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Skip to main content. Stay informed for a lot less, cancel anytime. In an email interview this week, Boll told me why he decided to stop making movies and pondered his life as gaming's movie-making pariah. I ask Boll whether he would change anything if he had it all to do over again. Would he still make all of those video game movies? When he responds, he seems to be telling me that game movies were not a choice, but rather the only way he could get the funding he needed to do what he loved: Make movies.
Boll landed his first video game adaptation, House of the Dead , after Heart of America — a film Boll calls his "great movie" — flopped, he said. That first gaming title came to Boll as a zombie flick, something he said he's always wanted to do. That it was based on a video game was secondary. Boll, like the people who watched the movie, wasn't happy with the end result.
Stuck in a situation that allowed him the money to create films, but only if he did it based on games, Boll seemed to do his best to embrace the medium. Back in he defended video games, saying that they were, like a book or a comic, a great foundation for a movie. He thought he had more creative control this time around, but still he didn't like how the film turned out.
Speaking with me last week, Boll seems to blame both the movie and the critical response to it, for the vitriol most video game fans seemed to have for him at the time.
That bad movie was followed by others. By the time he got to a movie adaptation of over-the-top shooter Postal , most movie-goers had written him off. I am stunned. Unfortunately games just don't have much writing or intelligence behind them except for Splinter Cell and RPGs.
Most are, in fact, games. As in fun diversions; they don't need a have a message or get an idea across. So you get stuff like Resident Evil 4 or HL2 where the concept is cheesy as hell, but it's okay because fun makes up for so much. Try and get a serious film director attached to that and you see why only Uwe Boll will go for it. The industry for better or for worse is still pretty "silly" as far as scripts go. Were you guys really expecting Bloodrayne to be the next Bladerunner or Lord of the Rings?
I closest thing OTOH is Interview with a Vampire, but it matters that Anne Rice wrote a really deep book and mythology to begin with, whereas Bloodrayne was never going to get deep with its story, regardless of the treatment. I was surprised to see Batman Begins have such good writing and directing attached to it, but then again comic movies have gone through their share of hard knocks.
It had to get good eventually. The tax shelter accounts for a lot. His latest film for instance probably won't make it back even after DVD. The movie practically writes itself. There's not much to ruin. I'm shocked the Japanese creators of Fear Effect and Seed let him get his damn dirty ape hands on those properties, even if they are obscure ones. Companies were using the law in a legal-but-not-correct manner - setting up a German shell company that actually owned the movie but immediately leased it back to the studio, instead of actually having a German company make and own the movie.
Boll actually uses a German company, and retains control of the movie. I guess you could start writing to German lawmakers, pleading that allowing Boll to use this law is tantamount to slandering Germany, but I highly doubt they care. I guess the situation is currently much like where comic book movies were a decade ago - cheap, shoddy, and exploitative of the source material.
It's going to take someone like Sam Raimi to make the video game equivalent of "Spider-Man" for studios to take these properties seriously.
So, , he's going to be able to continue taking advantage of this. From everything I've read, and I've not read the law itself, his tax shelter is closed but only applies to movies he's not already bank rolled. Since he had financing for like six movies prior to the law changing, he can keep releasing garbage for the better part of the next decade.
No, right. House of the Dead sold about 1. It takes them a while, but they do tend to eek out a profit eventually. Anderson to get together and do a movie. I can only imagine what kind of blockbuster could be made with that much talent put behind one movie.
I realize a lot of people liked the first Mortal Kombat and the first Resident Evil but I thought they were terrible. Yeah, but they weren't even in the same category of suck as Bolls movies. Boll was getting desperate, and his funds were drying up. Then the offer came in to direct a film version of House of the Dead —not the Dostoyevsky novel, but the popular Sega zombie-shooter arcade game.
Boll resolved to spend as little money, time, and energy as possible. In a crucial sense, the films were a success. They were so cheaply made that, taking into account the sale of DVDs and international television rights, all three films turned a profit. I have to drive this as long as it goes. I have to put my personal interests aside. Build my reputation, build capital with it, that I can do more passion projects if I have some money. To speak with him, Boll seems to have enjoyed very little about making films.
He complains of the difficult actors, endless C. There were a couple of full-blown disasters too, including a propane explosion on the last day of shooting In the Name of the King: Two Worlds.
Whether or not Boll was actually the worst director alive, he became easily the most reviled. Boll got no credit for hiring more experienced screenwriters or assembling bigger, better casts— Ben Kingsley, Jason Statham, Ray Liotta, J.
Simmons, Billy Zane, Leelee Sobieski, Ron Perlman, Michelle Rodriguez, and John Rhys-Davies have all done their time with Boll—or the fact that, within the alleged genre of the video-game movie, Boll was actually exploring a variety of genres. Even if it was really different as the one before or even better. Boll eventually found himself treated like a pariah in the games industry. When he met with the game developer Blizzard, hoping to acquire the film rights to World of Warcraft, they laughed him out of the room.
Never, ever. But in fact, being universally, extravagantly reviled took its toll. You go through the whole process. Then came the boxing fight. It looks more like a fatal P. If he was frustrated at not being taken seriously as a filmmaker before, there would be no chance of it now. Behind the scenes, too, Boll was engaging with the material more seriously.
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