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Banned
AlloCiné (the French equivalent of IMDb) has a very interesting interview with David Cage (made in September 5), on many different subjects.
I particularly liked Cage's emphasis on always trying new ideas (to the point of leaving their tech demos as tech demos only), not relying on old tricks/'videogame language', on thinking outside the box and break new grounds (same reason I love Valve), disregarding skill-based mechanics to focus on story, meaning and emotions. I've got a lot of respect for the guy, there should be more developers like him.
Also, working with such talented/experienced actors seems to have been fun, despite being a lot of work.
Source: http://www.allocine.fr/article/fichearticle_gen_carticle=18627370.html
I particularly liked Cage's emphasis on always trying new ideas (to the point of leaving their tech demos as tech demos only), not relying on old tricks/'videogame language', on thinking outside the box and break new grounds (same reason I love Valve), disregarding skill-based mechanics to focus on story, meaning and emotions. I've got a lot of respect for the guy, there should be more developers like him.
Also, working with such talented/experienced actors seems to have been fun, despite being a lot of work.
Source: http://www.allocine.fr/article/fichearticle_gen_carticle=18627370.html
Meeting with 'Beyond: Two Souls' creator David Cage
Exclusive Sony Playstation title expected on October 9, "Beyond Two Souls" is the new creation of French studio Quantic Dream and Game Designer David Cage. Halfway between cinema and video games, the title also features the actress Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe, who were trying Performance Capture for the first time.
Often, if not always, the revolution taking place in the gaming industry is measured in terms of progress and technological achievements, at a time when it's all about "Next Gen" consoles and -sometimes- the gratuitious one-upmanship of productions. In 2010, the French Game Designer David Cage formulated this revolution in other words. What if it should be done by exploring new ways of storytelling? That was the bet of the game Heavy Rain. Bet more than won, with 3.2 million copies sold.
On October 9, his Quantic Dream studio will release Beyond: Two Souls. A title conceived and designed as a thriller, always offering an experience halfway between cinema and video games. With no less than two guest stars who are trying Performance Capture for the first time: Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe.
Being a figure both endearing and divisive, both among players and within the profession, David Cage wants above all, as he says himself, to create experiences "that make sense, because a lot of video games today seem meaningless." Remarks which may seem at least self-centered, but David Cage is far from being the only one to feel that way.
For instance, it's the same conclusion drawn by Jeffrey Yohalem, the brilliant writer of one of the best games released in 2012, Far Cry 3, a title yet far different from the production signed by Cage, and was justly rewarded with a BAFTA for his outstanding work on writing the Ubisoft hit.
AlloCiné: In hindsight, do you think your approach to the game "Heavy Rain" has been understood? By players and professionals?
David Cage: In terms of the players we have sold -as of today- 3.2 million copies of Heavy Rain. So there are 3.2 million people who have subscribed to our approach and at least five million who have played the game. Probably 7 to 8 million people have been exposed to it in one way or another, since many players say they have shared the experience with someone.
As for the gaming industry, many talented figures like Peter Molyneux or Warren Spector have publicly stated that they liked their experience with Heavy Rain very much. The game is cited as a reference by people from Telltale. Not to mention the developers who clearly took inspiration from it without saying it officially. It's all good, even though I was not trying to make this game a source of inspiration. Heavy Rain may have been a source of liberation for people who wanted to tell stories in a video game and did not dare, or doubted that this was possible.
AlloCiné: Barely three years have passed between "Heavy Rain" and "Beyond". With the success of the previous title, I imagine that the development of "Beyond" occurred serenely.
David Cage: I don't know if you can create by being sure of your case, knowing full well that the project will be a success... I cannot work with this mindset. I need to question myself all the time. These days I met many people eager to play Beyond and I hope they will be satisfied, but I still have uncertainties about my choices, as with Heavy Rain...
The development was this time faster because for the first time, we have not spent a year trying to convince an publisher. After Heavy Rain, Sony asked us what we wanted to do: I had a one-sheet synopsis for Beyond, I told them about a story with a girl having a link with an entity, the publisher told me "Deal! Let's do it." straight away. They practically gave me a blank check allowing me to make the game that I wanted to do. In addition, there were more than 200 people working on the game, almost twice as many as Heavy Rain, which also sometimes has made the management of the art direction more complicated. Speaking in terms of workload, it was like three or four times Heavy Rain.
