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After the massive success of the Fallout TV series, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and more, it seems the era of video game adaptations is only getting bigger. Director Paul W.S. Anderson has been at it for decades, adapting the likes of Resident Evil, Mortal Kombat, and Monster Hunter to the big screen, and he can't believe there are filmmakers out there creating adaptations without being fans of the source material.
"I think it's important for me to be a fan," Anderson said on the podcast Post Games, as spotted by PC Gamer. "You know, it always shocks me when directors give interviews and they're doing a video game movie and go, 'well, I never played the game.' Like, that's outrageous! You know, would you adapt War and Peace and say, 'you know, I never read the book: I've got the script, it's fine, I shot that, the book I'm not interested in.'"
Anderson feels "like it's doing a disservice to the people who love the game and have invested many hours and days and months of their time into this world for you to ignore it." In particular, he thinks getting "what's really important" is getting the "aesthetic" right.
"I always make sure the production designers I work with play the game or watch playthroughs of the game, so they know what it looks like, and the director of photography knows how the camera moves," Anderson explained. He added, "All of those things are present in my movies because they're present in the games that I've adapted. I make sure the entire crew are immersed with all of that as well, so if you're a fan of the game you really feel like the DNA of the game is built into the film you're watching. I think that buys you a lot of goodwill."
I'm not a die-hard Mortal Kombat fan, but I've always admired how well Anderson's 1995 film captured the campy tone of the games. The rest of his work, well… the Resident Evil movies I've seen have mostly been dumb fun, but they've got a mixed reputation among series fans in part because of the liberties they take with the source material – quite the opposite of his point here. But hey, I'm at least glad he's trying.
"Respect for the IP" and "understanding what an audience gets out of playing the game" are Anderson's principles for a good adaptation. He specifically cited one of the original Resident Evil's most memorable moments: the jump scare when the undead dogs pop through that hallway window.
"It was scary," Anderson recalled, "and I thought 'I have to make a scary movie because the game is scary' and that's one of the things it delivers to the audience, is those scares. That's why I couldn't do just a straight adaptation, because it wouldn't have scared anybody, because they'd have known exactly when the dog was going to jump through the window and they'd be prepared for the scares. I don't want to rob the audience of that, because that's part of the experience of playing the game that should be ported into the movie version."
I'm not sure you need to play Resident Evil to understand that an adaptation of it should probably be scary, but I guess I admire that he's trying to do right by fans. Even if those efforts are sometimes for the worse, it has at least brought us a few of the best video game movies out there.
