Hooray for Hollywood

It's amazing to see the difference between what it was a few years ago and what it is now. Games were always the bastard step-child to the film industry and what's interesting was games were always considered a secondary property. There's been a complete 180 in the past several years with games like Modern Warfare and Grand Theft Auto, and these have shown that these can change perceptions. People have realised that the quality of games has dramatically improved, not just on the visual quality, fidelity and interactivity, but really on the performances, the story and the ability for a viewer to embrace a world that's big and really respect it for what it is. The game industry has really come into its own, not just from a financial stand point with people respecting the amount of dollars a franchise can do, but they look at it as really great story, as really great characters, and an amazing environment that people want to spend time in. These are viable platforms for delivering story and content. And I've seen that from producers, and from the studios in the past year and definitely from the actors.

The amount of content that goes into a game is ridiculous compared to what's in a TV show or a film. If you look at the sheer number of lines for a half hour TV show, that might be 400 lines of dialogue, for a 90 minute feature that might be 1500 lines, or a film like Dark Knight might have 4500 lines. But Modern Warfare 2 had 42,000 lines of dialogue. It's such a massive amount, when you bring in an actor who's used to doing a handful of lines a day, and for the next three hours they're going to be doing 300 lines of dialogue and performed at a very high intensity, that's a challenge for a lot of actors. It's a big learning curve. And the way in which things move quickly in pre-production, production and post-production, I'm hoping some of that is going to rub off into my experiences in working as a film director.

At a studio level everyone is trying to get involved and make that balance work. Film-based franchises in the games industry have not performed very well. They haven't performed well for a number of reasons because of the way they've been put together and rushed. Initially a lot of actors felt threatened because they saw a medium with digital actors, but it's now become anything but that.

The success of the games industry is going to benefit those other movie industries. It's providing more work, it's providing more content. Recently in Hollywood there's been such a push of bringing back franchises and doing remakes of older films – which isn't always such a good idea, why would you want to remake an already classic idea? I understand introducing it to a new generation but sometimes the remakes are fairly recent and the older films still stand up and are very relevant. So I think that finding new content in the games industry is going to absolutely expand into the movie industry and vice-versa. By expanding these franchises out the film industry is going to re-seed stuff into games.

As much as people are threatened by the fear of the unknown, it's going to be a huge benefit to both industries as they grow hand-in-hand. All games secretly want to be films, that's the goal because a lot of developers grew up watching movies. Every game has film references for its characters, its story, it's pacing, direction. That's what all games are looking for – that immersive, cinematic experience. You're seeing art influencing art influencing art.

Well the joke in the games industry is that you never really leave, you change booths each year at E3. You're constantly moving from one project to another and when you develop a skillset in the games industry it is so drastically different than most other industries that it's a very supportive community and there's always work. A lot of the time people don't always move from games into films and the other way around. The pacing is so different in films and those people don't have the patience to go into games. The pacing has been the barrier to entry for people going both ways. You'll only see a small percentage of people moving between the two industries, and that might grow over the next five years, but it's not the case at the moment.

A triple-A console games needs at least two years in development, and that's assuming the team is ready, you have an engine and there's a franchise ready to go. That's why you see so many sequels and you see them doing better and better because the team and technology comes together. Once the graphics and sound and technical sides are taken care of then the pacing and the story come together much faster. Unfortunately, when a film gets green lit there's a tremendous amount of development that goes in before production even starts. A film can be in development for four years before it gets greenlit. But once that's greenlit with a director and crew it can be finished in a very short amount of time compared to a game – 12-14 months.

Even with a huge effects-driven film, if they don't have that foresight to have the team in place well in advance then you can see the problems with both game and film being out of sync. Something is going to have to give. Game developers have to be involved in what makes the film special. The film is a passive experience but in a videogame you are those characters so it's a different experience, so if you want to explore those characters as a player then there's really no surprises if you've already seen the film. And you're also comparing the game to the film, which either had a larger budget or more time to develop out that story. From my perspective, the game needs to be started a tremendous amount of time before the start of the film. The stories have to be cohesive and tell their own stories in their respective mediums for the right reasons and allow you to experience it differently.

I've been offered several in the past year or so. It's a challenge. I think it would be fantastic because coming from a game background and loving games and what makes them special, there are a lot of things that come out of the games industry that I would love to see on film. There's been some game-based properties developed into films that have really insulted the games industry because they've assumed to know what gamers like. Whether it's one I work on or one that I was a fan of, my biggest rule would be to not violate the story and the characters by imitating what has already been done in the game.

I think that would be fantastic. I would not hesitate to get involved in that at all. I think that my experience as a director is going to grow over these next few films and if I did have that opportunity to do that I would want to surround myself with a fantastically experienced team to be able to deal with the scope of something that big. It would be a fantastic world to work in and I would not want to do a disservice to that franchise with a new entry into the film directing market.