There’s been a lot of big news in movies this week, but this just may be my personal favorite.
Variety is reporting that Gore Verbinski will be directing for Universal Studios a movie based on the video game that many called the “Best of 2007” (and that I call one of the best ever made) — BioShock. This makes the production so much bigger than it was because — even with how big the game was — we all know how often games are made into movies, and how often those movies are terrible and done with no-name directors or “that” director that’s been named more than enough recently to even bother with! A lot of times they have decent stars for the cast, but they’re just there for a paycheck and you never see really good performances; hopefully that changes with whoever is cast in this one.
This is Gore Verbinski people! The man did The Ring, The Mexican, The Weatherman, and absolutely most important of all, he did all three of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
Now, everyone loved the first Pirates, half loved the second, and a lot disliked the third — but c’mon, all three of those movies were a blast. I personally believe that any hatred toward the third movie is strictly “sequel-hating” and not actual dislike of the movie… on most accounts anyways. I’m sure there are still plenty of people who just straight-up hate those movies, but they don’t have souls. Love them or loathe them, you have to admit that to take a theme park ride and make THAT is pretty damn impressive, and even better, the visual effects were amazing.
These two things all make me a very, VERY excited little boy for Verbinski being signed on to BioShock. I have everything that can be crossed, crossed in hopes that things continue to go very smoothly; I do not want any of this Halo shit happening where the movie is shelved in four months!
Also involved is John Logan, who’s in talks to the screenplay. Not a name many people know, but if you look at his credits, you see some very impressive titles, like, ohhh, Any Given Sunday, Gladiator, The Last Samurai, The Aviator, and Sweeney Todd.
It keeps getting better and better, too! Below are some very interesting details from an interview Variety’s Ben Fritz did with Verbinski on The Cut Scene.
On the visual effects and if the film will carry over the story from the video game:
“Fans of the game will not be disappointed. Of course, it’s just like anything else that you adapt. If you create a film from a game you have to break some of the game’s rules and do the best job you can, because they’re completely different. We can’t possibly put 30 hours of gameplay into a two hour movie. So we have to make some tough choices. We want to take all the strengths from the property. Of all the games I’ve played, this is the one that I felt has a really strong narrative.”
Will BioShock be as epic as Pirates of the Caribbean?
“I don’t think it’ll be on that scale. Of course, with “Bioshock” there are no locations I can go to. We have to build it. We’ll cleverly use matte paintings and all the technology we have to achieve a great deal of scale without actually building everything.
It’s a much more intimate story than “Pirates.” Although its an adventure, it’s a dramatic adventure. I see it more along the lines of “Blade Runner.”
How much of the game’s disturbing moments and moral choices presented to the players in the form of the Little Sisters will be in the film?
“I think we’ll go right up to the edge with the Little Sisters. I don’t want to soften it to the point where the core audience feels betrayed. At the same time, the gameplay is completely different than it will be for an audience watching.
The movie audience’s imagination is a lot more graphic if you let them imagine it. We’ll have to be really clever with that.”
Will the film be rated R just as the game was M?
“We’re prepared to make it an R-rated movie. I don’t intuitively see it as PG-13. The content and the graphic nature of the story itself is smarter than that. It’s not for young kids.
The utopian references and the way the characters and world are drawn in that delightfully inspired Jules Verne and Ayn Rand style places the film in a more elevated realm. It’s the realm of a graphic novel. It has to have that edge.
There’s sort of that “Manchurian Candidate” psychological element in there as well.”
Will the Big Daddys be CG-created or men in costumes?
“We could go either way. Typically when you get too burdened with animatronics, it slows down filming, especially knowing what we can do these days with computers. That being said, there’s no substitute for an actor reacting. It’s always a delicate balance. We’ll probably end up with a hybrid.”
On the film’s main character …
I think ultimately he has to do with the concept of free will. We will be designing him on that idea. It will be a character who adamantly believes he does have free will.”
Start date …
“I’ll be starting to work on it immediately as soon as we get a script that’s worthy. We’ll then move actively into pre-production. I wouldn’t put a time schedule on it so much as to say I’m jumping in with a full commitment.”
That is some exciting bit of details! My only HUGE wonder is the question about the main character. The dude’s most important line is literally a grunt here and a scream there. They would literally have to create a whole other side to the character with dialogue without touching the authenticity of the quiet half of the character that we know; even the slightest off voice or dialogue could severely dent the character as we like to imagine him, so I certainly feel for who gets the job of dealing with that! Hell, there could be a chunk of fans who see the character one way and another chunk who imagine him being completely different, so finding the one that makes everyone happy is some damn Rubix Cube writing/casting right there. That and budget; I don’t see this being cheap, and again, we all saw what happened to Halo, so that’s a scary place here.
Well, that was an article-turned-novelization, but hopefully some of you are into this like I am. Stay tuned, as I’ll be eating as much of this up as I can get.