Metal Gear Solid Movie - Jordan Vogt-Roberts Interview

Audio transcription

"We at Gamereactor are covering Gamelab Live 2020, but that means we are not physically in Barcelona, we are covering it remotely."

"It's not night time out of the office right now, because our next interviewee is in the US.
And he's not exactly a game maker, but he's very related to games, and he's the man behind the Metal Gear Solid movie."

"Thank you so much for joining us, Jordan.
Thank you for having me.
You were telling me before how things are going in the US regarding this quarantine."

"How difficult is it for you to work right now?
For me, I'm kind of a recluse and a hermit anyway.
And my home really is set up as...
It's a big space with offices, and giant whiteboards."

"So I'm able to be creative here, and I don't really like leaving the house much in general anyway.
So believe me, I've never more in my life wanted to be able to go and see friends and go to a bar or drink or whatever."

"But I'm also... I have asthma.
I'm immunocompromised in certain ways because of that.
So I take this very seriously.
I've been very strict about the quarantine."

"And for me, that translates to...
A, I'm able to develop scripts.
I've actually sold a couple new movies in this time.
So I'm actually related to video games."

"And part of my commercial career is fully CG commercials.
So there's actually two video game launch campaigns that I'm working on right now.
And I'm able to do that stuff from home of going back and forth with storyboards, then going back and forth with previs, and then shots."

"It's not the same as sitting there and being in a room and talking about all this stuff.
You kind of have Zoom, Google Meet, Skype exhaustion as every single one of those programs challenges you as you try and sign in."

"It makes you feel like...
It makes me feel like my parents when they didn't understand computers when they were young.
Honestly, in a very weird entropy kind of way, the last six months for me has really been about getting healthy in a lot of ways and changing a lot of my lifestyle."

"And so as I've gotten much better and much healthier on a physical level from some things I was dealing with, the world has then completely fallen into chaos and disarray.
So in a very strange Newton's second law, thermodynamics kind of way, as I got better, everything else got way worse."

"So maybe I need to start getting much worse and then the world will get better. I don't know.
But I've been able to work really well from home.
There are definitely times..."

"My mother works in a hospital, my father's in Detroit, they have a real hotbed, both of them are.
Currently all my family members are safe and that's my main worry.
And there are times when the exhaustion of it or the weight of the world definitely hits you and you don't want to do anything."

"But oddly enough, this time for me, in terms of development, script writing, being able to go back and play video games that I didn't have time for back in the day, I watched the entire five seasons of The Wire on HBO, which I'd put off forever."

"So I actually feel like I'm being relatively productive.
I've almost beat Breath of the Wild, which I had put off before because it was too daunting.
So yeah, I'm trying to make the most of it."

"I think we have a couple of things in common now that you mentioned. I'm asthmatic as well.
And also I think we both grew up with, let's be honest, terrible video game adaptations to movies."

"So how does one nail a modern video game adaptation?
I see you have Pikachu, a huge Pikachu behind you.
So both Detective Pikachu and the Sonic movies recently, those were really nice and were successful."

"So how are you approaching the Metal Gear movie for it to be like a proper video game adaptation?
Well, I think there's a couple of things with that.
Yes, we grew up in a time."

"Part of the reason that I'm so obsessed with video game adaptations and doing all these video game commercials is A, I sort of generally like hanging out with people in the video game industry and talking to them."

"I find those conversations more inspiring somehow than a lot of people in the film industry.
And I have a lot of great friends.
It's an honor and I feel fortunate to be able to do a panel with people like Kiki and Amy, two absolute legends and badass women."

"And precisely because we grew up with a lot of bad adaptations, I think that that creates a hurt in us.
We saw these things that we love get misunderstood.
So I carry that pain with me."

"And so it's part of my battle cry and part of the chip that I carry on my shoulder of wanting to right that wrong.
And that's also why if you look at a lot of my video game commercials, and there's several that actually haven't even come out yet, one of my favorite things when you watch those, especially the PUBG ones and the Destiny ones, even though those sometimes tonally are very different than the games themselves, the comments on YouTube collectively, there's a bunch of people saying things like, man, this is how I feel when I'm playing with my friends."

"This is how I feel when I play that game.
And so a big part of it is about translating feeling.
And translating what a game evokes from you emotionally as you play an active experience and then how you translate those feelings into the passive experience of watching a movie."

"And I don't think it's as simple as just taking plot and character and things like that.
I really think movies like Snowpiercer or Edge of Tomorrow, which are not based on video games, but have a lot of core video game mechanics in a strange way baked into it."

"Snowpiercer really is like a side-scroller beat-em-up.
The whole thing is a left-to-right experience.
And Edge of Tomorrow captures the respawning save point mechanics of what a video game is."

