The Arrow
interviews Paul Anderson
If you’ve been
around the “Arrow in the Head” site long enough, you should know that I’m a big fan of Paul Anderson’s
stuff. “Event Horizon” and
“Resident Evil” were a blast and I even mucho enjoyed
“Soldier”! Well, Arrow finally got the chance to spend some time chitchatting with the man behind the thrills and the
spills and got a couple of groovy bits of info in the process. So check it out!
ARROW: I’d like to begin by saying that you must be one of the most underrated
directors on the block.
PAUL: Well…my mother likes me!
ARROW:
PAUL: She thinks I’m excellent, not underrated!
ARROW: Well, I really dig your work and I wanted to put that out there.
PAUL: Thank you very much.
RESIDENT EVIL:
THE MOVIE
ARROW: I’ll start by addressing Resident Evil. While shooting the film, how close did you stay to the script? Were there a lot of re-writes as you went along?
PAUL: We stayed pretty close to the shooting script, but there
were a lot of changes from the first draft to what we shot. I went to Japan and consulted with Capcom about what they thought about the script and they gave me input. I also met with Shinji Mikami who created the game and he also had some input. We changed a few things because of that. Then, when we got particular actors involved, I did some very substantial re-writes for them. Michelle
Rodriguez’s character, for example, was originally a man who died 20 minutes into the movie. Michelle was so up to do the movie that
once I got her onboard, and she’s such a phenomenal talent, I re-wrote the role to make it a lot bigger. I obviously turned the role into a woman as well. So the script changed a lot but the shooting script is pretty much what you see onscreen now.
ARROW: How did you want to approach the CGI once you started shooting?
PAUL: All I ever hear is how people hate CGI, that CGI ruined the
“monster movie” and how everybody is tired of seeing big CG creatures all over movies
because nobody believes them and they don’t look real. But we knew there was going to be some CG creatures in
this film as well. For example, to get The Licker to move the way it should we couldn’t
do it fully with animatronics. What we did was to try shooting the creature and editing it so that the CGI was onscreen for as little as
possible– we took a lot of inspiration from Ridley Scott’s
“Alien”, which is a film that I think is still terrifying today.
One of the reasons is that Ridley shows so little of the creature, the editing is very fast and we just get quick impressions of it rather than 10
big second shots of the creature. I think that’s the power of ALIEN, Ridley was stuck with a really rubbish monster basically, he had a man in a rubber suit that didn’t look very
good, and as a result, he had to hide it and ended up with a movie where the audience had to fill in the gaps, imagining something much more horrific than what he actually had. We were trying to do that it in a way with the CG in this movie, keep the edits fast and use the CG as little as possible, so you didn’t get to dwell on the creature, it was all a blur of claws, fangs and brain.
ARROW:
Were you surprised about the positive fan feedback that Resident Evil got after its release?
PAUL: Not really because I’m a big fan of the Resident Evil games so I set out to do a film that the fans would really like. It was something
that I was really concerned about (the fans) as we were making the movie. We had to make a movie that they would embrace and really like. I was like shitting my pants when we tested the movie for the first time.
ARROW:
PAUL: You know…to see if we actually achieved that. I have a saying that the testing process for movies is actually
worse than the filmmaking process for a filmmaker.
ARROW: How’s that?
PAUL: You work for two years and suddenly it all boils down to 2 hours with 350 people who don’t give a damn about your movie,
whether they like it or not because they haven’t paid to see it. They’ll really let you know what they think of it. If they hate it, they’ll let you know about it. It’s incredibly nerve
racking. Because I felt so much pressure to deliver a movie that fans of Resident Evil liked, it was doubly nerve racking. The screening wound up being one of the best experiences I’ve
ever had. Nobody walked out of the theatre, the audience applauded in the end and we got huge test results. The focus afterwards showed us that 50 percent of people who we’re talking about the movie had played the video game and all of them thought the movie lived up or exceeded the video game. Everyday I was shooting the film I was thinking in my mind:
“Are the fans gonna like this, are the fans gonna respond to this?”
ARROW: Actually…for me, being an Internet movie critic, I was really surprised in the shift in attitude towards the film. Before its release,
fans seemed to be quite negative about it, especially since George Romero didn’t wind up directing it. But after it was released, I saw so much positive fan feedback online about the film. I was really happy that people were able to let shit go and just enjoy the movie.
