Celebrity Byte

Screenwriter Roger Avary enthusiastically highlights Producer Jack Rapke's facial expression at the L.A.Premiere of Beowulf in Westwood Village, CA. Photo by Lester Cohen.

How did you end up translating Beowulf with Neil Gaiman?

I grew up loving movies like Excalibur and Legend. I found myself stuck in high school English and handed Beowulf and I was like, "What the hell is this?" I read it and I fell in love with it. Beowulf is a monster movie. It's the best of all worlds. It has monsters and dragons and guys with swords. In 1982, I couldn't believe nobody had made it into a film at that time. I filed it away and then spent the next 12 years reading as much as I could about it.

I remember reading Beowulf in my high school Honors English class.

A lot of people had to labor through this in high school English. In fact, one of the reasons I wanted to adapt Beowulf was to make it easier for future generations to grasp the story. Beowulf comes from across the sea and shows up with 40 brave men and they prepare to fight Grendel. They have a party to attract the monster. While most of them have weapons, Beowulf strips off his clothes and fights the demon naked.

Beowulf is a monster movie. It's the best of all worlds. It has monsters and dragons and guys with swords. In 1982, I couldn't believe nobody had made it into a film at that time. I filed it away and then spent the next 12 years reading as much as I could about it.

What did Robert Zemeckis and his performance-capture 3D technology bring to this story?

Robert Zemeckis came to us and he saw in his head how to translate this into the film. To me it was like someone reached into my brain and pulled out the most idealized version of what I could hope for. It's the oldest story in the English language told with the most modern technology available. But all the technology in the world is not going to help you if it gets in the way of the performance. What I observed on the set was that there was no artifice of camera and constantly stopping the performance.

This is a story in which the hero ages over many years.

Aging is one of the age-old problems in movies. I can only think of a handful of movies that have ever done aging right. With this, it was never a concern. The technology really liberated us and Zemeckis to do whatever was in his imagination.

Screenwriter/director Roger Avary and actor James Van Der Beek. Photo by Chris Weeks.

How do you go about adapting a story for the big screen?

In general, I think first and foremost you look at the story. When doing an adaptation of any kind, you have to recognize that the original source material will always be there, be it a book, a video game, a poem, or anything else you adapt. It will always exist but the experience of a movie is so different than the experience of a video game or the experience of a book or, indeed, a poem. I think what you need to recognize is that I'm making something that is specifically a movie and I need to make sure that it works as a movie.

Having adapted Silent Hill for the big screen, how are games different from other adaptations?

I've adapted a lot of things, not just games. I've adapted The Rules of Attraction by Brady Smith. I've adapted people's lives like Salvador Dali. What's fantastic about games is that you have an interactive experience. Because you control the avatar, as a player you take on a proprietary feeling over the experience. You really start to identify with the character you're playing. And behaviorally, you'll act the way you might in a situation like that. I can remember playing Resident Evil when it first came out on PlayStation and it was so different from anything I'd seen at the time because it used the pre-rendered shots and it had a really strong cinematic quality. I remember when I would stop playing that game at night after playing it non-stop all day long, it felt like a very real world that I was leaving behind every day.

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