Penny Blood's Heidi Martinuzzi
talks to director Uwe Boll and star Kristanna Loken
about the upcoming video game adaptation Bloodrayne.
Bloodrayne opens on January 6th to an excited, albeit skeptical, audience. There’s no denying that German director Uwe Boll has had mixed, often downright volatile, reactions from horror and video game audiences with his last two films. House of the Dead (2003) (scripted by The Dead Hate The Living director Dave Parker) and Alone in the Dark (2005) were financially successful, if not faithful adaptations of the games. In fact, since Artisan has released House of the Dead on DVD, it’s been among the top ten highest grossing German films of all time, right behind Das Boot, believe it or not. Alone in the Dark starred a bland Tara Reid, a bored Christian Slater, and a totally useless Stephen Dorf, but there’s no denying that the actors are better than the cast of unknowns that Boll had to work with on House of the Dead. Attempting to save Boll’s reputation this time are Sir Ben Kingsley (Gandhi), Michael Madsen (Reservoir Dogs), Kristanna Loken (Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines), Michelle Rodriguez (Lost, Resident Evil), Udo Kier (Flesh for Frankenstein), Billy Zane (Dead Calm), and Meat Loaf (The Rocky Horror Picture Show). The same producers have stuck by Uwe Boll throughout his American horror filmmaking career (except for Mindfire Entertainment’s Mark Altman), hoping to see it skyrocket. With a much higher budget, locations in Romania, and a vampiric action storyline, Boll could very well have made the best of his recent string of horror goofs…
‘I get a lot of shit from the critics” says director Boll.
Boll has a reputation in the industry for being rather pompous and very honest (how un-Hollywood of him), and a rash filmmaker as well whose projects have showcased a lack of understanding of either the horror genre or video game fans. Luckily enough, the talented Guinevere Turner (the decidedly lesbian scriptwriter/actress of the charmingly disgusting American Psycho and HBO’s The L Word) got involved in the creation of Bloodrayne, which promises the audience that the character of Rayne herself will not be an empty, shallow catsuit of sex appeal and affected femininity. Rather than follow the original storyline of the Bloodrayne games, which are set against a backdrop of Nazi conspiracies and WWII intrigue, Bloodrayne is set in a mythical 18th century world where we learn of the origins of the title character Rayne. Rayne, played by the inescapably noticeable Kristanna Loken, is traveling as the star attraction in a freak show. Her half-vampire, half-human heritage gives her strange abilities to heal quickly, but that doesn’t stop her tormentors from abusing, hurting, and torturing her for their own profit and amusement. Rayne fights the abuse and uses her powers to defend herself and punish those who have hurt her.
With the extreme criticism he got from video game fans for House of the Dead and Alone in the Dark, how will Boll deal with what will inevitably be a massive concern for the integrity of the Bloodrayne video games?
Boll says, “You use the costume, the great cast, the story elements, and you put it together, and you get Bloodrayne. I think it makes more sense to make it like this than to follow, exactly the video game story. Are all people going to like it? No. But the people who haven’t played the game need to understand it…You have to develop something that everybody understands, people who have never played the game need to understand the movie.”
Kristanna Loken, the star, adds, “You can’t please everyone. They’re either gonna love it and say, ‘Oh you really made this character live’, and there will be people who don’t… I tried to incorporate some of the signature moves, but we also wanted to make her live, you know. I wanted her to come to life.”
Rayne is a very strong character that takes revenge on her father for the murder and rape of her mother. She’s half vampire, half human, so finds herself constantly struggling with her inner demons as well as being shunned for being a vampire.
“Kristanna is the best”, says Boll of his star. “She’s not only a great actor, but she can fight and do wire work. Her character Rayne is hot, disturbing, rough, sexy and needs blood. It took a bit of work to get Kristanna’s costume to look right but still be functional, but it was well worth it.”
There’s one thing about this new action/vampire adventure that’s astonishing: despite the beauty of Loken and Rodriguez, they aren’t made into outlandish cartoon characters by either their costumes or their actions. Perhaps this has something to do with writer Turner’s insight into the inner workings of the female, or maybe it is Boll’s desire to make a film with some depth.
“The thing that I’m most proud of about Bloodrayne is that we managed to make a dark, classical vampire movie. Not over-the-top superhero stuff like Elektra or Catwoman,” Boll states.
Loken is one of the few women who is getting the very intimidating female roles in genre films today. With her beginnings as the blond but deadly TX Terminator in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, to her role as the Icelandic Queen Brunhild in the Viking/Dragon romp Ring of the Nibelung, she is one of those Xena-types: tall, beautiful, but deadly when she wants to be.
“I get these roles because I am physically the type,” says Kristanna, “I am tall and blond, look at me, and I’m a goddamn Viking. I can play the roles that other women just can’t because they seem too delicate.”
Of course, like all incredibly beautiful women she has a story about how ugly she was growing up, and also how she learned to embrace her clumsy physical strength, the same strength that landed her such great film roles.
