In the Name of the King QA

In the line of Uwe Boll leaving the big budget film industry, GameDaily has an interview with John Rhys-Davies (Gimli to most of you) on his role in Boll’s latest failure. First is an amusing answer to the question “why do these actors join Boll’s films, anyway?”

GameDaily BIZ: What attracted you to this movie?

I’ll be honest with you. The builders have not finished my house and I was going mad and I thought, this could be fun. Who else is in it? Burt’s in it? Oh, I’m on. Lets go and see if we can make a success out of this one. Do I regret that? No, not at all, I think this could do well.

More pertinent is a discussion of adapting games to film in general.

BIZ: In the Name of the King is one 40 movies based on video games in development in Hollywood. What are your thoughts about Hollywood’s infatuation with games?

You really want me to answer that? It’s a disaster. It’s a disaster. One or two may succeed, and I hope this is one of them, but the structure of a game is completely unlike the structure of a film. And it shows the despair of the studios and producers that these movies even get a look at. If we had good writing, it would not happen. I think that right at the moment, the film industry in Hollywood is in a crisis because we have successfully excluded young and able talent for so long that now there is nothing left. There are only remakes and adaptations. There’s this mentality of “oh my god. lets try to find another genre and see if we can invigorative that.” When you look at the fact that only one in 10 films makes its money back, or makes enough money to keep the rest going, of these 40-odd films from games, are you going to see four successes out of that? I doubt it. If you see one or two, that will be good. It’s dumb. It’s stupid. But then who ever said the film industry was being controlled by smart people?