The Resident Evil movie series is making a comeback after nearly over years of silence. Helming this reboot is writer-director Johannes Roberts who is a massive fan of the franchise, dating back to the premiere of the first video game. The reboot, titled Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, takes a noticeable tonal shift from Paul W.S. Anderson's six prior movies. Roberts has reverted the cinematic project back to its source material, adopting a straightforward horror tone and bringing forth loads of disfigured monstrous creatures.
Game Rant had the opportunity to chat with Roberts about the boldest decision he made while constructing his movie, his cinematic inspirations, and the acting performance he's most excited for fans to see.
Johannes Roberts On Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City's Boldest Decision
When it came to rebooting the Resident Evil movie franchise, Roberts was set on one thing: Viewers had to experience the same dark, horrific tone as the acclaimed video games. He told us, "I wanted the dark, scary tone of the game, and when I was writing the movie, I was so obsessed with the reboot of the second game, which I thought cinematically was just amazing. I wanted to make that tone and atmosphere the benchmark for my film."
While he took heavy inspiration from the reboot's source material, that wasn't the end-all-be-all of his pre-production process. He continued, "When I was thinking about how to create a movie version of this, it needed to be more than the game. There needs to be different plugins, you need to give an audience something different. Otherwise, you might as well stay at home and play the games because the games are f***ing great. And they're scary."
John Carpenter's Influence
Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City has one thing that the video games don't: Roberts' personality. The writer-director expressed, "The thing that I really wanted to do is bring my personality to it and bring my film references to it I'm a huge John Carpenter fan. And I really, really leaned into that. The thing that I love about Carpenter is his humor. I wanted to bring that into the movie and it's a very funny movie. And I don't think people will have realized that quite from the marketing material."
Giving more insight into his film inspirations, Roberts named the top Carpenter movies that sparked Welcome To Raccoon City's development. "Its references are so Precinct 13. There's also some Little Big Trouble in Little China, which is a very, very funny movie. It's quirky, it's odd, especially the music choices. There's a whole massive action sequence that's scored to Crush by Jennifer Page — this massive 90 song and it just has a very unique and odd personality. This movie is quite bonkers in its own way, but it's also a scary horror movie. It's its own thing and it very much has my personality imprinted on it. I hope people fall in love with it as much as I have."
How Avan Jogia Won Him Over
Aside from the movie's unique tone, it also has many stunning performances. Throughout our conversation, Roberts expressed his adoration for the movie's cast and named the actor that he's most excited for fans to see. He said, "I love the cast. The thing that I'm most looking forward to is fans seeing the characters because the marketing can't give you the human element of all these characters coming together and the emotional journeys they go on. They are all so unique and funny at times."
Pinpointing one actor, he continued, "[Albert] Wesker is this big bad guy in the games and he's the same in the movie, but we have an origin story and some real emotion there. And there's Chris [Redfield], a small town High School guy whose life has kind of passed it by a little bit. But again, he has that humor and this apple-pie-wonderfulness to him. That's a terrible word. I don't know if that's a word or not."
But that's not the performance he's most looking forward to gauging fans' reactions on. He turned the tables to Leon S. Kennedy, played by Now Apocolypse actor Avan Jogia. Roberts shared, "I think the one that I really hope lands as well as I love it and is Avan as Leon because if you look at Robbie [Amell] or Tom [Hopper] they look like their counterparts of the game, but [Avan] does not look like [Leon]. He is his own thing."
He added, "The Leon character was my way into the movie when I was writing it. And Leon is the perfect Carpenter antihero. He's a bit useless at times, a bit just hungover, and he just wants the data. When I was writing, I saw the movie and I must have looked at every actor in Hollywood, any town, everywhere, to get this role. And I remember him coming in and and and reading for the role and I was just like, 'he does not look like Leon from the games but he is f***ing great.' I really fought for him and he's just wonderful in the movie."
Continuing to gush about the character, he shared that "Capcom was very protective over their, their world." Roberts said, "They wanted everything as much as possible to be like the game. We talked a lot about some of the roles, particularly Leon, and the direction I was going in, and I could tell that there was a nervousness there. But when they watched the movie, there was a giggly excitement, particularly with Leon. They really understood that he was his own thing. He was the game. He was Leon, the geeky nerdy Leon from the first game. He was the rookie, but he was something more in his own world."