Hooray for Hollywood
Modern Warfare 2 director Keith Arem discusses the growing influence of games and movie making
As a creative talent Keith Arem has worked on multiple games, most recently as director on Activision's Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, but also on the performance side of game development for Sony, THQ, EA, Ubisoft and more. He also runs his own PCB Production business, as well as graphic novel projects including Ascend and Dead Speed, and has now taken on in his first movie directing role with upcoming feature film Frost Road.
In this exclusive interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Arem talks about the transition from games to film, the differences between working in both mediums, and how the two can influence and inform each other as entertainment sectors continue to evolve and converge.
I've been working with Infinity Ward for the past four or five years. I came on board right after they finished the very first Call of Duty game and I do a lot of projects with Activision – I do a half dozen projects with them every year. I was contracted directly by Infinity Ward to come on board with Call of Duty 2 and it was a fantastic experience, they are one of my favourite teams to work with. They're very well organised and have a very clear vision of what they want to do as a development team. I also worked on Modern Warfare and then Modern Warfare 2. My role is primarily as a performance director, so I work with all the talent, I work with the cast of actors, we engineer all the sessions, I direct all of the actors – both performers and voice actors and all the celebrities. What's really interesting with that franchise is that even though we've had some named talent on the project it was never any kind of intent to use celebrities for marketing or adding brand awareness. What's great about that property is that it stands alone from its performers. We were really fortunate that celebrities approached us to get involved with the project, they'd heard about our studios. Over the past four or five years it's really grown and the team has been phenomenal to work with.
I actually have a few projects that are going to be announced and coming out this year. Most of the stuff I've been working on, including my graphic novels, has been developing original properties in the past couple of years. I have a book called Ascend with Image Comics and some other books, and we've already been doing film deals with those. So it was coincidental that I was working on Modern Warfare 2 when all of the Frost Road stuff happened. So it's been a fantastic year for us.
A lot of the pre-production work is very similar in terms of how the work is done with pre-visualising a lot of the scenes. A lot of the work we do in games is perfect for film development because we're story-boarding and working through all of our scenes and fleshing out these elaborate worlds because we're not looking at 90 minutes of content but 10-20 hours of content. What I really like about the games business is that it's really collaborative and a lot of the different departments can really contribute on a scale that affects the game because you work as a massive unit. It used to be two or three guys working on a game, but now you have up to 100 working over two year periods. Working as a director in the games industry is a little bit different, I wear so many hats. Sometimes I'm writing, sometimes I'm directing motion capture, sometimes I'm overseeing the cinematics or working with the actors.
What's really neat with moving into films is that as a film director, it's a single unified vision of one person, with all the other departments working underneath that person. For me, coming from such a collaborative world it's a good and bad thing. I'm not very egotistical about anything and I love getting input from all the people I work with but at the same time I have a very clear vision of what I'm trying to achieve. I've had a lot of success in working that way because it's not so stubborn a view that I'm not open to looking at other ways to interprete a scene. I tend to focus scene-by-scene as we go through a project and I think both in terms of game and film that's going to be to my benefit as I grow as a director.
I think the worst bad habit is the expectation that things move at the speed at which games move. I'll easily work on 30-40 games a year, very intimately and on an intense basis. But in the film industry it moves so incredibly slow until production. The process is slow and I'm used to the faster pace. I'm adept at seeing and managing a lot of different projects. There's not a lot of people in film who are used to multitasking so much. I have an engineering background so I'm half creative and half technical, I also have a very strong writing background. I'm really excited about bringing all these industries – games, movies, graphic novels – together and changing the way people perceive a franchise so it's not just a film or just a videogame, but a better integration of story and content. So it's not just an ancillary product derivative of what that tent-pole property was, but it actually goes hand-in-hand and can tell backstory or other trans-media elements through the internet, or other mediums that are converging. If you can tell a compelling story in each medium - and what's proper to that medium - as opposed to just regurgitating a story you've already seen in a better format. That's my goal as a director, to fix that world and come up with a new way to look at franchises.