"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."



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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.

"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 ef...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com

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