Resident Evil director Paul W.S. Anderson says the first movie doesn’t adapt the games because it would ruin everything: ‘Imagine watching Alien if, going into the cinema, someone told you they all die apart from Sigourney Weaver’

Director Paul W. S. Anderson didn’t pioneer the videogame movie adaptation, but in the bad old days he was one of the very few to make decent (and commercially successful) movies out of adapting our blessed medium. I’m not going to say that stuff like Mortal Kombat (1995) or Resident Evil (2002) are high art, and there’s some absolutely honking stuff in his later Resident Evil sequels, but Anderson’s adaptations always felt like they understood the source material, particularly when it comes to cinematography and set design, and even the not-so-great ones are perfectly watchable.

High praise, I know. But this all has to be taken in the context of just how bad videogame movies were in the 90s: Anderson, by contrast, made his name with the unexpectedly entertaining Mortal Kombat, and the Resident Evil series of films he was instrumental in kicking off has collectively grossed well over a billion dollars. The latest episode of Chris Plante’s (excellent) podcast Post Games features a lengthy interview with the director about his path into videogame movies, and a whole lot concerns that 2002 adaptation of Resident Evil.

“I was living in Hollywood,” says Anderson. “I was living in a place called the Colonial House on the ground floor, and in the penthouse suite Tim Burton was living. I would see him in the parking lot, which was just a big thrill for me to see Tim Burton. He was very Tim Burton-esque as well. He was always carrying a large pile of boxes or something. He hadn’t made Alice in Wonderland at that point, but there’s something very Alice in Wonderland about it.

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“So I loved being in Hollywood and I had got my first PS2 machine, it had the vibrating controller back in the day when that was a big thing, and I played Resident Evil 1 and 2 back-to-back. Totally fell in love with the game. And I’m a slow gamer. It took me probably two weeks to play both games, but I was so into it that I just didn’t go out.

“After two weeks, my friends were all very scared and worried about me, because no one had seen me, and I emerged confirming their worst fears as to what had been going on, because I had red eyes, I hadn’t been sleeping, had two weeks’ growth of beard, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, this videogame! I’ve got to turn it into a movie! It’s amazing!'”

Resident Evil may well be Shinji Mikami’s masterpiece, and Resident Evil 2 saw his protege Hideki Kamiya take the reins to barnstorming effect. Both are among the most brilliant games of their era, but what especially attracted Anderson, in terms of adapting them, was that the games themselves had adapted aspects of certain movies and directors already.

“What I loved about Resident Evil, apart from the fact it was a great game, was it was clearly patterned on a series of movies that I had loved growing up,” says Anderson. “It leaned very heavily on the Romero zombie movies. And then in Resident Evil 2, you could see that there was a big influence of John Carpenter there as well. The police station in Resident Evil 2 was very Assault On Precinct 13. And the makers of the games would go on to say, when I met them, yes of course these were big influences on us as well.

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“I thought, ‘Well, this is going to make an easy adaptation!’ Or easier than most, because it’s clear what the influences are, and [they’re] very cinematic. Added to that I loved the zombie genre: Romero, Lucio Fulci, those movies were big in Europe, not so big in America, but very big in Europe when I was a teenager. And I thought, ‘Wow, no one has made a zombie movie for 10 years.’

“That was a big deal. People were obsessed with zombie movies [but] it was a bad time [for the genre]. We had [a new] zombie movie. And sure enough Resident Evil was the one that kind of kick-started everything, because a year after Resident Evil, 28 Days Later came out, and then the flood gates were kind of open, and zombies haven’t stopped being in the zeitgeist since.”

(Image credit: Stevenca)

I’m not sure Resident Evil single-handedly kickstarted the zombie phenomenon back into life, but it was a decent zombie movie at a time when there weren’t many of those around. Don’t get me wrong: some of those Resident Evil films are terrible (Anderson directed the first entry, and then the fourth to sixth). But the original is underrated, and one of its smartest ideas was to act as a prequel to the games rather than re-telling their stories.

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“It was originally titled Resident Evil Ground Zero,” says Anderson, “because the third game had come out: Resident Evil Nemesis, right? And I thought this is kind of cool, it says ‘Resident Evil’ and then there’s the title of that chapter.