AlloCiné: Technically, what has changed between the two titles?
David Cage: Everything. There's a new graphics engine, based largely on our parallel development for the PlayStation 4. A new special effects engine, a new animation engine. Performance capture has completely changed the way we work: the acting was scanned in its entirety via this technique. There's much more variety in the gameplay experience, as the story unfolds over fifteen years. The sets are very different, the largest (that?) can be explored. There are intimate and emotional scenes as well as epic and spectacular ones. The scope of the game has nothing to do with what we did on Heavy Rain. Visually, it was almost like there's a generation gap between the two games. Yet all the scenes shown from Beyond run in real time on a PlayStation 3.
AlloCiné: On the front page of the press release of "Beyond Two Souls", there's a quote from you: "When Tarantino shows a new movie, nobody asks him if it's fun. They ask him about the content and the topic." What exactly did you mean? Emphasize the seriousness of a video game?
David Cage: I must have made this statement in English, some time ago, in response to a question that was often asked to me: "Where's the fun?" [he said in English]... But what does that mean, for a video game to be "fun"? Because the word does not exactly have the same sense as "amusement" in French. Do people ask filmmakers if their film -which can be a drama- is fun? For a long time in the video game industry, we had to say where the fun was in a title. I was asked this question on Fahrenheit and on Heavy Rain. Objectively, we cannot say that Heavy Rain is a fun game. Did people want to imply by this question this it was an uninteresting game? I think it offered a different experience.
AlloCiné: We still feel that you are still in a process of deconstruction of videogame codes. There's no Game Over in your title for example. Is it still videogames we're talking about?
David Cage: When you want to build something new, you can sometimes it do on pre-existing things. But some other times, you must bulldoze everything away. Most other game developers try to build upon a historical base, and add narrative and emotion afterwards. I've never considered that this base was a key prerequisite of what a video game should be. I do not think a gun, cars, platforms, people to kill are the mandatory elements of the interactive experience. They represent a form of interactive experience. I do not want guns, lives, game overs, points, because they don't match the experience that I want to create. I understand the other games, I appreciate them, but I want to build my own little "house" on the side. It will be to my taste and not based on concepts invented thirty years ago.
AlloCiné: The PS3 user base is estimated to about 70 million machines. But have you ever wanted to adapt "Beyond" on PS4? Especially since the game comes out two months before the new Sony console...
David Cage: Fahrenheit was one of the latest games in the PlayStation 2 game library and this contributed to its success. It comes at a time when we have much experience on the PS3 and the install base for it, in fact, is very broad. It will probably take four or five years before there are many PS4s in the world. And there was not just the financial issue, we really intend to reach as many people as possible.
AlloCiné: You regularly release short films before your games. This was the case with "The Casting" before "Heavy Rain", "Kara" before "Beyond" and most recently "The Dark Sorcerer"... Have you ever had the idea to develop your short films as games?
David Cage: No, we place ourselves in the same light as Pixar, which produced short films in inbetween full-length movies, to try new ideas. I wrote Kara to test a new graphics engine, the one used for Beyond. We also wanted to experience the Performance Capture. I didn't want to work with Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe using a technology that I had no control on. This test also allowed me to imagine what would directing actors be like. I wrote the synopsis of Kara in two hours, but we cast hundreds of actresses for the title role, before finding the androgynous face of Valorie Curry, who delivered an incredible performance.
The film had a huge impact, even beyond the general public and the video game industry. I know that Pixar and Weta Digital -the special effects studio working with Peter Jackson- were impressed. Even today, a year and a half after the release of the short film, I get daily emails of people from the internet, gamers or not, telling me to make a Kara game and some are even willing to co-finance its development via Kickstarter! It's very touching and at the same time we wouldn't want to disappoint people. Same for The Dark Sorcerer, there are no plans for a PS4 game based on it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjPd3-VnL2E
AlloCiné: I was a little surprised by Ellen Page's words in a video module we've seen: the video game world was unfamiliar to her. It surprises me a little, considering her age. In contrast, an actor in his fifties like Willem Dafoe has agreed to participate in the adventure. How did you convince them?
