Silent Hill: From Game to Movie

Posted on October 21, 2005

There has been an absolute explosion of feature films made from computer games: Doom is in theaters this weekend starring the Rock, and you can't pick up a magazine without hearing more about the upcoming Halo movie and how huge the budget will be. The Edge magazine talks to screenwriter Roger Avary about adapting the videogame Silent Hill into a movie.

Roger Avary: I'd played the original Silent Hill on the first PlayStation and it was a fantastic game. I remember it being so advanced in its story, atmosphere, in the way the camera and game engine operated and in how playable it was. One of the most important things to me while playing an interactive application like a game is that the interface is as invisible as possible. A good example of an interface vanishing after you play it for a while was Resident Evil - it wasn't like you were telling your brain to press the A button and the L button simultaneously. You were able to fall into it much more quickly. GTA is another game with such an interface, though I've kinda fallen out of step with that because they�ve altered the interface as the game has evolved. I was very comfortable with the original and felt that a lot of the changes were needless.
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Some time afterwards, I was showing the Rules Of Attraction in France and Christophe [Gans] and I went out to dinner. There, he brought up the possibility that he would be doing Silent Hill. Now, authorship in Japan is very tightly maintained and controlled, and the authors of videogames need to be wooed very carefully if you intend to make a movie from their material. So what Christophe did is make a presentation on video, cutting together scenes from Silent Hill and other movies, and he put it all together on his own dollar. Additionally, he did a videotape interview that he then had translated and sent over to Konami and Akira Yamaoka. Yamaoka watched and immediately he said 'Oh my God, this is the guy'.
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I think that as videogames evolve and become more cinematic, there'll be a natural convergence. I think that one of the greatest frustrations between games and cinema is that game designers have been attempting to fall into passive entertainment. You're playing an interactive game and then suddenly you stop and you're sitting there watching a cinematic. It's like 'well hold on a minute, this is a game and I'm not an active participant'. So I actually think that eventually game designers will realise that trying to make movies out of their games is not the key, and that it's instead creating an interactive experience full of consequence that drives the story along without stopping. Movies, by design, are passive entertainment, which is not to say that that's any worse or lesser than gaming.

Note to budding screenwriters: if you aren't already a gamer, you might want to consider taking it up as a hobby. Because gaming is only getting hotter in the future.