PAUL: I think that there was a lot of concern from the fans
when we were making the movie, that we would deviate too far from the video game
because we were choosing not to use characters from the game. But as we were making it, I always
thought “wait till people see the movie”, because what we’re making is 100 percent Resident Evil and it captured the spirit of the game. Also, each of the games featured different
characters at times. Like Resident Evil 2 which doesn’t have any characters from Resident Evil
1. When I played Resident Evil 2, my first response wasn’t like to throw my joystick to the ground and say
“Where the fuck is Jill Valentine? I hate this video game!”
ARROW:
PAUL: I thought it was damn cool and I think in a way that is the strength of the world of Resident Evil. It continues to expand and we get to meet new characters. I think that keeps it fresh. In a way, I feel the
TOMB RAIDER game became a little stale because no matter how cool Lara Croft was, just playing her became a little boring. So I felt when we did the movie, it was like making another installment of the video game franchise. It was gonna be within the world of Resident Evil, but we were gonna meet some new characters. But the characters are very much archetypes of the characters in the video game.
ARROW: Definitely.
PAUL: You look at Milla Jovovich, her name and her character isn’t Jill Valentine but she sure as hell looks like and acts like Jill Valentine and that’s true of most characters
in the movie.
RESIDENT
EVIL: SPECIAL EDITION DVD
RESIDENT EVIL: DELUXE DVD
ARROW:
The Resident Evil Special Edition DVD
was released today…
PAUL: I know, I have to go buy myself a copy.
ARROW: How much input did you have in the making of the DVD?
PAUL: A lot. I wanted to really ensure that the DVD for Resident was as fully loaded as we can make it.
ARROW: I heard the commentary was a fun listen, I haven’t heard it yet but how did you feel while doing it?
PAUL: It was a lot of fun. It was a blast! It was
me and Jeremy Bolt who was my co-producer on the movie with Milla and Michelle. Jeremy and I kept trying to say sensible filmmaker comments about the film and
Milla and Michelle just shafted us down, started shouting at each other and talking about each others underwear for an hour and a
half. I just actually listened to it recently and it’s so funny. It’s not your traditional commentary, but for me I would go buy the DVD just to hear it. I think it’s hysterical and really
great. They’re both remarkable girls and to have them talking in a room for an hour and half was just fantastic.
ARROW: I heard that there was some gore cut out of the film to get the R rating, is that true?
PAUL: Not really, we got the R rating the first time we showed Resident Evil to the boards. It was a little on the edge when we got
it, though I think with Event Horizon I got a lot of experience on what the
ratings boards will or will not accept for an R rating, so I kept that in mind while we were shooting the film. Like when the lasers cut up Collins, I knew when he fell apart, I wanted to see the inside of his head, to see what his brain looked like. And incidentally, everything in the laser corridor scene is anatomically correct. If someone was to chop your head off, that’s what the stump of your neck would look like and the inside of Collins’ brain, that’s exactly the color and the consistency of what the inside of your head looks like.
I knew I wanted that but also knew that if we shot it and it would be in crisp focus we would’ve gotten an NC-17 and would’ve had to cut around it. So that’s why we did the focus towards
Milla’s face in the background. You still see the brain and everything but its just slightly soft. That was really to ensure that we got the R
rating rather than having to re-cut and then not see anything. Yes,
there was gore cut out that’s not in the movie…but not a huge amount.
ARROW: Will it ever pop up on another issue of the DVD?
PAUL: Maybe in the future, but I am very happy with the cut of the movie as it is now, so
it’s not something I’d like to go back to.
ARROW: I don’t know if this is official but I heard that there’s a Deluxe Edition DVD of Resident Evil coming out in like 3 months with even more goodies on it. Is that true?
PAUL: I don’t know if it’s going to be in 3 months but I do know they’re will be another Edition. The reason for that is that I pushed so hard during the post-production of the film to generate material for the DVD and got so much stuff that they couldn’t get it all on the disk. First, they couldn’t get it all on one disk logistically and when there’s gonna be the next edition its going to be a 2-disc set. Also, in terms of hitting the deadline to get the DVD out– they couldn’t get all the material ready on time.
