Joystiq were at the Halo 3 public beta event in New York this week and they had the opportunity to interview Frank O’Connor, Bungie’s writing lead — you probably all know him from the regular Friday updates he posts.
Here’s what he had to say about the on-hiatus Halo film that we haven’t heard much about in the past few weeks:
How about the movie? What’s happening there? I imagine that in your position that you’re also responsible for the writing on that.
Well, we certainly work with them on the story bible, but they have Hollywood script writers. They’re not just gonna let me sit and write a movie. But the movie’s on hiatus right now. They need to sort out the finances, the politics of it. It’s really common in the movie industry for would-be competitors to coöperate on products, and you add a studio and a big corporation like Microsoft in the mix and it’s really complicated. I personally wish that we kept up the momentum with the movie so that I could see it next year. That’s not going to happen. But technically the movie is still a work in progress that will happen one day so we’re just waiting until everything’s right and all our ducks are in a row to make it happen properly.
Are Microsoft, and Peter Jackson as producer, still wedded to Neil Blomkamp as director? That was one of the problems that the financiers had.
That was one of the rumors. It’s a lot more complicated than that. But Neil Blomkamp is still working really closely with Peter Jackson. Honestly, I’d be really curious to see what Neil Blomkamp — if you’ve seen any of his shorts — what he could do with the physicality of the Master Chief. Seeing the Master Chief in video games
is one thing; he’s running around with guns and rocket launchers. I’d like to see him taking out some trucks bare-handed, clambering across rooftops, leaping from building to building, in a way that you can only really do in a movie. You can take such artistic liberties with the gameplay elements, that I think Neil Blomkamp would be able to do something fantastic but I literally don’t know if he would be the director who made the movie eventually. I have no idea.
He’s certainly an interesting choice, a unique choice.
As a director, he certainly speaks to the militaristic, realistic sort of anachronistic almost, human element that we have in the game. If you look at Halo, you’ll see that human technology in the 26th century is barely changed from the 21st. I think he’d be able to do some really interesting things with atmosphere as well as with action.
So it looks like things are still going to head forward sometime in the future, just the nitty gritty business deals and funding to get sorted, as per usual. Also… bring on the Halo 3 beta (did you all get your Halo 3 beta invite?), I think we’re all looking forward to it.
Full interview at Joystiq, read on for info about Halo 3 multiplayer, story lines and Peter Jackson’s episodic content.