Screenplay

Discuss the latest about the second Silent Hill Movie

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NanayaShiki
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Re: Screenplay

Post by NanayaShiki »

JKristine35 wrote:Yes, because changing parts of a story to suit a different medium and different audience totally means that Gans didn't like or respect the games. If he had ever claimed the film was in the same canon as the games, then you would have a point, but he didn't. I'm sorry, but you are simply ignorant on the subject matter to imply such a thing. Anyone who's bothered to read his interviews can see his vast love of the games. Hell, there's even a featurette on the French blu-ray release of Gans doing nothing but gushing about how much he loves SH2. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. :)
I'm just messing with you. I don't like either movie, but I'd never say "Oh snap" in a post I'm even remotely serious about.
Droo wrote:One thing that definitely improved from page to screen, then.

The Pop Tart Jump Scare > everything.
Truest words ever.
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tbonesays
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Re: Screenplay

Post by tbonesays »

Yuki wrote:
JKristine35 wrote:Bassett stated before filming even began that he doesn't like making long movies, and that he likes things short and sweet. Considering Hadida gladly allowed Gans to turn in a film of over 2 hours, I don't see why everyone wants to blame him for Revelation's runtime.

Bassett didn't really ever talk about the lore of the first film, except to say it had a difficult ending to work a sequel around. He also never claimed to be passionate about the first film, even making statements in interviews that heavily implied the only thing he thought was good about Gans's film was the atmosphere. There's really no reason to believe he was tied to the lore of the first film at all, and the script proves that he wasn't.
]
Look at the professional critics of the first film; they complained about a long movie with a confusing plot. It's clear that Hadida perceived them and wouldn't let that happen again. Of course to do that he sacrificed everything original about Silent Hill.

It's hard to say what the lore of Silent Hill is because everyone had opinions.
None of them were very sequel friendly however, so MJB was going to have to add new elements anyway.
I said nothing about the lore of the first film--I was referring to the series as a whole.
I'm also not saying that Hadida (possibly) did a shorter film just for the sake of it. The way Bassett wrote about it made it sound like he wanted a somewhat longer film, but the advertising (which I'd wager Hadida, being producer of SH and RE, had a part in) referred to it as a thrill ride, implying it was going to be shorter from the onset.[/quote]
Last edited by tbonesays on 23 Mar 2013, edited 3 times in total.
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JKristine35
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Re: Screenplay

Post by JKristine35 »

NanayaShiki wrote: I'm just messing with you. I don't like either movie, but I'd never say "Oh snap" in a post I'm even remotely serious about.
Then my apologies for somewhat flying off the handle. Knowing your intense dislike of the film series, and having heard this "They don't respect it because they changed it for film audiences" nonsense before, it was hard not to take what you said seriously.
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Re: Screenplay

Post by FrankRD »

tbonesays wrote:Look at the professional critics of the first film; they complained about a long movie with a confusing plot. It's clear that Hadida perceived them and wouldn't let that happen again. Of course to do that he sacrificed everything original about Silent Hill.
He also managed to get the second movie an even worse reception.
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Re: Screenplay

Post by Yuki »

tbonesays wrote: Look at the professional critics of the first film; they complained about a long movie with a confusing plot. It's clear that Hadida perceived them and wouldn't let that happen again.
Exactly. Again, the bottom line of Hollywood is money, and Hadida's a producer. I'm willing to bet that a lot of what happened was Hadida changing stuff, and of course Bassett can't just speak out against him or risk gaining a bad reputation. Considering he's only made a few movies, that's too much of a bad thing for him to do--the more positive exposure, the better, and badmouthing an employer would be a Bad Thing.
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Re: Screenplay

Post by JKristine35 »

Hadida wasn't responsible for the retcons - Bassett was. This script proves it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
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Re: Screenplay

Post by tbonesays »

JKristine35 wrote:Hadida wasn't responsible for the retcons - Bassett was. This script proves it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
The buc stops where? Hadida is the producer and he's responsible for the finished product. Even if we didn't know that MJB was his hand picked man, we could look at the old screenplay and see SH [ :wink: ] was a hands-on producer making decisions.
Yuki wrote:
Exactly. Again, the bottom line of Hollywood is money, and Hadida's a producer. I'm willing to bet that a lot of what happened was Hadida changing stuff, and of course Bassett can't just speak out against him or risk gaining a bad reputation. Considering he's only made a few movies, that's too much of a bad thing for him to do--the more positive exposure, the better, and badmouthing an employer would be a Bad Thing.
And it looks like Hadida is turning a profit on SHR. Looking at SH's imdb page it seems he handles the Resident Evil series in the same way; popcorn sequels made largely for tv that get no critical praise but make coin off of a reliable fan base.
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Re: Screenplay