Like the DVD that’s out now, the material on it had to be locked 3 months earlier so they could go and press the DVD. So there was a lot of stuff that we did kind of after the deadline that will be in the next edition. But I think what’s in this first DVD is fantastic but I was aware that there was a lot more material to showcase so over the past few months I’ve been working with Sony to kind of get all that in place so they could do the Special Edition later on.
ARROW: What kind of stuff will be on the next edition?
PAUL: Well, one of the things I did fairly recently was another audio commentary with Richard Yuricich
whose our visual effects supervisor. So that will be a completely different audio commentary than the one I did with
Milla and Michelle. Do you know Richard’s work?
ARROW: Not off the top of my head.
PAUL: Well, he’s like a legend of visuals effects, the first movie he ever worked on was 2001, he also did Blade Runner and Close Encounters, amazing landmark sci-fi movies. And this guy never talks to the press and I think the only interview he’s ever done was a short one for the book “The Making of Blade Runner”. He just doesn’t like talking about his work and I finally persuaded him to do a commentary for Resident Evil. So he came in and we did the commentary together but when there wasn’t any visual effect shots on the screen, I
wound up pumping him for info on all the other amazing movies he’s made like Blade Runner and Close Encounters.
I’m just a real fanboy when it comes this stuff so THAT’S gonna be a really fantastic commentary
because it’s not only going to be about Resident Evil, it’s also going to be about this man’s amazing career as well. He knows so many super cool things about Close Encounters, all this shit he’s never told anyone ever before. That commentary was done recently so it’s not on the DVD available now but it will be on the next edition.
ARROW: Anything else on the next DVD Edition we should look forward
to?
PAUL: Yes, we had a behind the scenes guy shooting us on set every day, so there will be a lot more documentary footage on the next edition. There will also be a deleted ending on the
disc. We initially shot another ending that was totally different than the one that’s in the film now.
ARROW: What was the other ending like? I gotta ask!
PAUL: It’s not as good as the one we got at the moment obviously.
ARROW: Yeah, that one kicked my ass!
PAUL: Thanks. The other ending is more in keeping with the ending of the video game, more of a kind of tie-up where the ending we got now is a more open-ended kind of a bleak
70s nihilistic ending. The other ending was also pretty cool and we spent a lot of time shooting it.
Milla was wearing a different costume for it and it’s set seven months after the bulk of the movie is finished. It was kind of like the last frames of T2.
EVENT HORIZON SPECIAL EDITION DVD
ARROW:
Do you have any insight about the Special Edition “Event Horizon” DVD?
PAUL:
Well, I’ve always been disappointed in the past about the number of extras that were on the DVDs of my movies. I mean, Event Horizon is a case in point, it’s a real shame that all that’s available is not on the
DVD. I keep talking to Paramount with the idea of doing a Special Edition for that.
ARROW: So it’s NOT official yet that there’s going to be a SPECIAL EDITION of Event Horizon coming out soon on
DVD?
PAUL: No. They approached me to do a Director’s Commentary on it but I was in the middle of shooting Resident Evil so I was unavailable for it. At that point they said: we’re just gonna wait and talk about doing a Special Edition later down the road. Now that I’m back in LA full time, I’m gonna get in contact with them again and see what we can do. But
it’s not official and I think if it’s gonna happen…it’s a long way off.
ARROW: A lot of Event Horizon fans are really hoping that it happens. I know that for a fact.
PAUL: I hope so too, there’s a lot of great stuff that we cut out of the movie that I would like to see back in and there’s also a lot of cool behind the scenes stuff, like an HBO special on it which I think would be great to stick on the
DVD, I don’t understand why they haven’t done it.
ARROW: Maybe it’s a copyright issue or something like that…
PAUL: Maybe, I also think that when Event Horizon was done, DVD was sort of in its infancy, so I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it. I didn’t understand what the possibilities of DVD were yet. Now I very much do, so I paid lots of attention to it while we were shooting Resident Evil and when we were in post-prod, I wanted a DVD that was fully loaded. I personally buy a lot of DVDs and I’m always disappointed when the extra features
are “you can watch it with French subtitles or watch the trailer”
ARROW: You’re telling me!
PAUL: I think WOW you know…they’re really giving me my
money’s worth here!
