Copied from Fangoria #252, and really not mine at all. The comments at the end are, though.

A Bigger Chill For Silent Hill — By Anthony C. Ferrante

Five years ago, when French director Christophe (Brotherhood of the Wolf) Gans first played Silent Hill on the PlayStation 1 game system, he found the hair rising on his skin and was truly frightened by what he was seeing and feeling. “I remember thinking, after two hours of playing, that there was something amazing there,” says Gans. “Hollywood sends me plenty of vampire scripts and stuff like that. For me, it’s so difficult to find something different in the horror genre, but here it was, and it was a game.”

Gans instantly called his frequent producer Samuel Hadida to see if the rights were available to adapt Silent Hill into a feature film (opening April 21 from Sony’s TriStar Pictures). However, after Hadida had left message after unanswered message with game creator Konami, Gans did what any self-respecting director would do: He begged.

“A friend of mine was working at a TV channel and wanted to interview me about being a gamer, and I told him I would do it, but he would also have to shoot me separately, explaining why I wanted to make Silent Hill into a movie,” recalls Gans. “So he taped me, put Japanese subtitles on it and sent it to Konami. It was basically me facing the camera for 37 minutes, explaining why I wanted to do Silent Hill. They received it and screened it for the whole staff, and they were amazed. At that moment, Brotherhood of the Wolf was released in Japan, and Akira Yamaoka, the creator of the game, said, ‘That guy can do Silent Hill. He’s crazy about it and he’s going to respect what we have done.’ At the time, everyone was chasing the rights—Miramax, Cruise/Wanger, etc.—but we got it because of this interview I sent. If tomorrow I wanted something else, I would do exactly the same thing.”

Once the rights were secured, Gans was still knee-deep in preproduction on his next film, a prehistoric epic called Rahan. But when the financing fell out at the last minute, he was able to jump right into the Silent Hill world. With four games produced, the tricky part was figuring out where to start. He hooked up with his good friends and fellow screenwriter/directors Roger (Pulp Fiction) Avary and Nicolas Boukhrief, and they discussed how to bring the surreal, abstract scenarios of Silent Hill to the big screen.

“Originally, we wanted to adapt the second game, because it’s the most emotional of the four,” Gans recalls. “It’s a beautiful story, and the best Silent Hill of all. But when we started working on it, we realized after a while that it was impossible to tell that story without explaining why the town is the way it is—a sort of Bermuda Triangle where you can enter and not exit. So we went back to the first game.”

Nonetheless, Gans and his writing team didn’t find it any easier to envision the initial Hill as a feature. “It was much more difficult to adapt, because there basically is no story,” the director notes. “The second is interesting because it does have one. When they did Silent Hill 3, it was more of a sequel to the original, and they created a strategy guide in which they had to recount the first game’s story. When I read it, I realized something very obvious: The people who created the first Silent Hill had no clue of what they were doing. They had no idea of what story they were telling and had to build in the logic later. When I told that to Akira Yamaoka, he said, ‘Of course. We wanted to make the most horrific game, but we didn’t realize were were manipulating some mythological elements.’”

That strategy guide soon became the foundation for the Silent Hill movie script, penned by Avary. “It’s very epic, in terms of [adapting it into] a film,” Gans says. “It’s a huge horror adventure. There’s a big story in the background, with many people involved. It’s about a man named Harry Mason looking for his daughter and his wife, and what we learn about what happened in this town years ago is this enormous Romanesque plot. The only equivalent I know of is the novels of Clive Barker. He’s a genius and the only one who works in this kind of horror-adventure genre for me, so we decided Barker would be our reference style in adapting Silent Hill.”

