I think Alone in the Dark was too much an action creature movie than a horror creature movie.
I boxed 15 years in a club.
House was the first film where I had no influence on the script. I had to buy the script with the game rights.
I think it's better to be too early and disturb a few people - but have other people say it was necessary - than to do it way after the fact. We shouldn't forget that Charlie Chaplin did a movie about Hitler while Hitler was alive, and Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece Dr. Strangelove was during the McCarthy time, where everybody was a communist and McCarthy was flipping completely out. I think it's important to have a movie like Postal now, where we are on the peak of the Iraq War, on the peak of terrorist attacks, where everything is actually happening.
Slater's a big star and he's been in the business a long time. He's always in a good mood and easygoing but he takes his character very seriously.
In the Seventies, a lot of executions via electric chair failed because of technical problems. Seed tells the true story of someone who survived and sought revenge. They buried him alive to make it seem he was dead.
Homer is the nice side of Al Bundy with the same intellect. I really like him and Al Bundy.
Of course there are a lot of books that are interesting to make movies out of, but on the other hand, I think video games are also kind of like bestselling books for the younger generation, and the younger generation is the one going to the theaters.
House of the Dead 2 I gave away. Alone in the Dark 2 I will also not do; even if the DVD movie made money. BloodRayne 2 in the Wild West is what I really want to do.
A movie like House of the Dead with around $7 million budget or Alone in the Dark with around $16 million budget are much easier to make profit than the typical $50 million major motion picture.
Now while the German money is over for Hollywood, I still have $80 million to make movies, and we will have two things coming up: less major movies and the price for actors will go down.
I think the harsh reviews helped, in that I spent way more energy in the preproduction and development. From this point of view, I'm very thankful for the harsh critics. I still think the critics were unnecessarily insulting in a lot of things, but I think it helped.
The Postal is a ruthless, Mad TV-type thing. We sent out a DVD to the South Park producers, and they liked the movie so much that we can say now, "It's like South Park with real actors" on the trailers and posters.
I always try to get games of different genres. This is the reason Postal is a comedy, and Far Cry is a real, pure action movie - like Die Hard on an island - and In The Name Of The King: A Dungeon Siege Tale was my opportunity to do my epic, Braveheart, Lord Of The Rings, Gladiator movie. I try not to repeat myself in genres too much.
I think a lot of people don't take you seriously if they hear it's a video-game-based movie, and a lot of press people don't write about you. With BloodRayne, a lot of serious newspaper people didn't actually even see the movie. They went online to see other reviews, and then wrote their own. I think comic-book-based movies have a better image. We see it with 300, Sin City, Spider-Man - they are A-list features, and video-game movies are B-list.
I get most of my reviews through e-mail, and then I go and read it and go on message boards to check it out. I want to see what's out there and to better estimate my position. I'm definitely happy that a lot of people are voting positively for Postal - especially the hundreds and hundreds who actually saw it. Still, there are a lot of people who didn't see it who are giving me only one point out of 10 because they hate me, and it has nothing to do with the movie.
I think without the harsh critics, I would maybe have not made progress. From BloodRayne on, I spent more time and money on the development.
The main point is that I think if we want the Earth to survive and everybody to have a positive future, we have to stop thinking in terms of religions and races. We have to face that we are all on the planet Earth together, and we have to figure out how we all survive. It makes no sense if we are all driving hybrid cars, but China pumps massive amounts of CO2 in the air. If we don't start working together and find solutions - if every country thinks only in terms of, "First we, then the other nations" - then we will fail.
As a filmmaker, I get compared to people who have no clue how to do anything, but because of some Internet writing, it looks like they would actually be better filmmakers. I think this is absurd.
There are a lot of idiots on the Internet getting a lot of attention.
Everybody says video-game adaptations are all the same, but I disagree. Normally, video-game adaptations are like Alone In The Dark, Resident Evil, Alien Vs. Predator - sci-fi creature stuff. But I think I've covered] a wide range of genres and time periods, like Transylvania in 1700 and now a Western with BlodRayne II, or adventure with Dungeon Siege, or comedy and satire with Postal.
A lot of the main audience thinks video game-based movies are always horror movies but it's totally not true. In video games you have adventure, sci-fi, horror, action and even comedy. I think that people should accept more that video games are kind of like the best-selling books of the new generation.
Even if people hate my other movies, and hate me, or whatever, I think from this point of view, Postal is the most important movie after September 11. It's not respecting any edge, any border, any nation, any religion - it's an all-type offender. I think that only if everybody gets a little pissed about something then you will start thinking about your situation.