ARROW:
ALIENS VS PREDATOR…OH YEAH!
ARROW: Well, I’m moving on to the BIG NEWS, which is Aliens
vs Predator: is it official?
PAUL: Yes.
ARROW: Are you writing the script?
PAUL: I’m just finishing the script for Resident Evil: Nemesis and as soon as that’s done, I’m gonna begin to work on
AVP.
ARROW: So how do you feel about the
project…are you excited?
PAUL: I’ve been waiting to do a movie with Aliens in it since I was at school, since the first Alien movie came out, since I fell in love with Sigourney Weaver and since the Alien scared the hell out of me. I’ve been obsessed with ALIENS for a while, it’s the coolest cinema franchise out there and Predator is the baddest hunter in the
universe, so the idea of combining the two of them is just phenomenal! It will be a stand-alone franchise; it will not be a continuation of the Alien franchise.
ARROW: So we won’t get a Sigourney Weaver or an Arnold Schwarzenegger cameo then?
PAUL: I’m not telling you that!
ARROW:
I had to try.
PAUL: I haven’t even written the script yet!
RESIDENT EVIL: NEMESIS
THE MOVIE
ARROW: So
let’s move on to Resident Evil 2.
PAUL: Electric Boogaloo.
ARROW: You bet Electric Boogaloo! You just finished writing the
screenplay?
PAUL: Yes…
ARROW: Do you have any casting ideas, there was a Mira Sorvino rumor floating around recently.
PAUL: We haven’t approached any cast for it yet, although they’re a couple of people from the first one that we would like to return.
ARROW: Will the sequel be a bit like what ALIENS was to ALIEN? More of everything?
PAUL: Yes, it’s definitely more of a fully loaded action movie. Where the first one was sort of claustrophobic horror, Nemesis will be a lot more expansive. Nemesis will take place in one night in Raccoon City after its been overruled with the undead. You have a group of survivors fighting for their lives and trying to get out of the city.
ARROW: Is
Milla returning? I assumed that she would.
PAUL: We would like her to return, yes. And it will also feature characters from the Resident Evil Nemesis game.
ARROW: Nemesis will be played by Eric Mabius right?
PAUL: Yes, that’s the idea…at the end of the first movie he becomes the Nemesis.
ARROW: So he mutates.
PAUL: Yes, he becomes the main villain of the second feature.
ARROW: Are you aiming for a trilogy with the Resident Evil series?
PAUL: Yes, I would like that. I’ve got the idea for the 3 movies mapped out already, they
were always in the back of my mind. Now that the first movie did the business it did, the trilogy might become a reality.
ARROW: I assume you’ve been a huge
horror/sci-fi fan for a while now?
PAUL: Yes.
ARROW: What’s your favorite horror movie?
PAUL: I think my favorite
horror movie has got to be “The Shining”.
ARROW: Nice…
PAUL: It’s just
“The
Shining”, isn’t it?
ARROW: Yeah, there’s not much more you can
say about that.
PAUL:
ARROW: It’s
Kubrick…it’s the Shining…that’s
it!
PAUL: It’s the Shining.
ARROW: I’m assuming that Kubrick was a huge
inspiration for you in terms of visual style?
PAUL: Yes,
absolutely. He
was a master, I think all through my work, there’s definite
influences of 2001 and The Shining, he was a huge influence on me
absolutely. I mean, how can you watch a Kubrick movie and not be
influenced by him?
ARROW: True. You’re getting bigger into this movie game, getting
larger budgets for you work. Now does this increase in cash flow allow
you more freedom in regards to the studios or are they tightening
their grip on you, since there’s more money involved?
PAUL: Well,
it’s
interesting, the way “Resident Evil” was made, I actually had
more
control over it than other movies I’ve made before. It was a really
good experience for me as a filmmaker. For example, the final
sequence in the movie is very 70s, very bleak. You know the idea
that Mila survives the whole movie and then rather than an uplifting
payoff, what you’ve got is the suggestion that everybody else is
dead. If we’d financed the movie in a more traditional kind of studio route, that ending would have been very difficult to force
through. I don’t think any studio would have allowed us to go with
that. But because of the amount of control I had over Resident and
the way that it was financed, that’s something we didn’t have a problem
with.
