Col­lider had the chance to meet with Michael De Luca (writer of Judge Dredd, pro­ducer on Blade II, Zathura, Ghost Rider) at ShoW­est and dis­cuss, amongst other things, the Metal Gear movie adap­ta­tion. I’ve picked out the rel­e­vant MGS related con­tent from the inter­view for you. De Luca dis­cusses the aim of the adap­ta­tion and achiev­ing an inde­pen­dent cin­e­matic aura whilst stay­ing true to the fran­chise, he also clar­i­fies his pre­vi­ous com­ment on Kurt Wim­mer — he is not direct­ing, he isn’t even hired yet — he is cur­rently involved in the adap­ta­tion writ­ing process. Though this doesn’t rule him out for a direct­ing role in the future.

Col­lider: So this is the ques­tion that every fan…I’m ask­ing this for every fan…what are you going to do to finally make a kick-ass video game movie?

Mike De Luca: I mean, hope­fully not screw it up.  For me adapt­ing a video game is just like adapt­ing a book or a play or any other…whenever you’re adapt­ing from another medium for film you try to take into account what you need to do to make it a movie. 

With books it’s how you com­pen­sate for not being inside a character’s head and with video games I think what you have to com­pen­sate for is the loss of inter­ac­tiv­ity, you know.  What makes video games fun is that you get to be the char­ac­ter and you’re sit­ting there rul­ing the uni­verse and it’s a really first per­son inter­ac­tive expe­ri­ence.  When you’re in your the­atre seat, you’re stuck with these sub­jec­tive ver­sions of the story and the game from a direc­tor or the writer’s point of view.  You can’t inter­act with what’s going on so what­ever turns you on about the game, you’re imme­di­ately disadvantaged […]

So I think the bar is higher and I think in the past, peo­ple haven’t real­ized that they set the bar low for video game movies think­ing that oh, there’s a built in audi­ence and we don’t need to go crazy with this movie. […] [In Metal Gear Solid] the Cain and Able story between Solid Snake and Liq­uid Snake and their rela­tion­ship with their father and the sto­ry­line of Metal Gear Solid 4 has the mak­ings….there’s so much story in Metal Gear as opposed to other video games that I think it’s going to be a chal­lenge but it’s an upscale prob­lem to have so much the­matic sub­texts and story mate­r­ial to draw from, so I think we have a leg up already. It’s such a rich uni­verse and Kojima is like George Lucas in terms of cre­at­ing this uni­verse so what it says about war by proxy in this kind of future where war has been out­sourced to pri­vate com­pa­nies I think can be almost very top­i­cal and also kind of satir­i­cal in like a “Robo­cop” kind of way, so I think if we can get a script that hon­ors the sto­ry­line of all 4 games, but that also has a cin­e­matic aes­thetic you know the kind of aes­thetic Ver­ho­even brought to “Robo­cop” or the kind of aes­thetic the Wachowski’s brought to “The Matrix”.  If there’s a cin­e­matic iden­tity to the piece that exists on its own, it doesn’t con­flict with the DNA of the game, you know that’s our goal is to pull off those 2 things.  Not mess with the DNA of the game but pro­vide a movie that is an adap­ta­tion but that has it’s own cin­e­matic iden­tity so even if you don’t play the game you know, you’ll come out of that movie feel­ing like you did at the end of “The Matrix” or the end of “Robo­cop”.  That’s our goal anyway.

Col­lider: I guess that being said, have you thought […] $100 mil­lion movie—this is a sum­mer block­buster or this is going to be one of these mid-range kind of things?

Mike De Luca: No, they know it’s big.  I mean, we don’t want it to be crazy big but they know it’s big on the big­ger side of things.

[…] This writer Kurt Wim­mer is one of the peo­ple we’re look­ing at to talk to about pitch­ing on it.
[…] Kurt is like one of many peo­ple we’re talk­ing to about pitch­ing us back a take on adapt­ing the fran­chise. He hasn’t been hired or anything.