Post by JKristine35 »

Yes, Bassett is a complete angel who has never so much as farted in an elevator his entire life. He couldn't possibly be responsible for any of Revelation's vast suckiness, even though he both wrote and directed it, because we all know he's perfect and is just an innocent victim of Hadida's evil. He had nothing to do with all the shittiness in the script, or in the final movie, because Hadida wrote the script for him and laughed maniacally as he tarnished Bassett's purity. Please. This idea that everybody in the world is responsible for how shitty a movie is except for the guy who wrote and directed it is ridiculous. Shall we start blaming the Republicans for making Revelation bad next?
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resevil80
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Re: Screenplay

Post by resevil80 »

Bassett is 100% accountable for all retcons that made into the film. He is also to blame for having the terrible Mall scene in both the screenplay and finished version of the film. Bassett is still to blame for weak dialogue and a weak shooting script.

But, Hadida is to blame for forcing Bassett to shoot a movie with a 20 million dollar budget in 3D instead of spending the budget trying to make a good film. Hadida is also the type of producer who would want to reign in the run-time on a video game based sequel when the first film didn't exactly set the box office on fire.

Who said Bassett is in the clear? But you can clearly see producer meddling all over the finished product. You act as if Hadida has this immaculate resume of award winning films. He and Carmody are both on the low end of the producer spectrum. I am not trying to say they are evil douche bags who just want to screw shit up. I'm just saying they were trying to maximize profits and get as many screens and daily showings as possible.
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Re: Screenplay

Post by Yuki »

resevil80 wrote:Bassett is 100% accountable for all retcons that made into the film. He is also to blame for having the terrible Mall scene in both the screenplay and finished version of the film. Bassett is still to blame for weak dialogue and a weak shooting script.

But, Hadida is to blame for forcing Bassett to shoot a movie with a 20 million dollar budget in 3D instead of spending the budget trying to make a good film. Hadida is also the type of producer who would want to reign in the run-time on a video game based sequel when the first film didn't exactly set the box office on fire.

Who said Bassett is in the clear? But you can clearly see producer meddling all over the finished product. You act as if Hadida has this immaculate resume of award winning films. He and Carmody are both on the low end of the producer spectrum. I am not trying to say they are evil douche bags who just want to screw shit up. I'm just saying they were trying to maximize profits and get as many screens and daily showings as possible.
Adding to this: just because Bassett's the writer and director doesn't mean everything in the script (or finished film) was his doing. Filmmakers are always constrained by their producers, so while the bad dialogue is almost definitely Bassett's fault, the plot beats are likely a fault of Bassett, of having to deal with trying to bring the filmic universe in line with the games', and of changes that Hadida wanted to appeal to more audiences.
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Re: Screenplay

Post by tbonesays »

Both the General and the Centurion share responsibility after the battle is lost. But people don't care to put the blame on a thousand individuals and instead blame the alpha leader when they are unhappy. (recall how President Bush was blamed for everything that went wrong in Iraq because he set the operation in motion). Eventually you conclude that part of the leader's job is to select good operatives.

It's interesting in film that producers are somehow shielded from public criticism which seems to fall on the director and lead actors. I suppose the producer hears it from the financiers if a film tanks but we never hear about it. No I don't watch Entourage. I never looked at Carmoday and Hadida's imdb page until yesterday and see they have produced a ton of movies, the ones I have seen have been mediocre.

Anyway, SH and MJB are a tandem that have worked together before on a movie that no one has heard of. SH knew exactly what they were going to do, produce a cost effective 3D movie driven by violence and jump scares. No amount of clever script editing was going to change the design of SHR.
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Re: Screenplay

Post by JKristine35 »

The only things that make sense for Hadida to be involved with are the 3D and the cheap scares. There was no monetary reason to retcon anything from the first film, no monetary excuse for the shitty dialogue, no monetary reason for the endless exposition. That was all Bassett, who damned near outright admitted he didn't like the first movie in interviews. I never once stated that everything is Bassett's fault, however, I'm seeing a lot of suggestion that absolutely everything that made the film bad is everyone's fault but his, and that's just wrong. As I said earlier in this thread, the retcons and atrocious dialogue are all on Bassett, made even worse by his outright lies to fans.
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Re: Screenplay

Post by resevil80 »