RETROSPECTIVE
“SHOPPING”
ARROW: Let’s do a brief retrospective
of
your past movies. You down?
PAUL: Sure.
ARROW: I’ll start with “Shopping” which is a
very little known film that I haven’t seen yet. It starred Jude Law.
Can you tell us a little bit about it?
PAUL: It’s all
based on real life events. When I was growing up in New Castle, my
home town in the North of England, there was a big trend of what was called
ram-raiding, where kids would steal high performance cars like a BMW
or Mercedes and at 3 o’clock in the morning, drive them at high
speed through department store windows causing lots of damage. And
then they’d just steal
something totally meaningless like a T-shirt and wait in the car
inside the department store with the alarms going off until the police
turned up. They’d then proceed to have a high-speed car chase. And it
was all done for kicks!
ARROW: We all need to relax.
PAUL:
Yeah, like
the kids would have boring dead-end existences and this was the
adrenaline rush that they got.
ARROW: Does the film have a wide
distribution over the world?
PAUL: It didn’t get much
of a theatrical release, but it’s available on DVD and video.
ARROW: How did the Jude Law casting come
about?
PAUL: We discovered Jude,
it was the first thing he’d ever been in. It was interesting because
the choice for that role was between him and Ewan McGregor who were
both unknowns at the times. We had a hard time deciding, but we went
with Jude in the end.
ARROW: So looking back…are you proud of that
film?
PAUL: Yes,
very! It did
very well for everybody really. It’s got a terrific supporting cast,
it’s got Jonathan Pryce in it, Sean Bean, Sadie Frost, it’s
where her and Jude met, they fell in love on the set. It also
features one of my regulars: Jason Isaac, it’s the first
movie I’ve ever done with him and he proceeded to be in everything
else I’ve done.
ARROW: I didn’t see him in
“Resident Evil”.
PAUL: He’s in there but
uncredited. He does the narration at the start where he tells you
about the Umbrella Corporation and he appears at the end where Mila
is in the viral tent outside the mansion, she’s being restrained and
he’s the guy saying to take her to the Raccoon city facility and put
Eric Mabius’ character in the Nemesis program. You also briefly see
his face, he’s one of the doctor’s leaning over Mila, examining her
with the bright lights behind him and his clear blue scary eyes. I
didn’t want to make a movie without him, so we just grabbed him for a
day of shooting.
ARROW: Is he going to be in
“Resident Evil: Nemesis”?
PAUL: I actually wrote a
part for him…yes, to expand on that character. We didn’t pay him for
the first movie so I figured I owe him.
“MORTAL KOMBAT”
ARROW: Let’s move on to
“Mortal Kombat”, which was your break in the American market. Would you say
that MK was your school of filmmaking in terms of dealing with special
effects?
PAUL: Yes, very much
so. I
hadn’t dealt with visual effects before.
ARROW: How hard was it to be a director used
to a more classic type of filmmaking, to hop onto a flick with CGI
and other assortments of complex effects?
PAUL: I found it very
exciting. Although I had never done them before, I had actually
grown up watching movies that were very effect heavy. What I
wanted to make with Mortal Kombat was basically a cross between
“Enter the Dragon” and “Jason and the Argonauts” so when I made that
movie I completely immersed myself in visual effects and by the time
I came out of it I knew a hell of a lot about them. Also, since I was
really into them, I spent days working with the animators. You know,
a lot of directors, when they work on a visual effects film, they get
sent a tape of the effects, then they make comments on it and then
they send it back. They never actually go to the visual effects company. Since I was keen on them, I wound up spending days and days
on a one-on-one basis with the animators and the people responsible
for putting these shots together. I now have a huge knowledge on how
visual effects are created and put together. Probably more so than
most directors. Not more than Jim Cameron though, he knows
everything I think. The man knows more than Einstein!
ARROW: We’re you approached to do
the sequel to “Mortal Kombat”?
PAUL: To do the sequel?
ARROW: Yes there is one, it’s very crappy.
PAUL: I know…I’ve seen
it. Immediately after the first one was released, literally on the
Monday morning after our big opening weekend, the studio asked me if
I would be interested in doing the second one. And I wasn’t really
interested. You know for a director, it’s really 2 years worth of
work and they wanted to go straight into doing it again and I just
felt that I’d done it and I wanted to do something different rather
than return to do the same thing again. I had no involvement in the
sequel whatsoever.