"And I think that sometimes it's going to be, A, it really took people like Sam Raimi and people who grew up loving comic books to come in and have that technical film credibility to them and understand these source materials."

"So it took that, and now I think we're reaching a point with me, Dan Trachtenberg, there's a handful of guys who are younger, who grew up with video games being a part of our DNA, being just as much of an influence as movies were."

"If I was smarter and video games were more accessible, I probably would have went into games instead of movies as a kid, but I was not good at math, and at that point video games were about coding and things like that that I would not have been able to handle."

"And I really love this position that I'm in right now of being able to act as a bit of a liaison between these two worlds and translating them.
And Metal Gear itself is such a dense thing where you're taking on a beloved, sprawling property that not only has an incredibly intricate plot and incredibly complex characters that represent the walking, talking ideologies and philosophies of Kojima-san and these very western tropes translated through a Japanese mind and spread back out in an interesting way."

"And so you not only have just the pure plotting, but then you have the emotions of what that gameplay makes you feel.
What it felt to be sneaking around and to know that being caught had real consequence."

"What it felt to be fucking with guards and to knock on a thing and run around the way.
Huh? What was that noise?
And just the Japanese goofiness of finding people de-panced or what I refer to as almost a Tarkovsky military surrealism."

"The magic real elements that are in that game and the almost survival horror elements that are in that game.
There's a lot of really complex tones and things in Metal Gear and it's very easy for people or a studio to just sort of view it as a futuristic military franchise."

"And that's not what it is.
You have to first and foremost understand all of those things and intelligently know how to focus in on and sort of mix and match and remix in terms of what story you're telling and tap into parts of the story."

"Like the original Metal Gear, Boss and Snake actually facing off, which is not something that's been rendered to the fidelity of the rest of the games in the franchise.
And then for me, there's a device that we have in the script that I love that really plays into some of the core thematics."

"A big part of those games for Kojima fundamentally is asking how do we make the whole world whole again?
How do we make ourselves whole again?
And the cycle of pain that we as people are caught in, that the world is caught in, and that these soldiers in particular are caught in."

"And so for me, there's a device that we're playing with that I think it's not what the Edge of Tomorrow thing does, but in the same way that that sort of is like thinking outside the box, we're applying I think a very unexpected and very Kojima-san-esque fucking with your audience, but in a way that allows you to properly tell this story."

"In a way that those games felt disruptive because they fucked with the format and they challenged your expectations of games.
And so it's equally important to me to not just take these elements of the movie, but to be equally disruptive."

"You know, in the film environment.
And then there's the tightrope I have to walk of like, you know, not just being fan service, but to the legion of fans who are out there who have been waiting for this movie, to the legion of fans who believe that a Metal Gear movie can never exist or should never exist."

"And then the whole generation of people who don't know what it is and don't know why people like me are obsessed with it.
You know, I have to then thread that needle in the same way no one knew who Star-Lord and Rocket Raccoon and Groot and people like that were five years ago, but now you get in an Uber and they've got a little Funko Pop of those characters sitting on the dashboard of their car."

"I believe that Sniper Wolf and Revolver Ocelot and Otacon and Snake and the Boss and all of those characters are as iconic as the characters from the MCU.
And so, you know, as much as I want to make a movie that the fans say, fuck yeah, that's my Metal Gear, I also want to make a movie that the rest of the world sees why Kojima-san's work affected us and touched us so much."

"What's the status of the project?
Is it still due on 2021?
I ask, of course, due to the current circumstances.
And what can you tell us about the exact timeline and characters that you are covering?
I can't get too much into the timeline."

"I would love to tell you because every time that I actually tell somebody or like a lot of the concept artists, they say, holy shit, that's so smart.
I would have never expected that, you know, and because I talk to a lot of concept artists who have worked on this art with me."

"And, you know, there are people that I have relationships with and trust, so I give them a full rundown of what we're doing.
And generally, they're like, whoa, that is very Metal Gear in an unexpected way."

"So I wish I could tell you more, but I can tell you that the timeline itself sort of plays directly into the, like, unexpected device and the cycle of pain that I'm talking about.
And for me, it is important to be able to contrast the sort of sins of our fathers of the, you know, there's these great quotes about, you know, how a warrior is destined to stay on the battlefield, you know, and they're trapped there until, you know, they're killed and set free, essentially."

"And they have to continue that struggle until that happens.
And so therefore, like, contrasting Snake's journey and Boss's journey and the mistakes that were made that continued the cycle of pain that they're all trying to break free from is important."

