Direct from a Bungie announce­ment, Microsoft’s offi­cial statement:

“We are dis­ap­pointed that Uni­ver­sal and Fox wanted to sig­nif­i­cantly rene­go­ti­ate the finan­cial points of the deal. But the Halo fran­chise is hugely pop­u­lar and our goal remains the same — to find a part­ner that shares our pas­sion and will cre­atively col­lab­o­rate with us to best rep­re­sent the story and spirit of the Halo fran­chise. Peter Jack­son, Fran Walsh and the rest of the cre­ative team are ded­i­cated to ensur­ing the Halo movie becomes a real­ity. We are already in dis­cus­sions with poten­tial part­ners who rec­og­nize the value of the Halo brand and its appeal to con­sumers worldwide.”

Bungie con­tin­ues on to note a feel­ing of opti­mism, hap­pi­ness and sat­is­fac­tion — for rea­sons they can­not go into:

“Frankly we’re inter­ested in mak­ing the best movie, and it’s pos­si­ble that a part­ner who’s more con­cerned with num­bers, might not be the best part­ner for what’s more vitally a cre­ative process. Suf­fice it to say that Peter, Neill, Fran and Microsoft are as excited and ded­i­cated as ever and WETA con­tin­ues the pre-production process. […] when you do finally get to see the stuff WETA has already made, you will prob­a­bly pee a lit­tle.”

Looks like our coura­geous cre­ative team are still work­ing on churn­ing out the best adap­ta­tion pos­si­ble. The Halo movie is most defi­nately not can­celled, as many other pub­li­ca­tions has­tened to point out.

Halo Wars is a real-time strat­egy video game being designed by Ensem­ble Stu­dios and set for release on the Xbox 360. The title was revealed at Microsoft’s X06 and a pre-rendered trailer was offi­cially released:

For more details on this game visit Wikipedia

Aint it Cool News is back again with another inter­view, this time they talk to Peter Jack­son. Indeed it is a five part mam­moth — part 3 refers to the progress of the Halo Movie.

This inter­view cov­ers a num­ber of impor­tant top­ics that are on the minds of those fol­low­ing the film’s development.

Neill Blomkamp

First and fore­most Jack­son dis­cusses why Neill Blomkamp was cho­sen as direc­tor even though he has not pro­duced a fea­ture length movie until now. To para­phrase, Jack­son com­ments on Blomkamp’s bril­liant visual eye and sto­ry­telling abil­ity — as appar­ent in his short films.

- He is an absolute Halo fan (and is thus not in it for the cash or publicity)

- He can pro­vide a unique out-of-the-box approach as far away from cur­rent video game-movie adap­ta­tions as possible.

- He was cho­sen over many other appli­cant direc­tors because his visions and plans are excit­ing and entirely new and the poten­tial is great: Believe me, he’s doing some­thing that is very, very dif­fer­ent from what peo­ple are imag­in­ing, from what peo­ple have seen before. … It is orig­i­nal and new and has not been seen before on the screen. It’s not Rid­ley Scott, it’s not James Cameron, it’s not what we’ve seen before, but it’s some­thing new and fresh and it’s cool. (Jack­son states that Blomkamp has already spent 2 solid months work­ing with Weta on every aspect of design).

Script

Sec­ondly, the script. It is not cur­rently ready and at the moment Blomkamp is focus­ing on his vision of the Halo uni­verse. We are slowly tug­ging away at it, get­ting it there.

Since Gar­land’s draft two new scripts have been writ­ten. Jack­son states it is com­ing along nicely and although he, Fran and Philippa are not per­son­ally involved in the writ­ing they are keep­ing a close eye and strin­gently polic­ing its qual­ity. Film­ing will not start until the script is “really great”. The time needed to develop the Halo world, the props and the phys­i­cal real­i­sa­tion of the dream also allows time to per­fect the script. There will be Covenant, Warthogs, Ghosts and Scor­pi­ons and even the Pil­lar of Autumn.

PG-13?

This topic has not yet been dis­cussed, states Jack­son. Though he imag­ines the stu­dio will insist on PG-13 given the bud­get. He then goes on to dis­cuss the pos­si­bil­ity of a “hard R rat­ing DVD” and the grue­some hard­core flood designs — pul­sat­ing, throb­bing [and] ooz­ing.

The key quote is:
[They all say] “You can’t make a good film out of a game.” Well, that’s all crap. Good films just need good char­ac­ters, good sto­ry­line and a great direc­tor to bring it to life and make a film that you’ve never seen before.

This all sounds too per­fect. Our favorite video game is being brought to life in the best pos­si­ble man­ner — a rev­o­lu­tion­ary vision­ary (Blomkamp), crisp and unique visual effects (WETA) and a mas­ter at the helm (Jack­son). The foun­da­tions are set and the build­ing plans look hel­la­cious — let’s just hope the stu­dios don’t con­tract shoddy work­men — we dont want every­thing to fall down with the first tremor.

