I want a BioShock movie really bad. I’m not super good at video games, but I’m into graphic design and gameplay mechanics and 3D modeling, so I end up mostly watching people play video games. I enjoy doing it. I’m the life of the party.
Bioshock was tons of fun to watch being played, because the story was rigid enough to be interesting and have a beginning, middle and end with fantastic twists planted in the lives of the NPCs (non-player characters). A movie can’t live with that hole of a central protagonist still existing.
That seemed to be the primary problem when Gore Verbinski and director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo took their shots at adapting Bioshock for the screen. But the REAL problem was that all involved wanted Bioshock to be a “hard R” film. The studio, meanwhile, isn’t going to build an art deco underwater city for a movie that won’t make tons of money. So Bioshock halted.
Talking to Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, Aint It Cool got his thoughts on massive physical production that would have been Bioshock:
“Keeping in mind that the cost was one of the problems I would recommend to combine realism with good and special CGI. The most important thing is to make it feel like a real thing and I think you could do that with a good DP and a very real concept of the camera.
That was something I proposed from the beginning, (for it) to work as an experience, you know? From the very beginning to the very end tracking the point of view of the hero of the story, going with him.”
Gore Verbinski moved on to that movie where Johnny Depp has a bird on his head and may or may not fight mystical wolves and may or may not assault a train. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo moved on to adapting Highlander.
Highlander, the Christopher Lambert and Sean Connery “there can only be one” semi-hokey fantasy movie, can apparently be solved using the same strategy he would have used on Bioshock:
“Again, I think it’s about following the character. I would love, if we make the movie, to feel the immortality. Immortality is a curse and I would love to feel that. You are overcoming time, but you see at the same time that the most beautiful things, the things that you love, are dying and you continue this life as a tragedy. You can’t love with anyone because you’re going to lose that person.
I would love to introduce that flavor in a very strong way in the movie and at the same time the big connection with the Universe. “Why am I immortal? Why am I the chosen one?”
Check out more from Juan Carlos via Quint over at AICN.
