MONSTER HUNTER
Paul WS Anderson is letting the beasts out for Monster Hunter – and he really wants you to see them
Paul WS Anderson aims his unstoppable movie ray at another videogame.
FILMMAKERS HAVE BEEN DOING THEIR BEST TO TURN successful videogames into movies for the best part of three decades. There have been rather more failures than triumphs along the way, but Paul WS Anderson has had more success in the arena than most. Now the Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil director is taking on hit Japanese action saga Monster Hunter.
“I always find it funny when people go, ‘Well, videogames, why are they so hard?’” Anderson tells Red Alert. “I think any kind of adaptation is hard. And to be honest, if you went through and did a similar analysis on movies that are adapted from books, I think you’d probably find that there’s lots of failures there as well, but no one ever talks about that. I think it’s a rocky path whatever kind of adaptation you do.
“With the adaptations of videogames that I’ve done, first and foremost, I’m a fanboy,” he continues. “For 11 years now I’ve kind of been involved with the world of Monster Hunter. I’ve talked to the game creators as much as possible. Everything was run by the creators, and we had a really excellent process, they really had a lot of input. Sometimes they were highly critical, but I thought that was great, because I’d rather have the criticism from them and get it right, than have the criticisms from the fans.”
In the movie version of the game, an elite team of soldiers (led by Milla Jovovich’s Natalie Artemis) are on a search and rescue mission in the desert. Things take a turn for the weird, however, when they find their way through a portal into the New World, where monsters run amok. While little in the real world could prepare Jovovich for facing off against a menagerie of lethal beasts – though all those Resident Evil movies certainly won’t have hurt – she did do her homework on all things military.
“When I was preparing for this, I wanted to interview soldiers,” she recalls. “And so Paul and his producing partner were able to get me into an army base called Fort Irwin, three hours outside of Los Angeles. They do these real-life simulations there of combat-like situations – they’ll have a scenario where a tank is going through a village, and suddenly shots are being fired, someone gets shot in the arm, and you have to follow all the protocols in this high-stress scenario. You have to do all the things that you would do in real life. I got a chance to run some of these training programmes with them.”
In the New World Jovovich and her team encounter the Hunter, a warrior who’s turned taking down monsters into an artform. He’s played by Tony Jaa, a bona fide legend of Thai action cinema who came to the attention of Western audiences with his Ong-bak movies. Even though he’s one of the best screen fighters on this – or any other planet – he still took some tips from the game.
“I played the Monster Hunter game [before the movie],” says Jaa. “I wanted to know what my character can do, how the weapons can be used to kill monsters, and look at the combo fights – a combo is not easy! I could also create things on location, with these big landscapes and big monsters. That was amazing.”
But in a movie called Monster Hunter, you’d feel short-changed if fantastical creatures weren’t high in the mix. As the movie shifts between environments ranging from desert to jungle, Anderson was determined to show off his menagerie of beasts in broad daylight.
“I thought I’d seen enough monster movies where it’s nighttime, it’s raining or it’s misty, and you can’t see anything,” he explains. “I thought, ‘Enough already of hiding the monsters!’ Let’s just see them in the broad daylight. That’s why I spent a year and a half working on the visual effects – if you’re going to have long shots with the creature in broad daylight, the visual effects have to be world-class.”
It’s also Anderson’s love letter to Godzilla and the other iconic creatures spawned by Tokyo’s legendary Toho movie studio. “It was more fun working with Diablos than Godzilla,” says Anderson, referring to a regular member of Monster Hunter’s fantastical ecosystem. “Godzilla is a very recognisable creature – he’s wonderful, I love him, he’s an icon – and one of the producers on this movie is Toho. But one of the things that drew me to this project was that Diablos is such an insane-looking creature that’s original. Everyone knows what King Kong looks like, what Godzilla looks like, what a T-rex looks like. Diablos, for me, he’s on that level, but you’ve never seen him before. I fell in love with the idea of bringing these insane-looking creatures into the world and showing them to everybody in broad daylight, and not hiding their glory.” RE
At time of press Monster Hunter’s cinema release date was TBC.
Everything was run by the game creators… we had a really excellent process, they had a lot of input