ARROW: With the script and production values
they had…GOOD MOVE!
PAUL:
“EVENT HORIZON”
ARROW: Let’s move on to one of my
favorites: “Event Horizon”. The first hour of
this film is classic in my opinion, but it
kind of fell short in its last act. What happened? I heard
rumors of studio interference…how much of that is true?
PAUL: We just never had a
satisfying ending to the movie. Even in the scripts that we had and we
had several different endings, it was always the weakest thing about
the movie. The setup was fantastic but it never had a satisfying
payoff and when I started doing the movie, we said to ourselves,
we’ll fix it and we never fixed it. We tried but we never pulled it
together. It needed something at the end; it needed like a big twist
that would’ve pulled everything together in my opinion. I think the
movie still works and I’m very very proud of it, but I feel script-wise, that was something that was lacking.
ARROW: Were some of the alternative script
endings ever shot?
PAUL: It always ended
roughly the same way, with Fishburne sacrificing himself and the
Event going to the other side. The real changes were what Sam Neill
would stay in the burning containment while the gateway was opening.
ARROW: So if there’s a
“Director’s Cut” that
might come out, what will be added? What was snipped out?
PAUL: The postproduction
on that movie was very compacted. Paramount set a release date on
the movie and we had to hit that release date. I was cutting in
London and I was testing in LA, so every time we had a test, I had to
fly all the way to America and we’d lose lots of time. Me and my
editing team were also exhausted while making the movie due to all
the traveling. I think we cut things out to speed the movie up, but
in retrospect, I wish we hadn’t. There was a lot of very good stuff
before the mission started. There was a whole scene where Sam Neill was briefed before we met the crew of Lewis and Clark that I thought
was a very good scene with amazing visual effects.
Because we’re on
the space station and we see the earth moving behind you and it was
really cool kind of like the 2001 space station scene. But the
studio felt it slowed the film down and they wanted to get on with
the mission, so we took that out. I think it’s kind of a shame because I
always liked those briefing scenes and I think audiences do as well.
We also cut a lot of stuff where Fishburne and his crew are
exploring the Event, again to speed the movie up. In retrospect,
those were the bits in the movie that worked really well and we
could have done with more of them. There was a great bit where Fish
sees this thing floating in zero gravity and you think it’s something
really huge but we’re playing a trick on perspective, and the more
he comes to it, the more you see that it’s a tooth spinning in zero
gravity like a mini-space station.
ARROW: Groovy…
PAUL: And it’s got a bit
of gum stuck to it. It’s somebody’s tooth that’s been ripped out of
the jawbone. It’s really horrific, Fish goes up, grabs it and it
stops spinning. There’s also a really cool conversation between Fish
and Jason Isaac where Jason is describing what he thinks is
happening with the tooth ripped out of somebody’s jaw. It was a
scene that Kevin Andrew Walker
ARROW: Oh yeah?
PAUL: And there was no
payoff to it, which is why the studio wanted it out. They said: ”We
don’t even see whose jaw it came out of”. And I didn’t think that
was the point…it was just a cool and unsettling scene. Andy Walker
is very good at that. I would love to put that back in.
ARROW: And I would love to see it back in.
Any other juicy bits that got cut out?
PAUL: There was also more
of what happened to the other crew that went on the other side. That
orgy of destruction was originally a lot more graphic than what
exists at the moment. We had a lot of morbid and beautiful images
that we took out and that I’d love to put back in.
ARROW: Just the brief moments of those
visions were very effective; I can just imagine the whole thing.
PAUL: There was a lot in
there. For example, we had one where this guy had a big spike shoved
up his ass and it came out his mouth.
ARROW: OUCH!
PAUL: It’s
really horrible and I think we could do with a bit more of that.
ARROW: Well, I definitely second that motion.
BRING IT ON!
PAUL:
“SOLDIER”
ARROW: Let’s move on to
“Soldier”, which got a
lot of flack upon release but is a movie that I really
enjoyed. How close did it wind up being to the picture that it was
initially supposed to be?
