Late one night in the crew chat, after someone links the del Toro IGN30
interview and a cold kettle goes forgotten on the counter.
RYUU: Right, so del Toro just said he will “never” want to
make another game-to-film adaptation. And honestly? Part of me is gutted.
DARMA: Gutted? Why? He has never actually made one.
RYUU: That is exactly why it stings though. Think about who
we are talking about here. This is the bloke who was going to do BioShock as a
film, a proper one, with teeth, and he said the project died after what he
called “probably one of the most disastrous calls I’ve ever had.” One phone
call. That is Rapture, gone. And it is not a one-off either. He had this whole
trilogy of cinematic survival-horror games called Insane that fell apart
around 2012, and then he was attached to Silent Hills, the P.T. thing with
Kojima, which Konami then set on fire in front of all of us. So when a guy
with that scar tissue, a guy who clearly loves games, who speaks about games
like he actually plays them, turns around and says never again, it does not
feel like a snub. It feels like watching one of our own walk off the pitch for
good.
DARMA: See, I read it completely the other way.
RYUU: Go on.
DARMA: We are the ones who get burned by these adaptations,
yeah? Every single time. We sit through the trailer, we let ourselves hope,
and then it lands and it is a hollow fan-service shell with the logo stapled
on. So when del Toro, the one director who might actually have nailed it, says
he would rather bow out than make a bad one, that reads as respect to me. He
is not slamming the door on games. He is admitting films and games are
different animals.
RYUU: That is the bit that got me, actually. His reasoning.
He said a game has to create the illusion of an infinite sandbox, where you,
the player, are led through your own decisions, and you feel like the world
bends to you. A film cannot do that. A film is a fixed path you sit and watch.
So an adaptation needs a fundamentally different approach, it cannot just film
the cutscenes and call it a day. And the horrible truth is most adaptations do
exactly that. They film the cutscenes.
DARMA: Which is why him knowing that is the whole point. He
understood the problem too well to fake his way past it.
RYUU: Okay but flip it. Is it not a bit tragic that
understanding it so well is the thing that scares him off? We keep begging for
someone who gets games to be handed the keys, and the one person who properly
gets it has decided the maths does not work. That is not a win for us. That is
the smartest kid in class deciding the exam is rigged and refusing to sit it.
DARMA: Fair. But would you rather he sat it badly?
RYUU: No. No, obviously not.
DARMA: Right. Because think about what “trying anyway”
usually gets us. It gets us a studio chewing him up, a disastrous call, a
cancelled trilogy, a Silent Hills that becomes a legend precisely because it
never existed. The man has lived the worst version of this three times over.
He is not being precious. He is being honest about an industry that keeps
breaking his toys.
RYUU: That is actually a kinder way to hold it. He is not
giving up on games, the games business gave up on him first. Repeatedly.
Insane, BioShock, Silent Hills, that is a graveyard. You cannot keep walking
back to the same haunted house.
DARMA: And maybe that is the real takeaway for us. The
problem was never that directors do not love games. He clearly did. He was
arguably one of us, a genuine player, not a tourist. The problem is the
pipeline. The suits, the rights, the one bad phone call that can kill years of
work.
RYUU: So the lesson is not “games are unfilmable.” It is
“stop handing people who love games a system designed to waste them.”
DARMA: That I can drink to. Cold tea and all.
RYUU: Grim. Pour it out. But yeah, you are right. Better an
honest no than another hollow logo on a poster. I just wish the no had come
from a worse director.