"Growing up, it was always ‘Oh, she’s taller than her father, oh, her voice is so deep.’ When I got T3, I thought, here’s something I can take all my flaws and use them in a positive way. It’s a matter of being comfortable with my physicality and being able to handle weapons. Maybe I was a warrior in a past life. Who knows?”
Loken seems to gravitate towards playing outlandish storylines and fantastical characters. Drawing on her experience in previous films, she was able to flesh out the character Rayne with few limitations.
“I think fantasy is fun because you have absolute freedom to do what you like and there are no boundaries,” says Loken, but she didn’t want to let these advantages make her lazy; Rayne still had to be a living, breathing woman that the audience could understand. “But you’ll also see in Bloodrayne that she does have a human side. She is tormented. You know she’s a strong warrior, but you also see her, like Jekyll and Hyde, say to herself, ‘Oh my god, I just wiped out an entire village pf people. Now I have to think about that.’”
By downplaying her beauty and making a larger emphasis on her character instead, Loken has channeled a truly unexpected persona.
“The great thing I like about this character, and with working with Uwe, is the rawness of it, actually. We really didn’t want her to be polished; we wanted her to be flawed, and kind of messy, and to come to terms with her reality and struggle. In the love scene, all women are usually completely done up and perfect, but I had dirt all over my face. So I like that we went for it. Like anything in life, if you’re gonna do it, you can’t half-ass it.”
Kristanna will star in Boll’s upcoming Dungeon Siege (yet another video game adaptation) as fantasy warrior Elora, and has set her sites on producing as well. She just finished starring in the feature film Lime Salted Love, which is also her producing debut.
So, why does Boll call this a “classic vampire movie”? It seems to have so many elements that don’t exist in classic vampire movies, like action, swords, castles, etc. In fact, it seems to bear a startling resemblance to the storyline behind the Brian Pulido animated film and comic Lady Death, in which a tormented young woman seeks revenge on her father amid hordes of demons, vampires, and darkness. What is it that Boll finds fascinating, and different, about Bloodrayne from his other films?
“A vampire: he looks totally human, so he can cheat you better, he is not a creature who tries to get you or something, like a werewolf, …this makes it more, in a way, subtle, and scary and creepy. It is coming up more slowly…”
Michael Madsen, who plays a vampire hunter named Vladimir, had this to say. “Vampires are really fucking strange… they’re creatures of darkness. And there’s this whole other world Uwe has created, that didn’t exist in the game but that explains elements of the game itself.”
Udo Kier, cult icon and star of Andy Warhol’s Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula, as well as several other horror and mainstream films, plays the role of the Regal Monk who shelters Rayne rather than destroy her. Udo Kier; he’s pretty creepy. Why is he playing the good guy?
“In any other film,” says Boll, “Udo Kier would have played the vampire, but in Bloodrayne we used him as the opposite, as the Regal Monk. Udo is a friend of mine and a great actor. He’s always prepared, and so easy to work with we stayed in the same shabby hotel in Fagaras, Romania, and we would walk together each day and discuss how depressed we were about the food.”
Bloodrayne was shot on Romanian soil, in the towns and cities that resemble the 18th century setting Boll wanted and needed to recreate.
“We shot in the original Dracula town!” he says excitedly.
Along with Ben Kingsley as the Evil Lord Kagen, and the sexy Matthew Davis (Legally Blonde) as Rayne’s (hopefully) shirtless love interest, no matter what happens, Boll can’t claim the cast wasn’t good.
With the releases of House of the Dead and Alone in the Dark came other video game adaptations as well; Resident Evil I and II, for instance. It’s become increasingly popular to change storylines and rewrite characters in order to make them more palatable to general audiences. Though theses adaptations are hit-and-miss with the critics, horror and video games tend to mesh well into each other's sense of otherworldly action and fantastic scenarios.
“Video games have branding and built-in audience,” explains Boll. “The characters and stories are often great. I learned from making House of the Dead and Alone in the Dark that action is important, but you must have a good story.”
Lets hope so.
Cinefantastique Magazine owner and filmmaker Mark Altman produced the second installment of House of the Dead this past year, called House of the Dead II: Dead Aim, which has a cameo by Sid Haig and was written by Alone in the Dark scriptwriter Michael Roesch. It stars Saw II’s Emmanuelle Vaugier and is directed by Michael Hurst whose credits also include Mansquito and The Darkroom. While Altman produced the first House of the Dead as well, he didn’t invite Boll back as a director. No release date has been set yet, but it will be out in 2006.
Boll’s next film, In the Name of the King: Dungeon Siege will be released in the U.S. in November 2006, and will star Burt Reynolds, Mathew Lillard, Leelee Sobieski, and Ron Perlman in what is another fantasy video game adaptation.
Heidi Martinuzzi
Pretty-Scary.net
HeidiMartinuzzi.com
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