Johannes Roberts has been reflecting on casting and capturing ‘the spirit of the characters’ ahead of Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City's launch.
The director of the next upcoming adaptation of the popular Resident Evil survival horror video game series has been chatting about the casting process for his inbound film, Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City. What’s more, he’s been unpicking that knotty conundrum regarding how faithful you need to be when making a game to movie adaptation.
Roberts has been chatting about the unveiling of some stills of the film, and discussing his thoughts behind visual changes to some of the series’ most iconic characters such as Leon S Kennedy and other stalwarts of the Resident Evil saga.
As he says, “it was hugely important with the whole casting process to find people who embodied the spirit and energy of the characters I wanted to portray. I think often in game adaptations one of the big flaws can be just casting someone to look visually like the characters – giving them the identical haircut and clothes but not really trying to give the audience the thing that a movie does better than a game – which is to create a three-dimensional character that you can really connect with and believe in. I think as I said before one of the traps of falling into game adaptations is to make it feel like a giant cosplay version of the game.”
Roberts went on to discuss the casting process in detail, giving an example of how to him, the capturing the essence of a character was far more important than their look. “Our cast is obviously much more diverse than the original games but I wanted to resist the trap of just casting because someone just happened to look like their character identically. Leon was much harder. We must have seen so many people – it was really quite a tricky role because of the balance of humour and weariness.”
Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City is due to release in November via Sony Pictures. There are also a slew of Resident Evil projects being developed for the smaller screen over at Netflix. More on those as we hear it.
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