PAUL: It’s the script,
word for word. It’s David Webb People’s script. It didn’t deviate from
the script at all. But in terms of making the movie, it was a hugely
difficult film to make for a lot of different reasons. I had
originally planned to shoot the whole movie exterior, it was gonna
be my “Lawrence of Arabia” in outer space. After having done
“Event Horizon”, which was an entirely claustrophobic movie, I wanted to
do an exterior, big epic kind of location picture. And then the
weather in California was so bad; it was that year when they had El Niño and the
studio became scared and said we had to move the
whole picture indoors. So we ended up building a version of
everything that I wanted to build outside, but no matter how big the
stage is, it never captures the proper feel of a big exterior
location, which is what the movie should’ve had.
So visually, it was
compromised because of that. The few exterior shots we did do were a
nightmare because it did wind up raining a lot. We shot in a big
quarry outside of L.A. and at one point we had to leave it because the
rain was coming down so hard that the road was actually collapsing.
So it was logistically a very difficult film to shoot. Also, Kurt
Russell broke his ankle literally in the first weeks of shooting and
we proceeded with the picture. God…Kurt worked so hard on that
picture! I have the utmost admiration for him. Because what your
watching in that movie is an actor who’s making an action movie,
he’s in every scene, he’s performing all of his own stunts and he’s
moving on a broken foot.
ARROW: That must been so painful!
PAUL: Yes, he did have 4
days off, but then we had to start shooting. He was very badly
injured during the whole shoot. And as a filmmaker, that made it
very difficult for me because I come from very physical movies and
there was a limit as to what Kurt could do. He’s like the toughest
actor I’ve ever worked with, the guy would just grit his teeth and
just do it. He’s the toughest and bravest guy I’ve ever met. If I
ever have to go to war, I’d like to be under the command of Kurt
Russell!
ARROW:
PAUL: Actually Kurt
Russell and Fishburne, these are the men I’d want to go to war with…they
are real warriors. Kurt went through so much pain doing that movie
and I think his performance is magnificent as well. He had about 75
words to say in the picture, but the emotion he managed to convey was
just exceptional.
ARROW: I totally agree.
PAUL: We got fucked by
circumstance. I was also not too fond of the marketing campaign
Warner Brothers did. They seemed determined to sell the movie to
teenage boys as if it was a teenage action movie, but it was never that. That’s why it didn’t do much business. The young genre
fan said “I don’t really think I’ll fancy this, I don’t think
it’s
for me” and the audience that it would’ve worked with, the audiences
it tested well with, which were older males and females who responded
to the relationship between Kurt and the child, never went to see the
movie because Warner Bros chose to sell it as a teenage action movie. It fell
between the two stools.
ARROW: In retrospect, how do you feel about
the film?
PAUL: I ‘m very, very
proud of what Kurt achieved, and I think it’s his finest
performance. I’m very happy with what we did with him, but
visually it could’ve been and should’ve been a lot better than it
was. It was circumstance; we got fucked in the ass, you know?
ARROW: Yeah…
PAUL: To go from shooting
a big location picture to shooting the picture on a soundstage is a
huge change that we had to do very quickly and it was detrimental to
the picture, I think. Having said that, I’ve read some really horrific
reviews of the picture that I really didn’t think it deserved and I
think it’s got some kool stuff in it and that the performances are
very strong.
ARROW: I think that the emotional content of
the picture went over a lot of people’s heads. I’ve reviewed the
film and I state that there’s a lot of stuff going on emotionally, especially in terms of Kurt’s character, and I can’t believe that
people didn’t pick up on that.
PAUL: And that’s what the
movie is about. Yes, it’s called “Soldier” but apart from an
action
scene in the beginning and the action at the end, the second act has
no action in it…it’s a relationship picture, it’s about this man
coming to terms with the fact that he’s had no emotions and that’s
what the pic is about. That’s why when we tested the picture, it
tested through the roof with women because they really got the
relationship with the child, they found it touching. It was never
going to work with the same audience that say, Mortal Kombat, worked
with. But yet I think because I directed Mortal Kombat, the studio
said “well, that’s the audience we’re gonna try to sell it
to”.
ARROW: How does that happen? They organize
the test screenings, they see the results and then they decide to
concentrate on a whole different type of target audience. How does
that work?!