David Cage: They had very different approaches. Ellen discovered video games as a child, but she had to leave the family home early to go to on shootings. However, this media continues to fascinate her. She was very attracted to the character of Jodie Holmes. She told me several times that it was a role that Hollywood didn't offer her. She found it a real challenge as an actress to play the same character at different stages of her life. Especially since Jodi is like her in many ways, from what she told me.
As for Willem, he is a versatile actor, he won an Oscar for Platoon, he worked with the greatest filmmakers... But he also has a great career on the stage. He had a theater company for nearly thirty years and this year he played alone on stage in an avant-garde and risky play. He was in search of new experiences. I think he was impressed by the passion that we showed for this project. He felt that we didn't want to simply make money on his name, but rather that we wanted him for his skills as an actor.
AlloCiné: How does one direct an actor like Willem Dafoe? Did he not make suggestions for the mise-en-scène?
David Cage: I think people who are very talented are respectful of the work of others. I had been able to verify it with David Bowie [publisher's note: on The Nomad Soul in 1999]. They have nothing left to prove. They do not want to collaborate on a project to satisfy their ego, but to serve the project with their talent. This is really what I felt on the shooting stage. At no time did Ellen, Willem or Bowie fifteen years ago come to tell me what I should do. Never. They spontaneously put themselves in the service of my vision, and tried to serve it as well as possible. Therefore, directing the actors was very easy. They knew how to give us emotion, drama, and understood everything very quickly. They do more than playing a role, they become their characters.
AlloCiné: I'm surprised but - as I prepared for our interview and to go back to what you've just said, I read about writer Jeffrey Yohalem [Ed: in "IG Magazine" No. 27], who worked on "Far Cry 3". He had the same opinion as yours: "Playing a game is like living the acting skills of a film" he said. Do you agree with this statement?
David Cage: Yes, playing is like a simulation of life, somehow. It's like being in situations, realistic or not, which you must solve and which involve us emotionally. Most of us don't live the same things that the protagonists from Heavy Rain do - fortunately. But playing such an adventure can make you ask yourself what you'd do in such a situation. As for Beyond: Two Souls, the journey is different: it's clearly about living the life of someone else over fifteen years.
AlloCiné: Shouldn't video games better appropriate cinematic techniques like slow-motion, for example? It's often used in the same way in cinematics or Cut-Scenes, while the slowing of time could allow to show feelings / emotion in a game?
David Cage: I agree, we've also made ​​some slow motion scenes on Heavy Rain, particularly in the cemetery. But appropriating the grammar of film takes a long time. With Heavy Rain, we were still fascinated by the ease with which we could do things, such as cameras that were easy to use to zoom or move in all directions. So we sometimes abused it. On Beyond, we made ​​sure that camera movements were justified. As a result, the game is better made in terms of direction, as we have integrated the famous codes of the seventh art.
AlloCiné: Three years ago, you told me that the film industry was watching the video game world with a mixture of curiosity tinged with snobbery. Do you still feel that way?
David Cage: Yes, I do. By the way, you can often read in a negative movie review that the movie suffers from a videogame aesthetic. It's one of the worst judgment from a critic who'd want to that bash a movie. I understand why. A number of video games work on bad taste, gratuitous violence, nonsensical elements. Now, when I hear Steven Spielberg or George Lucas's skepticism about the possibility of telling a story in which the player is the hero, I collapse. They don't know the subject. It's a shame, because today the exciting things a narrative point of view emerge from video games.
AlloCiné: So you think that there's a lack of meaning in the world of video games?
David Cage: Personally, I have struggled for years -since Fahrenheit- to talk about emotion in video games. Everyone thought I was an alien. Today, things have changed. Developers are willing to put emotion into their title and make it a point. Even today Shooters want depth and narration. The next battle is meaning. Many of today's video games seem meaningless. Their developers may have created an emotional moment, but have failed to tell something strong. This will certainly take years to change, even if things are already on the right track: there are now real authors behind the games, not just marketing teams trying to tell the story which has the best chance of seducing the 15-25 age range. These authors should work more freely, without censorship and find a way to tell a strong story through an interactive medium.
