Gaming: Resident Evil Director Paul W. S. Anderson Says He's Got No Time...

And also finds time to demolish that awful Doom movie.

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Director Paul W. S. Anderson, who helmed the likes of Mortal Kombat (1995), Resident Evil (2002), and Monster Hunter (2021), has just done a new interview on Chris Plante's (excellent) podcast Post Games. It's a lengthy and enjoyable listen, and Anderson speaks at some length about the thought process behind that first Resident Evil movie (which is not only underrated, but kicked off a series of films that have now collectively grossed well over a billion dollars).

One of the interesting aspects of the interview is that Anderson is very clearly a big gamer, something that shines out of the Resident Evil movies in particular, and his love for the source material is obvious. That's not a given: videogame movies are now big business, partly thanks to Anderson, but for example Jason Momoa adopted the bold marketing strategy of telling everyone he didn't game and wouldn't let his kids play Minecraft while promoting The Minecraft Movie.

"I think it's important for me to be a fan," says Anderson. "You know, it always shocks me when directors give interviews and they're doing a videogame 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.'

"I feel 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. So I think for me, it's very important for the people who are doing an adaptation to have a real awareness of what they're adapting. And I would say what's really important as well is the aesthetic of it."

This is one of the aspects of Anderson's movies I've always enjoyed. I'm not saying they're all classics but, if you've played the original Resident Evil games and then watched the movie, there are so many nods and cinematic versions of the games' style and visual language. Turns out Anderson puts everyone through boot camp.

"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," says Anderson. "In a lot of videogames that overhead shot, the top-down look of a room where it's a grid,

Source: PC Gamer