The story the trio settled on focuses on the foggy titular hamlet, which in the movie is located in West Virginia. The lead character of Harry Mason has been turned into female protagonist Rose (Radha Mitchell). She and her husband Christopher (Sean Bean) have adopted a little girl, Sharon (Jodelle Ferland, from Kingdom Hospital and Terry Gilliam’s upcoming Tideland). Who starts to have strange sleepwalking episodes in which she expresses a desire to return to a place called Silent Hill. Christopher feels they should listen to the doctors in treating her disease, but Rose believes it would be more beneficial to bring the girl to the actual place and have her confront her demons.

“When Rose arrives at Silent Hill, this strange, misty place, she loses Sharon,” Gans explains. “She starts to follow a trail of clues and begins to understand that 30 years ago, something happened to another little girl who strangely looks like hers, and that child was horribly tortured. So Rose has to find the truth to save Sharon.”

While many fans have expressed outrage that the game’s protagonist has undergone a sex change for the film, Gans says it was necessary in order to make the story arc work. “When we started putting the story of the first game on paper, all the dialogue and situations with Harry made us realize that he’s not written as a guy, but as a woman,” Gans says. “He doesn’t act like a guy in the game. It’s not so obvious when you play it, because you enjoy that he’s very sensible and sensitive, but when you put that on paper, it doesn’t work. I didn’t want to betray the character or fans of Silent Hill, but in order to keep the same quality, I had to transform the protagonist into a female.”

Surprisingly, the Konami team didn’t resist this alteration, and in fact are planning to modify the original game with a female lead when they rerelease it in the near future. “The had the right to stop me on any detail, but they were very happy with the changes we made,” Gans says. “Of course, playing a game and making a movie are two different things, but I tried to reproduce the experience of gaming in the film. For the first two reels, you get the same type of feeling you have if you’re playing Silent Hill. In many ways, I discovered I was not trying to adapt the game, but to convey what my experience was in playing it. I have been to that town; I know each corner of each street, what happened in the hospital and in the school. I’m not adapting a book; it’s like telling my story of what happened to me when I was in this virtual world of Silent Hill.”

While that tale incorporates its share of monsters, Gans is quick to point out that this isn’t your traditional creature feature. “In most monster movies, you don’t see the monster until the very end,” he says. “One of the interesting things about Silent Hill is that we see the monsters. They’re not trying to hide. They’re coming at us, naked. The real evil in Silent Hill is the human beings, the people who tortured the little girl years ago. The monsters in the movie are like animals in a jungle, and you have to walk among them and escape them. It’s difficult to fight them off. Silent Hill is not an action game; it’s more like a ‘run for your life’ experience, and that’s exactly what we’ve done in the film.”

The emphasis on evasion rather than fighting back is what Gans feels makes the game so terrifying—and, in return, the movie as well. “In Resident Evil, when you’re afraid, you can just shoot a zombie and you’re satisfied because you destroy what you fear,” he notes. “In Silent Hill, you never stop being afraid. It’s a much more uncomfortable concept, because the game is about isolation and loneliness. You’re isolated not only physically, but morally. When you have to beat the shit out of a poor, screaming monster and crush him to the ground, I believe it’s morally very, very uncomfortable, and certainly not heroic.”

While the game adaptations from the Resident Evil films to BloodRayne have spotlighted kick-ass, martial arts-practicing superwomen, Gans wanted to go in a different direction and create a female protagonist who is grounded in reality. “I didn’t want to have a battle woman,” he says. “I’m bored with girls with guns. I like fighting films and I’ve made them, but to me, these types of heroines in film are guys dressed as girls, and it’s boring. I wanted in Silent Hill to have a woman who is vulnerable and sensitive.” He found the perfect balance in Pitch Black’s Mitchell, whom he feels embodies the qualities he was seeking. “I wanted someone who could be a very vulnerable mother; I loved Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby,” says Gans. “And Radha was perfect.”

