Paul W.S. Anderson, Zombie Fanatic

By: SCOTT COLLURA
Date: Thursday, March 21, 2002

With the horror-action picture RESIDENT EVIL raking in $17 million in its opening weekend, both videogame fans and zombie movie fanatics have something to be happy aboutas does writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson, the man responsible for the film. Anderson, who previously made one of the only true videogame adaptation "hits" with 1995's MORTAL KOMBAT, has also proven adept in the past at providing the scares with 1997's underrated sci-fi thriller EVENT HORIZON.

RESIDENT EVIL stars Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez and Eric Mabius as a group of commandos trapped in "The Hive," a huge underground research facility which specializes in top-secret bio-engineering experiments. When a deadly virus contaminates The Hive, Jovovich and crew find themselves up against the staff of the facility... who have mutated into the predatory Undead!

Sound a lot like the videogame on which the film is based? Well it should, since Anderson considers himself a huge fan of RESIDENT EVIL the game.

"I was

very familiar with it," he says, when asked about the game. "The reason why I did the project was because I was a huge fan of the game. I'd kind of played [parts] one, two and three back to back. It took me about two months. For two months it was nothing but RESIDENT EVIL for me. I just played the game and I really loved it and then I kind of emerged from my house unshaven and wild-eyed just going, 'Arghh, movie, must make movie! RESIDENT EVIL, zombies, Arghh!'"

But Anderson's zombie expertise wasn't just limited to the realm of videogames when he took on the RESIDENT EVIL project. He's also a huge fan of zombie movies; in fact, his devotion to the genre dates back, not surprisingly, to his formative years as a kid growing up in England.

"That was the attraction for me," recalls the director. "It was a great videogameit really is a fun, scary videogame, but also the videogame is heavily influenced by movies that I loved when I was growing up. It was choosing not just to adapt a good videogame, but also to reinvent a genre that was huge in the late '70s, early '80s, but really hasn't been done for about 20 years, not properly anyway. When I was a kid growing up in Britain, the Romero movies were called 'video nasties' and the government tried to ban them, and your parents forbade you to watch them, so of course all me and my friends did was just get together and watch them over and over and over again. So I could recite DAWN OF THE DEAD to you, probably backwards."

Interestingly, George Romerowho spawned the modern zombie film with his classic NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD in 1968actually had a hand in the early development of RESIDENT EVIL, though ultimately the writer-director left the project before Anderson ever came onboard. Still, Anderson points out that Romero's influence on the RESIDENT EVIL project was inevitable, even if little remains of his original script in the final film.

"I think

Romero's made three very good zombie movies and you can't ignore the lessons that you can learn from those films," says Anderson. "I did not read his version because I did not know he was involved. The way I became involved in it was I already kind of had a take on it and an idea for a story before we started chasing the rightsI'd kind of done it as I was playing the game. And then we discovered the rights were already taken by a Germany company, Constantin. We discovered they'd already tried to make a deal with several other filmmakers, and they'd gone through this whole process. But I didn't know there were any other existing scripts."

In fact, it wasn't until it came time to finalize the credits on the film that Anderson finally learned what Romero had originally envisioned for RESIDENT EVIL.

"I never read any of George's drafts until there was a Writers Guild arbitration," he says. "Obviously when you have more than one writer work on the project, they read all the scripts and decide who gets credit. So at that point, for legal reasons, I read George's draftand all the other drafts, because there were other directors attached. And they really had nothing to do with each other. George's take was very, very different."

Regarding Constantin Film, the German company which holds the rights to the RESIDENT EVIL movie, although Anderson's Impact Pictures did team with Constantin, that had little to do with the fact that the film was largely shot in and around Berlin.

"It was

purely location driven, the reason we went to Germany," he says, explaining how he came to choose the perfect setting for The Hive. "Because the majority of the movies is set underground, rather than build everything [as] a set, I wanted to try and film in some real locations if possible because I think for horror, the more real it can be the better. Originally we were looking in America for abandoned missile silos and things like that, and we looked in England for World War II underground installations, of which there are a lot. But by far the best underground facility we found was in Berlin. In central Berlin, there's this huge labyrinth of underground [subway] tunnels and stations [that are in the process of being built,] are almost done but not open, that were available for us to shoot in. And because they're not finished they're all bare concrete and steel, which reflected the kind of feeling I wanted for the movie as wellbecause that's very much the production design look of the game."

It always comes back to the game for Anderson, which helps to explain why both gaming aficionados and horror fans alike have taken to the picture so well. And like the game, RESIDENT EVIL the movie is difficult to categorize. Is it a horror film? Action? Sci-fi? Or maybe all of the above? Anderson certainly has his own thoughts on the subject.

"It's action-horror," offers Anderson. "Action-horror, with a streak of comedy in it. I wouldn't say it's sci-fi just because everything we used in the movie we tried to stay with available technology. So everything from the design of the labs, to the look of the test tubes, to the hologramit's all cutting edge technology, but it's all technology that's completely available today. Because, you know, in some ways I think the movie is dealing with the concerns of today."

As faithful as the director was to the original RESIDENT EVIL game, at the same time he did want to draw a line between that and his film. One way he accomplished this division was by making the film a prequel to the games, explaining how the story first got started.

"I wanted

[the film] to fit within the world of RESIDENT EVIL, and also expand upon it," he says. "Having played the first game, it's set in this mansion with the underground facility below it, overrun with undead and creatures. But it's never really explained why. So the prequel was to kind of feed into the first couple of games and give all the backstory, so it would exist within the universe and also expand on it. Which is good for the gamers, but also it gave us an opportunity to start with a fresh set of characters which, if you don't know RESIDENT EVIL from a hole in the head, is an advantage as well. And also, when you're making a horror movie, if we'd gone with a straight adaptation of one of the games you know who the survivors are right at the start and you also know who the bad guy is, who the traitor is."

Anderson illustrates his reasoning here by citing one of the all-time greats of the genre.

"[In that case,] as a gamer, there'd be no suspense at all in the movie," he continues. "It would kind of be [like] in the opening credits of ALIEN you're informed that Sigourney Weaver's going to be the only one who's going to live at the end. You're like, 'Why bother watching the movie?'"

Another possible similarity to the ALIEN franchise is exactly that: a franchise. There has been talk of RESIDENT EVIL sequel films for months now, and the movie itself certainly leaves room for a follow-up. Anderson, however, won't quite commit to a sequel... yet.

"There's been talk of sequels but there's nothing definite been done yet." He says. "For obvious reasons, no one's going to do anything until we see how well [the first movie] doesor not. Hopefully if the first one does work out, the movie franchise could evolve in the same way the videogame franchise has."

If that does happen, will Anderson return to the realm of the Undead?

"Sure," he concludes. "If the first one worksif it ain't broke, don't fix it. You should pretty much have the same kind of team."