Director Johannes Roberts Talks Making Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City

Constantine Films has announced that it is going to reboot Resident Evil, its most popular film franchise after the original series made more than a billion in box office revenues. But where the original series deviated drastically from the source material, new director Johannes Roberts – known for his work on 47 Meters down The Strangers: Night Prey – wants to do right by Capcom’s original games with his new film, Residents Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City. Roberts spoke to us to discuss the experience of bringing those first games to life. 

Game Informer: Your relationship to the Resident Evil series.

Johannes Roberts: It was more like I came in to the franchise as an observer than a participant. It was a massive thing. The first time you saw something cinematic and frightening was this game. As a horror fanatic, I was always a huge one. [a] horror cinema nut. It was hilarious to be surrounded by the same thing as I was. It was something I just watched people do. [laughs]. This would make me crazy. I was terrified by the methods and terror techniques that they were using. 

GI: It’s because those first games were born from technical limitations. However, they are very cinematic. This is your third horror film. Do you think Resident Evil had an influence on the films that you directed?

JR. There have been two things that have kind of run my career in horror. It’s about getting through the doors. I made a movie called Outside the Door. You would ask, “What’s the other side?” and then you’d open the door. Then you’d never know what you’d get. [Resident Evil games] really sort of played heavy on that – and obviously through technical limitations, because everything would have to load into the next beat. This created a sense of suspense. This is the second thing we used in movie. But I have definitely used it a lot anyway. It’s this idea of characters moving off-screen without following along. [laughs]. This is a very strange thing. I obviously went back and played those games when I started rebooting this movie, and it’s such a weird – now we’re in so much of a world where you are the character, and you move through the character and stuff. This strange, frightening, thing that you disappear from the screen is so bizarre.

GIYou can talk about your collaboration with Maxime Alexandre, the cinematographer, in setting up shots that both pay tribute to the games but also allow for the adaptation of the scenes into something that is live-action.

JR: The look and feel of what we did was a lot influenced by the games. John Carpenter was a world I drew heavily from. It’s retro. There are a lot more zoom lenses than usual, and there are a lot more long takes. The film has a very 1970s vibe to it. It’s a movie I could use quite often. The Parallax view, Body Snatchers Invasion, Do not look now, Jewel. Cinematography is my favorite part of filmmaking Jewel. We would use a lot of these cornerstones of ’70s cinema – The Exorcist and stuff – and use that as my language to work within the game franchise.

GI: That’s a fact I know of. Do not look nowWhen talking about the videogame adaptation.

JR: [laughs] Yes, yeah. The movie is almost finished. Now we will be focusing on the color timing. This is a great idea, bringing out vibrant reds like you’d see in Dario Argento films or other similar movies. Do not look nowThis movie has a red theme running through it. This movie is a great example of how I was influenced by 1970s cinema. Because it was a kind of 1970s conspiracy thriller with some of our themes.

GI: I think people often forget the message of eco-terrorism and the abuses of power, particularly in Resident Evil’s first few games. These are strangely political games. They can be hilarious. Did you think of these themes as you were creating it?

JR. We had all very different tastes in film, but there were key elements that drew our attention together. Love of film was the key thing. [the]The heart of this film is the ’70s conspiracist thriller. A few truly great films were made. [around]It is now Chernobyl, the TV series, I remember watching it, and all of us came into the office, and we were just talking about how unbelievably good it was – the storytelling, the themes, the cover-up. It was scary because it seemed so ordinary and yet the horror of radiation sickness. We would discuss these cover-ups and the many themes Resident Evil is built upon. The movies we would discuss were: Dark WaterLook at the Mark Ruffalo film and see all the things happening in America like the Flint water crisis, etc.

GIHow was it to adapt some of these locations into a live-action film?

My idea was to approach the source material in the same manner as a novel. This is something that had not been attempted before. That was the real principle that guided me. Although we are writing our own stories, let’s not forget to respect the world, and live within its lore, locations, and world of Resident Evil and other games. So we went to Capcom, and we got blueprints – like architectural blueprints – of the mansion, of the police station. These blueprints are identical to what the game shows. I found it amazing to walk around the sets, going “I’m f—ing here now.” This is the 25th year I’ve played this game. [laughs].” It was amazing. Then, to enjoy creating sequences and performing it for the very first time. [film]Like the legendary turnaround zombie, you first see the zombie. This is a huge moment like nothing else in computer games. Putting that onscreen was just – I remember one of the producers coming up to me and just saying they got shivers down their spine because it’s just so cool to do that.

GIWhich part was the hardest to make this film?

What do you know? The biggest challenge and, I guess most frightened I have ever been when doing this, was the zombie aspect – and I’ve never really realized it until we were doing the siege on the police station. Assault on Precinct 13 was heavily infected and the movie uses it a lot to guide its narrative. There is a big siege on the police station. I suddenly stood there and saw the arrival of the zombies. You realize that your body is laden with the effects of sixty years of zombie films. This is what you need to do. You have to get it right. When people have seen zombies – you know, they found them scary, then they found them not scary again, they’ve become part of comedy. They are everywhere. This made it difficult to write a story that had both a dramatic and grounded theme. I mean, it’s very John Carpenter-influenced, so it has its own world. You had to make it believable in that reality and scare people to fear zombies, and all the other creatures we unleashed. It was frightening. This day was very vivid in my mind. That day, I was struck by the feeling of “Oh my god, if this goes on, it’s going to be a real problem.” I’m going to die.” That was an enormous amount of weight. It was massive. 

Resident Evil: Welcoming to Raccoon cityIt’s in theatres right now