We got the chance to sit down and talk with Greg Russo, the screenwriter for the upcoming ‘Mortal Kombat’, ‘Death Note’ sequel and ‘Resident Evil’ reboot films and had the opportunity to do a lengthy interview with the incredible screenwriter, in the second part of our interview, we discuss him taking on the screenplay for the ‘Resident Evil’ reboot.
INTERVIEWER: How’s the progress with the ‘Resident Evil’ reboot?
GREG RUSSO: It’s good. I worked on the reboot for about a year and then Producer James Wan came in, my involvement on that project has kind of concluded, so I’m not sure what they’ll really do with it, I submitted my draft to the producers and they were happy with it and ultimately they’ll do what they will with the property but I’m currently not involved with that film.
INTERVIEWER: Was there any specific game that you tried to channel the most into your draft?
GREG RUSSO: Obviously I’m a huge fan of the franchise so to work on that was a lot of fun. And they’ve made six films before so when you come back to that and reboot it, you wanna do something different and not just rehash. For me it was very clear cut that I wanted to go back and make it scary again like a horror film in terms of the classic James Wan style so that was the pitch, going back and looking what made the games scary in the first place so yea Resident Evil 7 was a bit of a touchstone for my draft.
INTERVIEWER: That honestly makes a lot of sense, as with Resident Evil 7, they were going back to a lot of the horror roots where they had their action romps with 5 and 6.
GREG RUSSO: Yea, exactly, and not to shame the original film franchise that was made, I think that did very well, when you create a fresh reboot and look at the over the top action of the Paul Anderson franchise, it was fun and really cool but at the end of the day, for me as a fan of the original game franchise, I always considered the franchise to be horror at the forefront and action as a secondary feature. So it just made sense to go back to the horror roots.