JKristine35 wrote:The only things that make sense for Hadida to be involved with are the 3D and the cheap scares. There was no monetary reason to retcon anything from the first film, no monetary excuse for the shitty dialogue, no monetary reason for the endless exposition. That was all Bassett, who damned near outright admitted he didn't like the first movie in interviews. I never once stated that everything is Bassett's fault, however, I'm seeing a lot of suggestion that absolutely everything that made the film bad is everyone's fault but his, and that's just wrong. As I said earlier in this thread, the retcons and atrocious dialogue are all on Bassett, made even worse by his outright lies to fans.
Isn't that what we just said? Bassett admitted to loving what Gans did atmospherically, but he said story wise, it was up for debate.
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Re: Screenplay

Post by Yuki »

JKristine35 wrote:The only things that make sense for Hadida to be involved with are the 3D and the cheap scares. There was no monetary reason to retcon anything from the first film, no monetary excuse for the shitty dialogue, no monetary reason for the endless exposition. That was all Bassett, who damned near outright admitted he didn't like the first movie in interviews. I never once stated that everything is Bassett's fault, however, I'm seeing a lot of suggestion that absolutely everything that made the film bad is everyone's fault but his, and that's just wrong. As I said earlier in this thread, the retcons and atrocious dialogue are all on Bassett, made even worse by his outright lies to fans.
That's not how filmmaking works. Just because it doesn't make sense to us doesn't mean Hadida might not have been a part of it, because executive meddling boils down to essentially "I don't like this, so change it, and don't ask why." Yes, Bassett is at fault, but he's not the sole thing wrong with the film. And yes, there is monetary reason to retcon things from the first film: gamers complained that it was different from the game's lore, and bringing it back in would make the more-vocal people happy.

Nobody's suggesting it's not Bassett's fault; we're saying the fault lies with both and we have no way of knowing whose part is whose.
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Re: Screenplay

Post by JKristine35 »

That's not how filmmaking works. Just because it doesn't make sense to us doesn't mean Hadida might not have been a part of it, because executive meddling boils down to essentially "I don't like this, so change it, and don't ask why."
You're forgetting that Hadida was also the main producer on the first film. Why would he change around his own work? That makes no logical sense whatsoever.
And yes, there is monetary reason to retcon things from the first film: gamers complained that it was different from the game's lore, and bringing it back in would make the more-vocal people happy.
A vocal minority of a game fanbase is not going to make them retcon stuff. That would be silly, because then they would be ignoring the much larger crowd that dropped their money on the first film, just to please a small amount of people. That would actually lose them money, not make more of it. It would confuse even the casual viewers of the first film, and that would create even more complaints. There is simply no monetary reason whatsoever to retcon the first film. Not to mention, Sharon's and Alessa's ages are both retconned from 9 to 11, Sharon is suddenly made into a baby kidnapped from her parents, Christabella's relationship to Dahlia is retconned so that Claudia is her sister instead, and the cult is living in the Otherword. None of those retcons have anything at all to do with the games, so why did they do them? That won't please the game fans, it will just confuse everyone who's seen more than 5 minutes of the first movie.

Also, a vocal majority of RE gamers hate the canon of the movies. Hadida produces those, so if retconning to make gamers happy is so important to him, why haven't we seen it happen there?
we have no way of knowing whose part is whose.
We have a pretty good idea of it.

* 3D - Bassett said before the film even came out that the 3D is Hadida's doing, so we know whose fault that is.

* Retcons - Bassett talked about the first film in not so nice terms, and there was no reason for half the retcons to have been added by a producer, so we know who created the retcons.

* Cheap Scares - Debatable. Bassett made a blog posting suggesting he was responsible for the scare style, but then went back and whined that it was everyone else's doing in the commentary.

* Script Length - Debatable. Bassett's script is a bit longer than the final film, however, his commentary about liking short movies suggests he wanted to cut stuff out anyway. And even if you try to blame Hadida for the script length, just look at the stuff he had cut out: Heather and Vincent porking in the hotel, a bunch more retcons, the Otherworld in a modern police station with lots of people (tell me the fans wouldn't have raged over that), Lisa Garland kidnapping a baby for Alessa, more slasher scenery just like the other stuff everyone complains about in the final film. The pacing problems were still there in the script, the unused characters who appeared and died just as quickly are still there. If Hadida was responsible for cutting it, I'd say you still couldn't blame him for the film's pacing problems. About the only thing that is an obvious change made by Hadida that hurt the film was to add Suki.
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Re: Screenplay

Post by Yuki »

Just because Bassett stated his distaste for some things doesn't mean he's responsible for every single change. Hell, reading the screenplay, it wouldn't surprise me at all if Hadida wanted Claudia to be the Missionary (although I'm liking this ending so far better than the filmed version).

