<i>Resident Evil</i> director charms Hollywood and Games Summit

Given the impression the Beverly Hills Hotel makes, it's easy to see why the organizers of the Hollywood and Games Summit chose it as the location for their one-day event. However, it wasn't so easy to discern why they chose to stage a live, impromptu breakfast presentation of Screen Actors Guild vocal talent. While a retinue of bleary-eyed agents, producers, and developers looked on over their morning coffee, a half-dozen voice actors engaged in a discordant demonstration of their ability to shriek, scream, holler, and make noise as though they had just been gutshot with a 12-gauge.

After the SAG demonstration ended, the event kicked off with an introduction by Jamil Moledina, executive director of the Game Developers Conference. The affable Moledina kept his comments short, joking about "putting a dent in the liquor cabinet of this fine establishment," before turning the event over to Tony Uphoff, publisher of the Hollywood Reporter.

Uphoff was more business oriented, talking up the profitable synergy between games and movies. Then, though, he asked a question that must've been on the minds of the myriad of showbiz insiders present: "Is gaming cutting into box office?"

After a brief, yet poignant, silence, Chris Marlowe, the Reporter's editorial director of digital media, introduced the event's keynote speaker--Paul W.S. Anderson, the director of high-profile game adaptations such as Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil.

Then Anderson, looking much younger than his 41 years, took the stage. Despite being a punching bag of film critics for years, the Briton was confident and charming in person. "As a nerdy young boy growing up in the north of England, I often contemplated the nerdy future ahead of me," he told the crowd, "Playing Dungeons & Dragons, the inevitable sexual frustrations afterward, and then playing more Dungeons & Dragons." The response was thunderous laughter, given that most attendees knew full well that Anderson was once engaged to supermodel Milla Jovovich, star of his Resident Evil films.

Anderson went on to disclose his formative gaming experience. "In the 1980s, I took shelter from a rainstorm in an arcade in London," he said. "There, I saw a dozen boys gathered around what looked like a black monolith out of 2001. That game was Space Invaders. And on that rainy night, I played so long that I had to walk home in the rain because I spent my bus fare playing that game."

Anderson then yielded the stage to a video presentation of the history of films based on games. The first scene was from 1993's Super Mario Bros., starring Bob Hoskins as the titular jumping plumber. Then it was onto the Scott Wolf epic Double Dragon and then the 1994 Jean-Claude Van Damme opus Street Fighter. A clip of Anderson's own 1995 project, Mortal Kombat, was next, followed by its sequel. Next up was Wing Commander (1999), featuring Matthew Lillard in a stark-blond dye job. Then it was time for Angelina Jolie to strut her stuff in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Then came footage from another Anderson project, Resident Evil, followed by the sequel to Tomb Raider: Cradle of Life, directed by former Paul Verhoeven cinematographer Jan De Bont (Speed, The Haunting).

In a nod to another director (in)famous for his game-to-film adaptations, the next segment was from Uwe Boll's House of the Dead. Laughter then ensued, thanks to a hilarious fake ad for Resident Evil: Apocalypse, also directed by Anderson, promoting a skin-rejuvenation cream that has the "side effect" of turning its users into zombies. Then it was Uwe Boll time again, courtesy of an Alone in the Dark snippet which drew several audible hisses. The montage continued with clips of Doom and BloodRayne. Then came clips from Silent Hill and the forthcoming DOA: Dead or Alive, which Anderson is producing.

Though a sequence in which a near-naked DOA actress forcing an attacker to fasten her bra at gunpoint elicited a few groans, Anderson quickly defused any critics with well-timed quip. "Clearly games are not a great resource for romantic comedies," he said. After reminding the audience that Resident Evil is Sony Pictures' second-most profitable franchise after Spider-Man, he used humor again to drive home the point that not all games are meant to be films. "Movies with plumbers seem to be a genre which has passed the world by," he said, taking a jab at Super Mario Bros.

Continuing, Anderson addressed the pitfalls of making films. "If you are going to put Jill Valentine in a movie," referencing the gun-toting heroine played by Sienna Guillory in Resident Evil: Apocalypse, "her tube top better be the same shade of blue as it is in the game." He then went on to warn of the fickle nature of gamers as filmgoers by saying, "Your shock troops on Friday night can turn on you by Saturday afternoon, if you don't do it right."

Anderson then explained the central dilemma of making a game based on a film was predictability, given the fact that a game's story is well known. He then offered the solution he adopted for Resident Evil--throw out the story while retaining the game's iconic elements. "The plot for the [Resident Evil] movie was new, but all the locations, characters, and logos were taken from the game," he said.

Anderson went on to talk about adapting Mortal Kombat, which was, in the early 1990s, as much of a media and government target as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is now. "The game was considered a harbinger of doom dragging America into a video game apocalypse," he said, eliciting yet more chuckles.

Mortal Kombat's violence made it the subject of controversy--and also presented a challenge to Anderson as a commercial filmmaker. "If it was to be a successful movie, it had to be PG-13 or the kids who actually played the game could not come and see it," he said. "Or worse, they would buy a ticket for another movie and sneak in."

Anderson ended up making Mortal Kombat a PG-13 picture and joked how that decision did draw some controversy. He joked, "Were there a few complaints that we didn't rip Liu Kang's heart out then pulped it in front of his eyes? Sure!"

In closing, Anderson laid down the central dilemma of bringing games to the big screen. "If you stray too far from the game, you're doomed. If you stay too close to the game, you're also doomed," he warned. "These [game] fans have invested hundreds of hours in playing these games. If you disappoint them, your film is doomed."