Thanks Giorgio_C | AICN Read the rest of this entry »

It seems Microsoft (via the Xbox​.com web­site) have removed the Neill Blomkamp announce­ment, the pre­vi­ous URL now leads to a 404 page error. There can be a num­ber of expla­na­tions for this:

The announce­ment may have been pre­ma­ture
This could sug­gest the con­tract details or some other finer points had not been con­cluded at the time of pub­li­ca­tion. This would call for a retrac­tion of the state­ment to con­form with a con­fi­den­tial­ity clause.
The arti­cle was wrong
It’s pos­si­ble that some­one could have screwed up or alter­na­tively mes­sages may have been mixed. Neill Blomkamp’s role may not be as big as direc­tor, he could just be run­ning the spe­cial effects depart­ment. But con­sid­er­ing the AICN inter­view and the words from Blomkamp’s mouth this is highly unlikely.
The site messed up
It’s just a prob­lem with the site — I like this explanation.

Well this is all just spec­u­la­tion; such activ­i­ties are con­fus­ing and in the past have pointed to PR dis­as­ters etc. My hunch is that this is noth­ing but I bring it to your atten­tion any­way just in case.

Aint it Cool News are first to con­duct an inter­view with Halo’s newly announced direc­tor (for exam­ples of his work scroll down past this arti­cle). If you don’t want to read the full inter­view which is linked to above and has been repro­duced below, here are the key points:

The key points to note:
– Neill Blomkamp is a big fan of the games and prefers Halo 1
– He is con­fi­dent in his abil­ity to cre­ate a fea­ture film
– Being faith­ful to the game is impor­tant, espe­cially con­cern­ing Mas­ter Chief
– Too early to con­sider actors and musi­cal score
– The Covenant:
“the most impor­tant thing is that viewer thinks they are look­ing at some­thing that lives and breathes, and exists […] they also need to be ter­ri­fy­ing, and alien “
– The Flood:
“I absolutely love the flood, more impor­tantly I love infected humans and covenant”

My goal is to make some­thing that is hon­estly unique and a rad­i­cal depar­ture from stuff we are used to. I’ve been given the resources and the source mate­r­ial to make some­thing awe­some, so I have to really invest myself 100% in a film that I love every frame of

The Com­plete Interview

Quint: First and fore­most, are you a fan of the games?

Neill Blomkamp: From a purely game play­ing per­spec­tive I am a mas­sive fan of the games, but more impor­tantly, i’m a mas­sive fan of the world and uni­verse of Halo, the sci­ence fic­tion world that the games take place inside of.

Quint: Which do you pre­fer, HALO or HALO 2?

Neill Blomkamp: From a play­ing per­spec­tive I like both. But from a con­cep­tual and story per­spec­tive I pre­fer Halo 1.

Quint: You’ve worked in spe­cial effects before and have done many short films, com­mer­cials and videos. Did you do shorts like ALIVE IN JOBURG specif­i­cally to break into fea­tures with some­thing like HALO?

Neill Blomkamp: No, I mean I’ve always wanted to even­tu­ally get into direct­ing fea­tures, and it’s cer­tainly where I want to be, but there was never a path or a spe­cific plan to do that. Those pieces in a weird way I made for myself, it was just a learn­ing process.
I have to be doing some­thing cre­ative all the time, I like just rolling up my sleeves and just mak­ing stuff, for the sake of learn­ing, or exper­i­ment­ing, or mess­ing around, shorts can be bet­ter than pretty much any­thing for that. Com­mer­cials I was begin­ning to find uncre­ative because your end goal is to sell a prod­uct, and music videos are really great, but you can’t really have dia­logue, so I just defaulted to mak­ing my own pieces on the side of doing com­mer­cials, and iron­i­cally they seem bet­ter known then all the com­mer­cials, except that one for Adi­das which was basi­cally a short.

Quint: Are you ner­vous about tack­ling a movie as big as HALO as your first feature?

Neill Blomkamp: No, I’m not. I cer­tainly respect how com­plex it is, and how much focus is required. There will be some very hard times, with tons of pres­sure but you work through it. I am so invested in it from a cre­ative stand­point that my eye just stays on the end goal, I keep focused on mak­ing it exactly how I want it and treat every day as a path to that final prod­uct, plus the sup­port from the New Zealand team is really amaz­ing, its not like i’m out in the woods alone, they’ve done this back to back for like 10 years.

Quint: What’s your approach to the film? How do you plan on being faith­ful to the game while giv­ing the audi­ence some­thing new?

