Medal of Honor: John Milius Interview

EA's taking more than just inspiration from classic war movies for its latest in the long-running Medal of Honor series. Writer and director John Milius has been helping EA's team develop plot, characters, and settings for the new installment, European Assault.

Milius has movie and TV credits dating back over 30 years. To name just a few of his accomplishments, he shared an Adapted Screenplay Oscar nomination with Francis Ford Coppola for 1979's epic Apocalypse Now, directed Arnie action classic Conan the Barbarian, and inspired the character of Walter in The Big Lebowski. We spoke to him about his role with the Medal of Honor team.

Games Domain: Can you tell us about how your involvement with Medal of Honor: European Assault came to be?

JM: I was originally brought in on another game that was put on hold. So EA said, "Maybe you'd like to work on this one instead?"

GD: What kind of ideas have you been providing for the Medal of Honor team?

JM: I've been trying to provide a structure for the story - why a character would go to war, and go to these different places. You can see, by going to these different places, the shape of the actual historical events of World War II

We start with a daring raid where we discover certain things. That raid is not very successful, but it works in our story because we discover certain things we're going to need to know more about. It eventually comes back to where we're starting to make some headway in North Africa, where the Germans have been stopped. We go from there to Russia, where the balance is turned, and the biggest battle of the whole war, which is Stalingrad. Then the final gasp -- the Battle of the Bulge. All these things have something in common that we follow, and we go to all these places.

GD: Have you been writing dialogue for the game, or more giving assistance with plot and direction?

JM: More plot and direction, but I write a little dialogue now and then, when they ask me to. They do a lot of the dialogue themselves, but when then need something they think that I can do well, they ask me to do it.

GD: How do you find the narrative structure of video games to work with? You must have less freedom to introduce story elements in the middle of action. How does it compare with screenplay work you've done?

JM: You're right -- you are supposed to be playing a game, running around shooting people and stuff like that. But you can put a lot of those things in there, and much more so than I would have thought at the beginning.

Of course, I don't look at it that way, I'm just a story guy -- that's all I do in the movies, too. I'm primarily interested in story and what it takes to move the story along, and I became a screenwriter and director because that was the way we tell stories in my time. If I had been born earlier, I would have been a novelist. So I approach the whole thing from the point of view of the story.

GD: Do you think that video games will ever be taken as seriously as movies?

JM: Oh yes. Remember there was a time, not very long ago, when movies were not taken very seriously. Video games will lead to something -- and we don't know whether they'll be like video games today, or whether they'll lead to something else entirely. But we'll be able to say, yeah, this began with video games. And it won't be movies that it ends up with; it'll be something of its own.

This idea of an interactive experience is just going to get better and better as you create greater virtual realities. People are going to want to use them in some way. There may be a time, 50 years from now, when people say, "Let's pick out some old 'movies' -- this is what people used to look at, back before they had virtual sex."

GD: Do you think people will look back on games like that one day?

JM: Yeah. They'll say, look, these people thought these movies were so important -- they didn't realize how important the games turned out to be.