When it came to Sharon, Gans was initially intimidated when he realized he would have to direct a child actor in not one role, but as three very important characters. “I remember when we were writing the script, I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m putting myself in deep shit,’ because I’ve heard so many bad stories about working with child actors. But Jodelle was the first cast member we hired, and she was amazing. She gives an incredible performance. I told her, ‘You have to play three characters, and one of them is evil,’ and she said, ‘I’ve always wanted to do that.’ That little girl is so special. She knows how to play nasty and she knows how to play pure innocence. She knows every shade between good and evil, and it was super-strange. Working with her was one of the best experiences I’ve had on a set.”

Part of Gans’ feminine approach to Silent Hill involved his view of the environment in which it takes place. “I see it as a uterine world, particularly with the rust and darkness everywhere,” he says. “We are into the womb and belly—that’s my personal interpretation. When I told Akira Yamaoka about this, he said, ‘You are right.’ So I decided that was my position as director and author. I wanted everything about the world of Silent Hill to be feminine, and you’ll see it’s all about motherhood and sisterhood. We’re also dealing with the theme of witches and sorcery. One of the games’ secret ancestors is a beautiful movie named City of the Dead [a.k.a. Horror Hotel], and if you remember it has a strange town in the fog which is populated by witches and sorcerers.”

To carry this “uterine” theme throughout, Gans hired a female production designer, David Cronenberg film veteran Carol Spier, to bring a distaff perspective to enhance his vision. “I’ve admired her work for a long time, and she’s just amazing,” he says. “I invited her to create a strange, Freudian, womblike world, and she had to build 106 sets. Sometimes you will see that we have one track in the film with three different sets connected by invisible, seamless joints.”

According to Gans, there are four Silent Hills on display in the movie, which lensed in Toronto: the real town, the foggy one, the dark one and the Silent Hill of 30 years ago. “We sometimes had to do four different versions of the same place,” he says. “It was demanding. We had 106 sets, and the budget for the production designer was $12 million.”

While the look and feel of the movie were certainly important, recreating the game’s various creatures was also a key factor for Gans, who brought Patrick (Underworld) Tatopoulos aboard to design them. While it would have been easy to go the CGI route, Gans was adamant that the monsters be shot practically (with the exception of the Bugs, the only digital creations in the entire film). “All the monsters were on set,” Gans says with pride. “That was a big thing. There are no CG creatures; they were all shot on set. Of course, we changed some of their actions in post, but it was more about filming them in reverse so they had strange movements and stuff like that. We used a choreographer to create the monsters’ movements, and every one is played by a dancer. That’s an interesting thing you will see—each creature has a different type of behavior.”

The featured fiends derived from the games include Silent Hill 2’s Red Pyramid Head, the Dark Nurses, the Armless Thing (sometimes called the Demon Patient), and Grey Children (a.k.a. the Mumblers) and of course the Boss. Gans also came up with a new beast to add to the existing world. “His name is the Janitor,” he says. “And Akira Yamaoka thanked me for doing that. He is my personal addition to Silent Hill, and he’s a sick thing.”

Continuing the linkage between the game and the movie, Gans felt it was important to retain Yamaoka’s original music as well. “It was impossible for me to change it,” he says. “I know that every fan in the world was afraid of that. I was a fan, and it was just out of the question to hear different music in this film. I hired a guy named Jeff [Resident Evil: Apocalypse] Danna to come in and re-record it in 5.1 sound. It’s gorgeous.”

Despite the film’s $50 million budget, Gans recalls the Silent Hill shoot as a rigorous one. “It was tough,” he says, “as you can imagine when you’re shooting 160 sets in 60 days. It was fucking nuts.” Yet the Frenchman admits he was fortunate in that he and his team were making what amounted to a multimillion dollar independent film, since it was produced under a pickup deal with Sony, which had nothing to do with the picture’s development. “It was really made in compelte freedom by a bunch of crazy filmmakers, some of whom are European,” Gans says. “It’s also two hours and five minutes, which will make it pretty interesting for the fans, because it means we have time to develop the characters. The movie is going to be released as my director’s cut, because TriStar loved it. They didn’t ask me to edit anything.”