Keep in mind that the first film came out ages ago. Bassett was tasked with explaining backstory and connecting the two as if audiences didn't see it--the changes don't surprise me, and again, despite having some statements here and there we can't actually know which changes were whose idea.

And I'm not forgetting Hadida was producer for the first film. He wanted the second film to be more profitable than the first, more mainstream--we know this. While changing things to be more in-line with the games (which could also prevent confusion in case people go to the games from the films, which of course is only a single offered explanation and we can't actually know what's going on in his, Bassett's, or Carmody's minds) is likely on Bassett, other changes could be on Hadida. He's concerned with trying to appeal to the mainstream more than anything else, because that is the main role of the producer: money.
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Re: Screenplay

Post by JKristine35 »

Claudia being the Missionary has nothing to do with anything, since that doesn't relate to the games or the first movie, and as many people like it as don't like it from what I've seen.

Who knows who changed what from the script? The point is, the film's major problems, such as retcons and atrocious dialogue, only point to one person. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that anyone but Bassett created the retcons, since there's no monetary reason for them, and Bassett even stated before production started that he wanted to go a different direction and not mention the first film at all (he wanted to do an SH2 adaptation), but Hadida insisted on a direct sequel to explain the first film. Retconning the entire film =/= explaining the film. I don't see how it's not crystal clear that only Bassett created the retcons, and that it was probably Hadida who forced him to leave the more obvious ones out of the final film. The only things I see that sound like Hadida had a role were in the title of the film, the 3D, maybe some of the scares, Suki, and probably the horrific Vincent x Heather romance.

Confusing people does not appeal to the mainstream, and likely lost SHR a fair chunk of money, thanks to angry film fans and confused reviewers. I have no idea why making transitions between the film and games easier would be important to anyone at all other than Konami, who had no role in the creation of SHR.
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Re: Screenplay

Post by tbonesays »

I'm puzzled as to where JKR's defense of Hadida is coming from. Here is what we know.

* the first film was disappointing, at least it fell short of an RE type franchise maker.

* the director and writer were changed although they had been willing to continue.

* a new writer/director was hired who had worked with the producer before.

* the plot of the their adaptation was abandoned and the sequel returned to closely following the games.

* the genre of the film shifted a bit, from mystery horror to slasher horror. That meant pop tarts instead of Rose's tears.


Those sound like executive decisions to me. Even if any of them were MJB's idea originally, he could not have done it without SH's permission.


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Re: Screenplay

Post by UrsineVulpine »

Unfortunately, the issue of there being no monetary reason for doing this and that is the opposite. Everything about this film boils down to monetary reasons. Seemingly the main rule of studio productions is that your audience are idiots, if your story, themes and ideas are too complex or you don't have enough kills or gore for a horror film or whatever then audiences won't get it and won't pay to see it. Everything you see in this film was created to make a profit, the attempts at linking it with the first film to bring an audience there, the retcons about the order and stuff are there because they needed an antagonist, if no one was in silent hill there would be no movie, the constant exposition to explain the entire backstory an the plot of this movie was to ensure that people understood what was going on an it wasn't too complex for the mainstream audience (although it was still utterly confusing, even for fans). Everything comes down to monetary reasons in the end with a production like this. If its not a safe bet, they won't support it. Just look at wha Resident Evil has become. It's a pure example of that type of film making, all profit and no brains, which you can't apply to Silent Hill because its so much more than Guns, Girls and Gore.

Sorry if that made no sense, I'm typing on my phone.

Also, story wise, I noticed that there was a credit in the ending credits for Adaption by Laurent Hadida? Which I thought was interesting. I'm not sure what the relation is between the two Hadidas, but ill bet there is one. Interesting that someone is credited for adapting it though...
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Re: Screenplay

Post by mikefile »

About the script itself. The first half actually intrigued me a bit, making me wonder whether some parts should have been transfered into the motion picture or not. However, the script in its entirety is just laughable. I know people are tired of bitching, but I can't restrain myself from stating once more, this is pure FANFICTION, thus I must say I'm glad they cut out half of it , saving us from potential extra 30 minutes of repetitive gory hopping meaty creatures from the shadows and self explanatory hollywood 'LOVE IS ALL YOU NEED' lines.
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