Return to Silent Hill follows James (Jeremy Irvine), a man broken after his relationship with the love of his life, Mary (Hannah Emily Anderson), ends. When a mysterious letter from her calls him back to Silent Hill, he finds a once-recognisable town transformed by an unknown evil.
While James desperately searches for Mary, he encounters terrifying creatures and begins to unravel the mystery of what happened to the town. But as he descends deeper into the darkness, the secrets he uncovers lead to a horrifying truth, and James finds himself struggling to hold on long enough to save his one true love.
Directed by Christophe Gans, who returns to the franchise after helming Silent Hill in 2006, the movie is a chilling adaptation of the beloved Silent Hill 2 video game. Earlier this week, we were fortunate enough to sit down with the filmmaker to discuss how he approached the upcoming sequel.
In the player below, Gans talks us through what it was like coming back to the world of Silent Hill two decades on, explaining why, despite the advancements in technology, relying on practical sets and real performers was essential for him.
Gans, who counts Brotherhood of the Wolf and 2014's Beauty and the Beast among his credits, also explains the challenges of adapting a video game, bringing Pyramid Head back to the big screen, and touches on some possible spoilers while talking about choosing the right ending for this story (Silent Hill 2 features multiple possibilities for players).
You can check out our full interview with Gans on Return to Silent Hill below.
Return to Silent Hill is also a return to the franchise for you after almost two decades. I would love to know what it was that drew you back to this world of Silent Hill so long after that first film.
Simply because I wanted to adapt Silent Hill 2 back in 2006, but I had the feeling that it was maybe too early. It was something so sophisticated and so different from the films that we were seeing back then, 20 years ago. Then I decided just to adapt the first game. For me, it was a wise decision because I put all my energy into recreating the world of Silent Hill, of the environment, and it was plenty of work to do that. And now, 20 years later, I said, okay, now I can go deep into the psychology, the philosophy of that strange world of Silent Hill. And for me, the challenge was to recreate, in fact, that nightmarish feeling of a very sad and disturbing love story.
When it comes to adapting a specific game like Silent Hill 2, obviously, there are things that have to change for a film. I know the game has multiple endings, for example, including a couple of jokey ones. So, when it came to deciding what to pluck from the game and how to handle that, was that a big challenge as well?
Yeah. In fact, I have adapted the first ending that I had when I played the first time, and that was the one at the bottom of the lake. And it stayed in my memory forever because it was so unusual in a video game at that time that, as a reward, you did not have a victory, but in fact you had the truth about yourself. Usually, in video games, you have a reward. Here it was just the truth, and it was very disturbing, and it's why plenty of people consider Silent Hill 2 as maybe the first adult video game made on PlayStation, for sure.
Yeah, it's a classic, no doubt. And of course, Pyramid Head is a big part of that. So, I'd love to know, with the technology two decades on from that first film, what was the process of bringing that character back to the screen and making him look as good as he does in the finished film?
I remember very well that some fans were annoyed by the fact that I put him into the first film because Pyramid Head is very much related to the story of James Sunderland, because, as the fans know, he's actually a doppelganger of James. But for me, in the first film—and I talked a lot with Akira, one of the creators of the Silent Hill team—I wanted to be sure that I would not do something too disrespectful. And he said no, you can go, we need a totem, we need an icon for this world. And in the first film, I would say that Pyramid Head is the totem of Silent Hill. But in the second film, in Return to Silent Hill, he came back to its original meaning. And all the monsters too—all the monsters in this film have the meaning that they did not have in the first film. This new film is much more playing on the symbol, and the fact that the monsters are not just monsters ready to kill you, but they represent a part of the agony of Mary. And that's why I was very pleased also to have a much more orthodox approach on this one than I had on the first film.
With a video game, so much of that is obviously experienced and controlled by the player, as the lead character is in your hands. So, when it comes to bringing a movie audience into this world and putting them into James' shoes, what was that experience like for you?
You know, adapting a video game movie is not a simple thing simply because, of course, it's much more interesting to actually play a character and explore an environment like that of Silent Hill than just sitting passively in front of a screen. For me, what was interesting was that first I had to do a movie that people who have no knowledge about Silent Hill can watch. But for the fans, I was hoping that the film will be like a discussion with their own feeling about the game. I think that basically every player has his own interpretation of the game, his own interpretation of all the symbols that you can cross into the game, and all these interpretations are actually right. So it's why I try to imagine my film as a conversation with fans, saying, 'Okay, that's what I think about what means that scene or that scene.' It's why all the iconic scenes are into my adaptation because that's the moment where actually you can start a dialogue with the Silent Hill buff.
And because when you go on all the chats between fans you can see that they are only talking about their own perception, what they understood when they were playing. And that's interesting, it makes the creation of Silent Hill so interesting, so modern. The only time we have seen something like that, maybe it was when Lost the TV series was aired, the fans were becoming crazy about it and I know that the screenwriters of Lost were constantly going to check what the fans were saying because sometimes they had to rewrite the episode because the fans actually had a better idea than themselves. And I did that also when I did my adaptation of Silent Hill—sometimes I decide that my idea was the one that I would like to shoot, and sometimes I read some version on the web and I say yeah, that's maybe a better idea than the one I had. So sometimes I have adapted a fan idea than my own idea, it happened in the film.
I think this is a real fan-pleasing film, and that extends to the presence of the Nurses and how they're portrayed. I know you've talked about using dancers and acrobats for the creatures, so was that a big part of how you wanted to approach them with this film, even with access to modern technology?
You know on the first film, when I decided to use acrobats and dancers to play the monsters, it was a nice way to save money, and producers were very happy. They were very happy to say oh that's great, you know, you want to do everything with real persons and not animatronic and I say yeah yeah, you know, we are going to do like that it's very interesting. So they were very pleased. On this one, I think they would have preferred that we push everything in post-production and do everything with CG. But I say no no no no. It's impossible. We are going to keep this idea that everything is actually practical on the sets, you know, because of course there is some CG effect in the film, but basically what you are seeing on the screen is 70-75% real.
Wow.
I use the CG sometimes to change some shape, for example of the limbs, for example, the lying figure. I use CG to extend some sets but basically everything was in front of the camera and it helped the actors and everything and it helped this world of Silent Hill to be concrete, you know, to be as real as possible simply because we are dealing with the hallucination of somebody and a hallucination looks always very very real to the person who's living a hallucination. If not, it's not a hallucination, it's a mirage, you know. And so for me it was really the philosophy of the film. Make everything as real as possible just to increase the hallucination of the film.
Return to Silent Hill opens in theaters on Friday, January 23.