That includes the more gruesome moments: “It’s an R-rated movie and it’s fucking violent,” he promises. “There are at least a half-dozen sequences that are abominable, and that’s all I can say. Particularly in the second half; you will see it definitely has a different format than what you would expect from an American horror film. I hope people will enjoy that, and the fact that there is nothing formula in this movie. That’s not because we wanted to do something non-traditional, it’s because Silent Hill is not formulaic. It’s not a monster movie, even though it’s filled with monsters.”

Since Gans is a huge H.P. Lovecraft fan (he made his feature debut with the “Whispers” segment of Necronomicon), he was also attracted to those overtones in Silent Hill. “When we talk about Lovecraft, we talk about the elder gods, Cthulhu and them wanting to come back to Earth,” Gans says. “Lovecraft is also about Puritanism. It’s about a certain face of America, and that’s precisely the common point from my segment of Necronomicon to Silent Hill. It’s about the foundation of America as a religious nation. If you know the game, they talk a lot about the character named Jennifer Carroll, who was a great witch burned at the moment of the foundation of the town. Silent Hill was built by witch hunters and Puritans, which is why we decided to make it a historical ground for the battle between good and evil, like Salem; it’s very representative of the foundation of America as a religious country.”

Although he would love to go back to Rahan as his next film, Gans admits that project is still in limbo due to financing issues with Canal+ in France. He also reveals that he has been approached to adapt another famous game, which he may end up tackling as his follow-up to Silent Hill. “They proposed it to me and it’s difficult for me to refuse,” says Gans, who won’t reveal the specific title but says it’s not a Konami game. “I’m definitely not Uwe Boll. For me, Silent Hill was a great project. It’s more than a game. So this other project I will try to adapt in the same way. It’s a big, big franchise, but I can’t say anything else about it, except that it’s very Japanese.”

And even if his journey exploring Silent Hill is over now, Gans won’t rule out returning for a second visit. “After the first screening we had at TriStar, they were very excited and said, ‘Do you want to do the sequel?’ and without thinking, my answer was yes,” Gans recalls. “I love this world and I was not just a gun for hire. It’s something I wanted to do for so many years. It’s very sentimental for me. You will see—it’s a very melodramatic movie. It’s touching, emotional and yes, if this movie does well, I would feel proud to do a follow-up.”

And now, my comments. I tried to keep them in some sort of order in relation to the article. I suppose they don’t really matter much, but I don’t care. I have shit to say, and this is my website.

1. “It’s about a man named Harry Mason looking for his daughter and his wife” — His wife? Huh?
2. A rerelease of the game could be interesting. I hope they plan on changing more than that one character, though, because some of the dialogue could get funny. Since, y’know, it wasn’t already funny listening to the Amazing Unemotional Harry Mason Man….
3. I don’t get the ‘moral’ part of beating the shit out of a ‘poor’ monster. Maybe I would have to view them as ‘poor’ first. Maybe I don’t get it because I don’t view wild animals as ‘poor’ either.
4. I definitely don’t get the ‘womb’ thing. My uterus isn’t filled with rust, even if it is dark. Viewing the Darkside of Silent Hill as a womb seems awfully harsh on women.
5. I wonder if ‘the Janitor’ is the thing that goes around and cleans up the bodies of all the other videogame monsters.
6. Keeping the music is good.
7. The word ‘fuck’ in the magazines is censored. That’s stupid.
8. Cthulhu is not a god.
9. Nothing quite like planning for a sequel before the movie is even released….
10. …not Konami, very Japanese. I’m having visions of a Live Action Pokemon…which somehow leads to visions of a Monster Rancher movie. Both of these ideas are upsetting. I know that there are other ‘very Japanese Non Konami’ games out there, but…those are the first-worst things I could think of.

You can probably find Issue #252 in the magazine rack of some movie stores [like Suncoast], or you can subscribe through their site. I think there are other subscription options elsewheres [possibly cheaper, too], but I don’t feel like hunting them down right now.