“The way I’d always conceived of it is, every time a Resident Evil game came out it wasn’t like Tomb Raider, where your lead was always Lara Croft. The games would have different characters in them. Same universe, but you’d have different characters and sometimes different locations as well. So I thought, well, the film should be like another iteration of the videogame, only this time we’re going to be the prequel, and we’re going to be Ground Zero. It’s going to be the actual outbreak. How did it happen? Because I always found it fascinating.

“The first game you’re in this mansion, it’s very creepy and Gothic, and then underneath it you discover this high-tech laboratory where all these monsters are running around. But there’s never really any explanation of how the monsters kind of started running around. What was the inciting incident that caused all this disaster? And I thought, well, for me as a videogamer, I would love to play that game, so I would love to see that movie.

“That kind of got around some narrative problems for me as well, which is I didn’t want to just do a slavish adaptation of one of the videogames, because this was action horror, and in horror you can’t give away all the secrets. If I did a straight adaptation of the first game, you’d already know if you’re a fan going in Wesker is a traitor. This character is going to die here. This character is going to die there. Imagine watching Alien if, going into the cinema, someone told you they all die apart from Sigourney Weaver. That robs that movie of a lot of its power.”

The movie would end up being shot in Canada for funding reasons, and in one of those weird coincidences Anderson was on the last flight out of New York on 9/11, and that incident was why Resident Evil would have to lose the subtitle.

“I’m going to Toronto to go scout locations, and I was flying through New York, and my flight was the last flight to leave New York airspace before New York airspace was closed down,” recalls Anderson. “9/11 happened while I was in the air. So by the time I landed in Toronto I’d kind of missed it, but the event was obviously on every single screen in the airport as we landed.

“Then the whole shoot that I was scouting unravelled because American airspace was closed, no crew could travel, you know. So we ended up kind of delaying the whole thing for I think about a month. That’s of course when Ground Zero, you know, we had to drop that as an idea, as a title. It just had resonance that wasn’t appropriate anymore.”

(Image credit: Sony/CTMG)

Finally, Anderson pushes back on the idea that it’s weird for these films to have the political themes they do.

“Resident Evil has always traded in political themes,” says Anderson. “And I think if people look at America now, corporate corruption, it has never been more evident. People are really going, ‘Wow, these corporations, it’s just scandalous that they don’t pay any taxes and they manage to just weave around.’ And Japan had gone through that 10 years before America, there was a lot of big scandals, political corruption, corporate corruption, and I felt when I played Resident Evil, that’s what the Umbrella Corporation represented.

“It represented the fear of corporate corruption and the oppression that these corporations in hand with government bring, and the repression of the individual. And obviously zombie movies are at their heart the fear of loss of individuality. If you get bitten, you become one of the masses, you can’t be individual. You’re just one of the lumbering horde that don’t get to think for themselves.

“So I think that those themes that became clearer and came to a culmination in the final chapter, they’ve always been in there in Resident Evil. And I think it’s one of the reasons why the movies, above and beyond being great action, horror, entertainment and zombie films, I think it’s why they struck a chord. I think they had a sophistication to them underneath the surface.”

That may be going slightly further than I would, but I suppose you’ve got to allow the guy who actually made the films to puff them up a little. And I do think Anderson’s work gets an unfair rap some of the time: it’s not all grade-A gold, far from it, but Event Horizon is a classic and I still don’t understand how he made a good film out of Monster Hunter. On the subject of critical perception, Anderson has a winning through-line.

“You know, I admired John Carpenter growing up: Halloween, The Fog, Assault On Precinct 13, Escape from New York, these were landmark movies for me,” says Anderson. “Carpenter, who wrote and directed like I do, he very famously said, ‘In America I’m a bum, but in France I’m an auteur.’ And I do think [Europe] had an appreciation of him in a way.

“[There are] a lot of directors who were maybe marginalized or under-appreciated in the studio system because they were just churning out these movies, but they were John Ford, you know. I’m not saying that I’m John Ford, but the auteurs were working in Hollywood as well. And it doesn’t have to be in a kind of snobby art movie: you can operate in other genres.”

The full podcast episode has much more about Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil, and Paul W.S. Anderson’s thoughts on all sorts of things. It is a great listen.