"COVID is disrupting everything right now, so I can't really give much of an update on the status of it.
You know, I wish that I could be more firm about, like, when that's happening and things like that."

"You know, I actively every day, you know, want to be making this movie because I love it so much.
I love the script that Derek Connolly wrote.
It's so perfectly Metal Gear and so, I think, like, disruptive and fresh for audiences."

"In the meantime, I'm really advocating and fighting to try and get an animated series going with the original voice cast because there's so much love for people like David Hayter and his representation of Snake and all of those characters from Campbell to Otacon to Wolf."

"Like, you know, all of those original voice actors, like, brought so much to why people love them.
And so, I'm really advocating and trying to fight to get that done in conjunction with kind of this live-action movie that we're doing and hopefully people see the value and the, like, the true, I don't know, excitement that could come from that because I really do think the Metal Gear world is big enough where you can have these dual tracks and you can have a live-action thing and an animated thing going on at the same time in an art style that, like, is cool and disruptive in its own way and honors sort of a lot of Shinkawa's art and designs."

"So, you know, everything's caught up in studio politics.
So, I really wish I could give you more of an update, but I really can't.
Would you have liked to have Kojima-san together with you throughout the whole process?
Do you think that would have helped the project somehow or make it even extremely difficult to move forward as he's an author?
He's really into filmmaking himself."

"He's a real fan of filmmaking as well.
How would you think that would have come off?
Well, Kojima-san and I have become very close over the last couple of years.
You know, he was a big fan of Kong, and when Kings of Summer, my first movie, was released in Japan, he actually wrote in the liner notes of it, and to my surprise, in the liner notes, he literally wrote, like, a very glowing paragraph about me and our relationship and about how he believes that I'm the only person who, you know, could and should direct a Metal Gear Solid movie, which kind of blew my mind."

"And I take, you know, and I cherish that.
We've had many, many conversations.
We talk, you know, we talk ad nauseum about film because that's one of the things that he loves talking about."

"He really, he's one of the biggest cinephiles I know.
He loves film.
And so he has been, you know, I've shown him a lot of stuff.
I've shown him a lot of the art, and I've talked to him about a lot of the things that I'm doing."

"But he also, as someone who loves and respects filmmakers and filmmaking, to some degree kind of has an approach of, like, well, in order for this to be good, in the same way for the original Metal Gear, he was translating, you know, Escape from New York and Guns of the Navarone and, you know, all of these movies, you know, El Topo and these movies that were huge influences to him and, like, the American machismo in, like, 80s action movies."

"He was taking those things and translating them through his brain, and they became spat out in something that was far more, like, potent and important than those things.
And so I think that he has a sense that in order for it to be a good movie, it sort of needs to go through a similar sort of, like, filtration and process where I take those things in and then filter them through me."

"There, believe me, though, there is, like, there, like, he, there's, like, there's a character that I have in the movie that basically, like, would be him and the way that it's handled.
Really? That's who knows."

"Well, the way that, yeah, the way that it's handled, though, is, like, in sort of a meaningful way.
Okay.
Like, it's a quick thing, but it, like, it thematically represents something that I think would be sort of shocking to people, but also, like, in line with something that Kojima-san would do."

"Whether that actually ends up being Kojima-san or not, like, you know, the sentiment of the character is there.
But it's, you know, it's super important to me that he, I would love to have him as involved as I could."

"You know, there's obviously certain legalities and issues, you know, you know, with Konami and his relationship, and I need to respect that.
And, you know, I think Kojima-san also, like, as much as he is involved, would want to be involved, you know, also wants to respect, like, me as their director."

"But believe me, it's a dream to be able to go to Japan and sit and have dinner with him and talk about movies and games and to be able to dig into really weird specifics about things about Metal Gear that have never really been put in interviews before."

"You know, like, I have to pinch myself that I have these, like, casual conversations with someone who now is my friend, but also is, like, a legend to me and, like, a huge, a huge shaping force in my, like, influential DNA as a filmmaker and as a gamer."

"But, look, I would love to have him as involved as he could be.
I would love to have him on set.
I would love to, you know, there's all sorts of, like, potential red tape around that."

"But it's important to me that this is a movie unlike, you know, Alan Moore and Watchmen, where, like, you know, you have a creator completely sort of disowning something.
Like, you know, it's important to me that this is something that, like, he is like, yeah, this is my thing, and I love the translation that this has gone through."

"That sounds great. I think we're running out of time.
I'm really looking forward to the movie.
Whenever it releases to 2021, 2022, doesn't matter.
I will be there and also looking forward to your next projects."

"Thank you so much for your time, Jordan.
Stay safe and healthy, please.
You too. You too. Thank you."