ROBERTS: ANDERSON MOVIES ‘NOT RESIDENT EVIL’

Fans of the Resident Evil game series will remember what the core games play, look and feel like.  They’ll also recognize that Paul W.S. Anderson took a giant shit on those games and their potential to make great movie adaptations with his increasingly ‘off topic’ hold on the franchise.

Now director Johannes Roberts, helmer of the rebooted movie, appears to show dislike for Anderson’s work as well.  He tells IGN:

… it was its own thing. It wasn’t really Resident Evil as I knew it – the previous movies never captured the game and the feelings I got when playing the game (that’s not a criticism I think it just went in a different direction).

Roberts is of course diplomatic, reminding the interviewer that he’s not criticizing Anderson’s movies.  But all the same, he is keen to go the fanboy route, even building accurate replicas of the old house and cop station;

I wanted to go back to the horror of it all. I wanted scares and atmosphere rather than full-on action. I think fans of the game felt the same – they wanted to see the iconic characters and locations and feel that the movie was more in line with the Resident Evil game world so that’s really why we chose to go in that direction. We worked hand-in-hand with Capcom on this movie… to the point that we actually got blueprints from them on the designs of the Spencer Mansion and Raccoon police station in order to recreate them as perfectly as we could.

In the Full Interview, Roberts says he wants to go back to filming techniques employed in the 1970’s and dispense with CGI where possible, as well as deliberately using camera angles seen in the original ‘tank control’ games.

Of course, we’ve heard stuff like this before.  All directors say such things.  The Brothers Strause for example talked a great game on the IMDb message boards back in the day, when they were filming Alien Vs. Predator: Requiem.  A similar situation, they were out to assuage fans who were upset after Paul W.S. Anderson shat another bed, Alien Vs. Predator.  Turned out, their movie wasn’t much better.

… but at least they nailed the Predator (Wolf).