Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, out in theaters November 24, is a big job for anyone to tackle. As the 7th live-action film in a billion-dollar franchise, and the means of ushering in a new era accompanied by a Netflix series, any director would have their work cut out for them. The film follows iconic Resident Evil video game characters Chris (Robbie Amell) and Claire Redfield (Kaya Scodelario) as they take on the corruption of Raccoon City.
Thankfully, Johannes Roberts is more than up to the task. The director and videogame lover spoke to Screen Rant about the joys of honoring the classic game as well as leaning into the horror aspects of the genre.
Screen Rant: This film did a great job of capturing the tone of the first few games. How did you approach the film? I know you wanted to stick closer to the horror elements of it.
Johannes Roberts: It was very much that, I'm a horror guy. I'm in love with the same things that the game designers were in love with, with the same movie references, with the same film directors, with the same style of horror. It's so fun chatting with them because we work really hand in hand with Capcom on this and they're as geeky as I am. When they watched a movie, they were loving the mixture of gore and action and stuff and they had the same passion. It was so funny, in my mind I thought Capcom were a huge faceless, almost umbrella. They're not, they were just super excited and it was the same for me.
I just wanted to get back to the horror and I wanted to recapture like you say, the feeling you had; I wanted to recapture that feeling I had as a student when this first came out and PlayStation started to become a thing and it really made horror scary again. Horror cinema was not great at the time. I was like, "Oh this is the new world, this new future. This is how I'm going to get my scares." It's really to go back to that and then mix that with, I was obsessed as we were developing this with the reboot of Resident Evil 2, and I was like, "Oh yeah, I'm taking that. I'm putting that in the movie."
I was told that you had the original two blueprints from two iconic locations, the mansion and the police department. You got those blueprints from Capcom. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Johannes Roberts: Capcom was really, it was a weird one. I don't think they'd ever do it that way before. I was like, "Guys come, rather than keep you out, at arm's length", I was like, "Come on in, let's have fun, we're two nerds here. What can you give me? I want to go through your storage room and pull stuff out". I wanted the mansion and the police station so badly. I was like, these two things are going in my movie and I want to do it like the game.
They gave us the blueprints. We built to the specification, the exterior of the mansion, the exterior of the police station, the interior, both the main lobby atrium places. The library was super close, it was a build. We didn't go quite as gigantic there, but there were very specific things that we were like, okay, this is to the dimension. It's a lot of fun, you'd have to be a real nerd like I am to get as much of a kick from it, but I was standing in that police station and just being like, "Yeah, it's my police station!"
It's so cool. Even going through the mansion as we're following the ensemble, I almost felt like I had a controller in my hand. You know what I mean?
Johannes Roberts: That was the aim to feel that, yes. I like that you had a controller in your hands. That would be a good quote, I think.
Kaya Scodelario told me that she'd like Claire to divert from her video game counterpart in the future. Do you have an idea of where you want these characters to go in the future or do they align more with their video game counterparts or do you know where you want them to go?
Johannes Roberts: I have ideas. I'm very interested to see where we go from here, how this is received and I really loved leaning into the game and really embracing the game and falling in love with it. I would very much want to go lean towards the game and look at Resident Evil 4, look at Code Veronica.
Because I haven't got PlayStation 5 yet, I haven't played Village, but I want to play Village, I'm desperate to play Village. But I cannot get a PlayStation 5 for love or money. And I refuse to play it on my PS4, but yeah, I want to look at all the games, I know the Village and Seven are slightly outside of the world we are in. But look at all these games and really in the way that we did with this movie with the first two games is to see if there's a world there when we start expanding it. So we'll see, we'll see how it goes and where the characters go.
What's your favorite Resident Evil game?
Johannes Roberts: A hundred percent it's the reboot of the second game is my favorite. The seventh game scared the living s**t out of me, but I want to play VR.
I did. It scared the crap out of me.
Johannes Roberts: Someone said it's actually too intense. I want to go back to that, but I love it as a piece of storytelling and game and the reboot of the second game is like Boom!
