what it usually is in action movies. There are dogs leaping through the air, actors leaping to meet them. I'm very proud of it.
How are your zombies different from those in previous genre movies?
Anderson: I wanted the zombies to be real. So the people who did all the prosthetics and the makeup effects and the [computer graphics] effects, we sent them to a lot of morgues to go and look at bodies. And they looked at a lot of medical reference books. And I didn't want a stylized look. I said, look, if the story requires that somebody, for example, has drowned, and then six hours later, that dead body reanimates and gets up off the morgue slab, what does it really look like? ... And that's what we did. And I think that makes the movie even more scary, because, you know, there's no stylized makeup. Sometimes these people looked pretty terrible. But we stuck to the reality of what it would really be. ...
And also one of the advantages we had over the older zombie movies is ... Romero could only use prosthetics. So if he wanted to show a chunk of somebody's face missing, you had to build out from the face, so you ended up with these zombies with really high foreheads or big fat faces, that did look slightly unrealistic. I mean, it worked, but I don't think it would work now. The advantage we have now is that we could have something that's 90 percent makeup effect, but then, if we want a chunk of somebody's face hanging off, you can do that in CG. For example, we have a zombie where the nose is missing, and you see inside the nasal cavity. We can hollow out the head in CG. But the advantage is, really, what you're looking at is 90 percent reality. It's really a person there, it's 90 percent makeup and prosthetics, it's only 10 percent CG, and that's my favorite kind of CG. I tend not to like things that shove the CG in your face, because I think they look unrealistic, and I think with horror, you can't afford that. You should try to be as realistic as possible.
The movie also pays homage to Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland?
Anderson: That's entirely my obsession. I'm in love with those books. You know, Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. It is slightly reflected in the game. I was already writing the screenplay when another game came out, which was Code Veronica, and there's a creature in Code Veronica called the Bandersnatch, which is of course a character from Alice. So it's like the game designers were thinking that. And also, interestingly, there's a game in the works, which is a prequel game as well, so you know, the game designers were thinking along the same lines as we were in terms of a prequel as well. ... But the Alice in Wonderland stuff is mainly my obsession. If you know Alice, there's kind of some cool [stuff]. ... They literally go through a looking-glass to go into this underground world. They go through a hole in the ground. They meet these weird creatures. There's a supercomputer, a character in the movie, called the Red Queen, and there's a lot of decapitations as a result of her. So it's like a [messed]-up Alice in Wonderland. But again, if you don't know Alice in Wonderland from a hole in the head, it doesn't matter. The movie still plays. It's just, you're an Alice fan, there's lots of cool Alice references.
Why did you choose to shoot in Berlin?
Anderson: The whole movie's set in America. We shot in Berlin and Toronto. Purely because of location. The majority of the movie is set underground. And we looked all over the world. Rather than build everything as sets, I wanted to shoot in as many real locations as possible, underground locations. Real locations have a feeling of reality that's difficult to get in sets. And Berlin had by far the best underground spaces. We looked at abandoned missile silos in the desert in America. We looked at places in London. And Berlin, when the Wall came down, and they unified East and West Berlin, they had to rejoin the underground railway systems. Because they had separate systems. ... And also Berlin became a huge building site when it became the capital of Germany again. So basically they expanded the U-bahn [subway] system. And there are all these fantastic underground tunnels and underground train stations. There's like an underground labyrinth beneath Berlin that is 90 percent completed, but hasn't opened yet. And were able to go down and shoot in that labyrinth. And that really added to the feel and the reality of the movie, to be able to really film in these deep, dark underground places. It was great. Fantastic production values. And it also helped the actors, you know, because it was real. We shot for about four months. And the above ground stuff—because [it takes place] in Raccoon City, which is kind of the Middle American city that a lot of the game is set in—we shot in Toronto.
What can you tell us about a sequel?
Anderson: The movie starts a month before the first game and ends just as the second game is beginning. So it kind of dovetails very neatly into the world of the game. And in the first movie, we're dealing with locations and plot points and environments from the game, but with a new set of characters. If we did do a sequel, it would be survivors from the first movie meet survivors from the video game kind of thing. That would be very interesting.
Do you have a script yet?
Anderson: We've got ideas for it.
Can you tell us about your other projects?
Anderson: The main thing I'm developing is a remake of Death Race 2000 at Paramount Pictures, which I'm doing with Cruise/Wagner, Tom Cruise's production company. That's entitled Death Race 3000. Stunning change of title [laughs]. We've just had first script delivered, and it's pretty damn good. ... [by] J.F. Lawton. He wrote Pretty Woman and Under Siege. And he's written a lot of very good car action scripts that haven't been made as well. He's a big car enthusiast, so he was the right man to write the screenplay for us.
[Death Race 3000] is kind of a real riff on the first movie. It's not a straight remake at all. The first movie was an across-America race. This will be an around-the-world race. And it's set further in the future, so the cars are even more futuristic. So you've got cars with rockets, machine guns, force fields; cars that can split apart and re-form, a bit like Transformers. Cars that become invisible. It's got some really cool stuff in it.
It's like a 90-minute pod race from Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace?
Anderson: You know what, it's funny you say that. That's exactly how I describe it. If you imagine how good the Phantom Menace would have been if it was all the pod race, that's what we're making.
Cruise is attached to play Frankenstein. And that's about as far as we've got. We want to get the script right. And the script at the moment is good. It's not completely what I want yet. I think I've made my fair share of movies with weak scripts. I don't want to do it again. I want to be a bit more careful now [laughs].
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