August 3, 2002
Interview with Paul Anderson about the RE movie and DVD

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.

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.

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.


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[Thanks to JoBlo.com for the above interview with Paul Anderson]