The Hollywood Byte #4: Scott Faye Talks Max Payne and Alice

Hollywood producer Scott Faye (Venom) has been nurturing his two announced video game projects for a long time at Collision Entertainment. Come this May's E3, Max Payne will have been in development for eight years. Alice, based on American McGee's Alice, has been in the Hollywood pipeline for six years and counting. Both movies are in active development and Faye is confident that they'll hit the big screen.

Alice, which has Marcus Nispel (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) attached as a director and Sarah Michelle Gellar (The Grudge) signed on as the lead heroine, has a completed script by Eric and Jon Hoeber (Montana). Universal Pictures will release the film, which could begin filming as early as this summer. Faye said the film should have a budget in the $40 million to $50 million range, which he said is a "big studio picture, but not a grande studio picture." If all goes well, the film is expected to hit the big screen in 2007.

Faye said that in Hollywood marketing terminology, Alice is a multi-quadrant film, which means it can theoretically open in any quarter of the year. He added that Nispel, who has a very clear visual idea of what Alice will be on screen, wanted to do the film for a price. This decision wasn't based on the financial upside of making a movie for a more modest budget, but because the director likes to challenge himself creatively and because he believes he can do great things without a bloated budget.

"The script that we have now blends the spirit of the original work by Lewis Carroll with American McGee's unique vision of the mythology to create a story that is very compelling," said Faye. "What makes this different from other situations is that we have our Alice and we have a director that has a very visceral sense of how this game world should look on the big screen."

20th Century Fox will bankroll the Max Payne movie, which will be produced by Faye and Julie Yorn of Firm Films (The Exorcism of Emily Rose). Faye said a well-known screenwriter was just hired to turn the hit game from Remedy Entertainment into a film. (I'm not allowed to divulge who it is yet.) Faye said the movie, which would likely be filmed in the winter to replicate the setting of the game, could be filmed at early as late 2006 or early 2007. But at this point in time, he's not in a rush to get Max Payne to the screen.

The first step is to get a good script written (Faye expects a draft by May), and then take things from there. Faye said the budget for the film could be anywhere from $10 million to $100 million, depending on the vision, but he believes the budget will be somewhere in the middle range. Having come up through Hollywood on the low-budget studio side at Full Moon Productions, Faye is not a fan of trying to blow people away with expensive special effects and big budgets.