Interview: Alex Slevin – Director of Silent Hill: From the Lost Days
Silent Hill is one of the most authentic gaming franchises around. After being adapted into two crushingly disappointing Hollywood movies, diehard fan Alex Slevin is determined to do justice to the series with his film Silent Hill: From the Lost Days. Check out our interview with him below and be sure to support the film here.
DC: What do you love about Silent Hill?
Alex Slevin: Silent Hill is the most intricate and fascinating portrayal of human solitude and suffering I have ever seen. Thanks to the superb use of the possibilities that video game interactivity offers, Team Silent created a very stylized psychological experiment that plays with emotions and perception like no other. All this is crafted in a unique mythology and a huge amount of artistic references. That makes Silent Hill, in my opinion, a truly unique and personal masterpiece.
DC: This is an adaptation of Silent Hill and Silent Hill 3, right?
AL: Yes, this will be a long feature film (more than two hours) that covers both Silent Hill and Silent Hill 3 plots and characters.
DC: You’ve been working on the film for four years now?
AL: Yes, I started drafting the script back in 2011 and finished a complete version by 2013. Since then I’ve been polishing the details and working on pre-production and design.
DC: Will this do justice to Silent Hill after the two weak movies?
AL: We will do our best to make sure that the spirit of the games is faithfully translated to a movie. Film has its limitations (like video games do), but our work is really close to the source material and we’ll use the weaknesses of the two Hollywood movies [to] our advantage.
DC: Will this have a similar atmosphere to the games?
AL: We have made a great effort to find the proper locations and to build appropriate sets to craft the best atmosphere that our limited budget allows us. Of course we cannot reproduce all the stylized ambiance from the games, but we have focused on creating something that will transmit the same feelings. And matte painting will do the rest.
DC: Where are you shooting? Will the locations be authentic to the games?
AL: We’re shooting in about 30 different locations: a school, hospitals, asylums, theme parks and some really amazing abandoned buildings. We’re trying to reproduce the locations of the games when it’s possible. But because the architecture of most sections in the games is a fictional mixture of American, British and Japanese references, we had to take some licenses about that.
DC: We will see characters and creatures from the games?
AL: Yes, all the characters from the games are in the movie, and many of the monsters too. And we’re trying to use as [little] CGI as possible on them. We want this to be as authentic as possible.
DC: Are you being as ambitious as possible with the film?
AL: Yes, I’m being really ambitious with this. I don’t know another way to make this happen. Luckily I’m surrounded by a team of talented and professional people that helps me stay inside the realistic area. I’m afraid I have too much passion and too little resources.
DC: Any additional info on the runtime?
AL: The script has a total of 148 pages so, as I previously said, this will be a long movie. After all we’re adapting two games into a single film…
DC: Are you disappointed that the latest game in the series, Silent Hills, has been cancelled due to Hideo Kojima separating from Konami?
AL: I got really disappointed about that. I love MGS and think that del Toro is a great filmmaker when it comes to “small” and more intimate projects. I was really looking forward to what could have been the first interesting Silent Hill game in 10 years (also it was rumored that master Junji Ito was involved too). But once again Konami showed us that they cannot appreciate the creation of Team Silent (nor the MGS saga by Kojima). It’s really sad, but that’s how things work when money is the only, or at least the first, thing that comes into play.
Categorized:News