Neill Blomkamp: I think you can be faith­ful to the game and just begin to layer things that have not yet been seen, over the fab­ric of what exists. You don’t want peo­ple who know the game to see the film and not have any­thing that isn’t new.

Quint: How has work­ing with Weta and Peter Jack­son been?

Neill Blomkamp: Work­ing with Weta is amaz­ing. Just such a cre­ative group under one roof, it feels really good for me to able to col­lab­o­rate with all of them, see the designs start find­ing their way into real­ity. Very reward­ing, in a way I feel like I’ve found my home, all these peo­ple inter­ested in the same stuff.
Peter is really great, a vault of knowl­edge, not only from a cre­ative per­spec­tive, but also on a tech­ni­cal and logis­ti­cal one.
Learn­ing as much as I can about how to stream­line this process and make every­thing be more effi­cient, its good to just throw things his way and see how he has already dealt with what­ever it is, 100 times before.

Quint: How faith­ful do you plan on stay­ing to the design of Mas­ter Chief’s armor?

Neill Blomkamp: Mas­ter Chief is cer­tainly some­thing that I do not want to change too much at all, there are cer­tain things inside the Halo uni­verse that are sacred and he’s the main one.
Hav­ing said that, there is a need to revise cer­tain parts of him, just from a purely tech­ni­cal stand­point, he has to actu­ally be able to move, like a human, and the game design right now does not allow for full motion free­dom, which we will have to achieve.

Quint: Guy in a suit? CGI cre­ation? Mix­ture of both?

Neill Blomkamp: Well, the film has to have a feel­ing of real­ity, and so that means that I want to keep him real as much as I can, there is a neces­sity for him to become cg in sequences where a guy in a suit would just not work, but for the most part I am aim­ing for real.

Quint: Will we see Mas­ter Chief’s face?

Neill Blomkamp: You’ll have to wait and see.

Quint: As far as Mas­ter Chief’s voice, will you con­sider Steve Downes, who voiced the char­ac­ter for the games or will you more than likely go with a big­ger name?

Neill Blomkamp: It’s just too early to be able to know any­thing like that yet.

Quint: What do you feel is most impor­tant in bring­ing the Covenant to life?

Neill Blomkamp: Well, the most impor­tant thing is that viewer thinks they are look­ing at some­thing that lives and breathes, and exists, so from an organic stand­point they have to be believ­able, they also need to be ter­ri­fy­ing, and alien, and the best way to start doing that is to break that human sil­hou­ette, although many of them are bipedal anatom­i­cally, you can still shift the over­all body to be some­thing very alien, their motion must be alien too, the audi­ence has to get a kick out of how real and men­ac­ing these things are, and how believ­able they are too.

Quint: Will any of the aliens be done practically?

Neill Blomkamp: Right now there is one of them that might very well end up being all practical.

Quint: How about The Flood? What’s your take on The Flood? That aspect has always been my favorite of the games.

Neill Blomkamp: I absolutely love the flood, more impor­tantly I love infected humans and covenant, so that will absolutely have its place in the film. Halo is a per­fect project for me, because it con­tains so many dif­fer­ent things that fas­ci­nate me, one of which is the idea of bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion, and the flood is essen­tially a virus, it is a near per­fect organ­ism in terms of how resilient it is against nat­ural threats, this feel­ing of evo­lu­tion and why organ­isms evolve a cer­tain way ties into the covenant and even the humans. And then of course on a pure thrill ride basis hav­ing the audi­ence run into the flood in a nar­row dark hall­way is awesome.

Quint: I know this is very early, but will any of Marty O’Donnell’s score from the game make it over to the film? Is he a con­tender to com­pose the score for the movie?

Neill Blomkamp: It’s just way too early for any deci­sions like that

Quint: Are you plan­ning any loca­tion shoot­ing or will you be doing mostly green screen work?

Neill Blomkamp: I’m in the process now of sort­ing through all of our options, fig­ur­ing all of that out, in the end the method is irrel­e­vant as long as the audi­ence is trans­ported com­pletely believ­ably to where we need to put them, and so that’s the goal that every­thing needs to revolve around.

Quint: What’s the over­all tone you want to strike with the movie? Escapist, big bud­get action fun? Gritty, real­is­tic future war? Nei­ther? Both?

Neill Blomkamp: Well, I don’t want to give away exactly how I want to be, but, big bud­get action can cer­tainly look very sim­i­lar to 100 other films which are big bud­get action, so my goal is to make some­thing that is hon­estly unique and a rad­i­cal depar­ture from stuff we are used to.
I’ve been given the resources and the source mate­r­ial to make some­thing awe­some, so I have to really invest myself 100% in a film that I love every frame of, and for me to love every frame means it has to have some­thing that sets it apart.
Fans of the game should love this film, peo­ple who don’t know the game should be trans­ported to a place that blows them away for two hours.

Thanks Nel­son.