People don't talk much about censorship in video games, but we're at the same level as cinema in the 1950s. Having two characters kissing, a somewhat sensual scene, a drop of blood, all those things pose a problem. Particularly for everything related to sex. We should, one day, be allowed to have a game about politics, homosexuality, disability... You can talk about whatever you want in a game when it's done with sensitivity, with intelligence and taste. In Beyond, there's a moment when Jodie lives in the street. We tried to put the player in the shoes of someone who lives outside, who needs to eat and is cold. We think that this experience could change at a small level the way people look at the homeless. The game also allows this kind of approach and for me this is the most interesting thing there is.
AlloCiné: Beyond Two Souls was presented at the last Tribeca Film Festival -a very rare thing. How did that happen?
David Cage: It was the first time a video game was in the official selection at Tribeca [Ed: there was a presentation of the game LA Noire by Rockstar in 2011, but it was part of a workshop meeting] Traditionally, the publisher pays for a partnership with this type of event. That time, we were invited by the organizers of the festival. We were curious to see the reaction of the public, which was not only made of gamers. We presented 45 minutes of the game, the scene where Jodie is homeless, with American actor David Coburn, who lives in Paris and who was in the TV series Platane. People did not know what to expect. They were totally taken aback by the social dimension, the words and the acting. Their response was very positive. The organizers of Tribeca, who also organized the Sundance Film Festival, wanted to select the game after seeing this scene. They said: "That is the future of storytelling! We should talk about video games if that's where the future is headed!".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9D1N-MHwog
AlloCiné: I guess this made you feel more confident in your approach?
David Cage: Of course, this response is encouraging. But we must not lose sight that this is relatively marginal, and the gaming industry is massively producing shooters and car games. Just look at the games scheduled for Christmas to be convinced.
AlloCiné: Robert De Niro, who is the father of the Tribeca Film Festival, has a nice formula: "People have to care about video games and help them, because it's a child of cinema"...
David Cage: Beautiful formula indeed. Bravo, Robert! Let's play together! (Laughs) He's right. Moreover, working with Ellen, Willem or composer Hans Zimmer, we tried to build bridges between the two sectors. We respect cinema, cinema must respect us as young medium, a little brother who should be encouraged. We're not going to compete at all, just coexist and influence each other.
AlloCiné: You talk about Hans Zimmer. Why did you choose him to sign the soundtrack of "Beyond"?
David Cage: Initially, we were supposed to work with Normand Corbeil, who had worked in Heavy Rain but who unfortunately passed away at the beginning of the project. I really liked the work of Hans with Lorne Balfe on Inception, regarding the musical texture. I thought they had managed to create a true musical identity. We met them, specifying that we didn't want a typical video game music, which would sound like a worse version of John Williams. We wanted a cinema-like work on themes, on melodies. We warned Hans and Lorne that the volume required by Beyond was important: 15 hours of content - not 90 minutes.
They quickly sent us satisfactory themes and collaboration took place very simply. We felt like we spoke the same language. They immediately understood what we wanted to say through this story, and they quickly knew how to translate our intentions into musical notes. The recording took place in London with a symphony orchestra. But they also used synthetic textures to evoke the blending of two worlds - the organic world of Jodie and the more strange and intriguing world of Aiden, the entity.
AlloCiné: Last question: In 2011, we learned that "Heavy Rain" would be adapted into a film by David Milch, creator of "Deadwood" series. What's the status on the project
David Cage: I have no great revelation to make. Of course, Milch wrote a pretty surprising script. The rights of the game have been optioned by Warner. We don't know much more than that, especially since we were absorbed by the development of our latest game. By the way, Beyond seduced studios, too, since they come to us, asking to sign the rights. We watch that with great interest while keeping a distance. To really invest in these projects, you'd have to move to Los Angeles and chase agents all day long. If it materializes, good. But it's none of my priorities and my current work.