PAUL: In studios, there’s
a division that makes the movie and there’s a division that
sells
the movie. And quite often one hand is unaware or disinterested on
what the other hand is doing.
ARROW: Well, that’s a shame and a waste.
PAUL: That’s why when I
made “Resident Evil”, I wanted more control over it because I was very
disappointed in the reception that “Soldier” got and in the way it was sold,
and I thought the next time around, I’m gonna try to have more
control over this. It will either work or it won’t but at least I’ll
know that I have done my best and done justice to a film that I’ve
spent a year and a half making…which I really felt with Soldier
justice wasn’t done.
BAD PRESS AND THE RULES OF GAMES TO MOVIES
ARROW: As a director, I assume you read the reviews once your movies
come out?
PAUL: When I
made “Shopping”, I read every single review. I was so excited that
someone was writing about something I was doing. I would read
everything and anything. That movie was a big lesson for me and it’s
been pretty much the same with every movie I’ve made. For “Shopping”, I got insanely good reviews, people would love the picture
and then I also got reviews that said: “This guy should never direct
another movie ever” or “The movie looks ugly, the actors
can’t act”…we
got reviews saying that Jude Law was too pretty to be an actor…
ARROW: You gotta be shitting me?
PAUL: Can you believe it?
That’s the kind of abuse we got in Britain. It was a big lesson for
me, I kind of went “wow!”, you got two people who saw exactly the same
movie and one thinks it’s the biggest piece of shit in the world and
the other thinks it’s the best movie they’ve seen all year.
From that point on, I read some press, but I don’t really go through
the press I used to because it really winds up being about people’s
opinions and I’ve always perceived myself as a popular filmmaker, I
make movies for audiences…not for critics. For me, it’s more
important what an audience will think than what Ebert will write
about it.
ARROW: Do you sometimes go on the Internet
where you have younger and hipper folks roaming about that are more
in tune with the material you put out than say…Ebert?
PAUL: Certainly when we
were making Resident, we were listening to what the fans would say
about what they thought the movie should be or shouldn’t be. I was
dropping by Resident Evil sites and listening to what people’s
concerns were about the movie, so I did find that very helpful.
ARROW: For my last question, in your opinion
what does a genre film have to deliver to be solid?
PAUL: Solid?
ARROW: Solid, great, awesome, da bomb?
PAUL: What I’m really
passionate about is that if you make a genre movie and base it on a
source material…you really have to be respectful of the source
material. For me, I think it really helps that I’m a fanboy. I love
“Mortal Kombat”, I played it so much at the arcades, I love
“Resident Evil”, and I played all of the games. I think loving Resident Evil
and loving the toys, the games, just being totally immersed in that
world definitely helped me make a better Resident Evil movie. That’s
something that’s very necessary. I think if you’re gonna go into a
universe that’s already in existence, you have to obey the laws of
that universe and be aware on what the rules are. You can’t
contradict them and say “fuck it, it’s just a video game…this is a
movie and I could do whatever I want”, because you can’t.
It’s like
“Alien vs Predators”, you have to be totally aware of every scene of every
moment in every Alien movie, in every Predator movie, in all those
comic books because your opening weekend audience have read all the
comic books and seen all those movies and you can’t afford to make
stupid mistakes where someone can go “get the fuck out of here, cause
I know based on Predator 2…that’s bullshit”. You have to be
respectful of the universe while giving the audience something fresh
as well, something new. If the Resident Evil movie didn’t give you
something above the game, they might as well just stay at home and
play the game. AvsP is gonna give you something above and beyond an Alien movie or
Predator movie, it’s gonna be AvsP PLUS, it’s
gonna be enhanced because it’s gonna stay true to those movies while
giving you something new, something extra.
ARROW: Well, that’s it for me dude, I’d like
to say keep up the great work…
PAUL: I’m trying…
ARROW: And I’m really looking forward to
“Aliens vs Predator”.
PAUL: Yeah, I’m really
excited about it.
ARROW: I can’t wait to see what you do with
it…go nuts!
PAUL: I will.
And that was
that. I’d like to thank Paul for this badass interview, it made my
day. Say what you will about PA, but for me the man is an
inspiration. He’s a fanboy, genre nut and video game freak that MADE
IT! I for one, aim to follow in his footsteps. Keep ’em coming, Paul!