“I think [the movie] does justice to the video game,” Anderson said. “One of the things I loved about the video game when I first played it, I loved the creatures, but I loved the landscapes just as much, maybe even more. Because they were so beautiful and so evocative, and you really felt like you were plunged into a different world, but a world that felt real. I think that's one of the things Capcom have always done really well, is they build the ecology of the game exceptionally well.”
Check out the trailer for Monster Hunter below:Creating the monsters, the characters and the franchise’s ecology in a realistic way in movie format was one of Anderson’s top priorities. His mandate to the entire Monster Hunter movie team, from the props department to the costuming to the VFX team, was to try to get as close as a one-to-one match from the movie to the game as possible: “Let’s just do it exact.”
That direct translation was easy for things like weapons or outfits, but a bit trickier for the monsters themselves. That’s where Anderson’s close relationship with Fujioka became especially important, and the director leaned on the Monster Hunter franchise expert to make sure he did the creatures justice.
“I really tried to stick as close to the creatures as possible,” said Anderson. “Because there's quite a lot of movement and motion blur and everything [in video games], the real fine detail is hard to judge in the video game sometimes. But obviously Fujioka-san had a very precise image in his mind when he was creating the game. There were things that we hadn't realized existed, but in his mind there absolutely were.”
I really tried to stick as close to the creatures as possible.
Fujioka’s insights were all implemented to make the final versions of the monsters “pretty precise and exact,” both from a visual design standpoint as well as sound design. A prime example of how Fujioka’s insights helped shape the design of the creatures came in the form of the Diablos: “Originally we had kind of the claws were more pointed, and [Fujioka] said no, because it's burrowing through the sand. The points of the fingernails should be more rounded and blunt. Which I mean, I don't know if you noticed that. I don't know if anyone will notice that, but it's in there. If you kind of zoom, if you pause and you zoom into the tips of the claws, they're all rounded and blunt.”“
Watch the video below for a deeper look at the making of the creatures in Monster Hunter:Anderson attempted a similar level of authenticity when it came to adapting the non-player characters from Monster Hunter World into the movie. While Jovovich’s Captain Artemis is unique to the movie, both Ron Perlman’s Admiral and Hirona Yamazaki’s Handler are characters players will recognize. That’s another reason Anderson leaned heavily on Monster Hunter World as a jumping off point; while each game has had different characters players encounter, none of the NPCs have been as fleshed out as the ones in World.
“They were there occasionally, like there was the ship's captain on the sand ship. But I mean, he's in, he's out. He's a flavor of a character, but you wouldn't call him a real character in the way that the Admiral is, for example,” said Anderson. “The Admiral, he's this gruff older guy who's like a fearsome warrior. He doesn't suffer fools gladly, the line, ‘Don't keep me waiting, I hate waiting,’ we lifted directly from the game. Ron was trying to get a lot of his mannerisms in there. There's more character in the non-player characters in Monster Hunter World. That kind of made it clear which characters we needed, and also gave the actors more of a template to work from.”
You feel it's on the same continent ... but they are fresh and different locations.
Anderson and his team had more freedom when it came to envisioning the Monster Hunter movie’s settings. About 85 percent of the film takes place in the Monster Hunter video game setting, inspired directly from Monster Hunter World. Because this story is supposed to take place directly after World, Anderson’s idea was that the characters would have just “pushed beyond slightly” the part of the New World continent that you venture into in the video game.“
“We wanted to kind of emulate and pay homage to existing landscapes from the game, but kind of do our own version of them,” said Anderson. “A lot of it looks like the Wildspire Wastes, so we went with exactly the same, that kind of diagonal kind of pointy rock design and everything, but with slightly more kind of rolling dunes. Whereas in the Wildspire Wastes, when you have the sand it's an orange. We went deliberately for a white sand feel. You feel it's on the same continent, you feel it's maybe not too far away from the locations that exist in the game, but they are fresh and different locations.”He added, “There are going to be different environments that you haven't been in before, but they're not traveling so far that it would be like Monster Hunter World: Iceborne, where the nature of the landscape changes so dramatically. You're not going to suddenly have snowy wastelands.”
Keeping the locations recognizable had practical reasons too: Anderson wanted the creative license to use some of the game franchise’s most iconic monsters, and wanted for it to logically make sense to the games’ fans why creatures like the Diablos would be popping up in the environments he selected. Fujioka offered his guidance in this regard as well: “When you talk to Fujioka-san, he'll tell you that this creature feeds on that creature, that feeds on that creature, and they live in this environment because of ... I mean, he's thought out the entire ecology.”
Anderson said the decision to shoot Monster Hunter on location (the film largely shot in South Africa) instead of on sound stages or against green screens was in part to do justice to the gorgeous environments from the games. But it also was in an effort to make this film distinct from his previous well-known video game adaptations, the Resident Evil film series.
“Certainly I made a conscious decision to change the style of filmmaking from the Resident Evil films,” he said. “I wanted to break away from that studio filmmaking that Resident Evil had become, to do a landscape picture. I'd never really done one of those before. ... I felt to do it justice, we just couldn't do it against a greenscreen with some fake turf. That would have been the easier route to go, but I felt like the game deserved going to a real ecology, to real landscapes, and shooting it for real.”For more from IGN's week of Premiere content, learn about how almost 85 percent of Monster Hunter takes place in the video game world, and why Milla Jovovich's Captain Artemis is from our world. Monster Hunter is slated to hit theaters in the UK on December 4 and in the US on December 30.
