Resident Evil: Afterlife is written, directed and produced by Paul W. S. Anderson. Anderson also wrote, produced and directed the original Resident Evil, as well as writing and producing two earlier sequels, Resident Evil: Apocalypse and Resident Evil: Extinction. Producers also include Jeremy Bolt (Death Race), Robert Kulzer (Pandorum), Don Carmody (Resident Evil: Apocalypse), Bernd Eichinger (The Baader Meinhof Complex, Downfall), and Samuel Hadida (The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus). Martin Moszkowicz (Pandorum) and Victor Hadida (The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus) are executive producers.
Director of photography is Glen MacPherson, ASC, CSC (The Final Destination). Production designer is Arv Grewal (Jennifer’s Body, Lars and the Real Girl). Editor is Niven Howie (Resident Evil: Extinction, Death Race). The special effects makeup designer is Paul Jones (Silent Hill). Visual effects supervisor is Dennis Berardi (Resident Evil: Extinction, Death Race), with visual effects by Mr. X Inc. Original music is by tomandandy (Rules of Attraction). Costume designers are Denise Cronenberg (The Incredible Hulk).
Resident Evil: Afterlife begins four years after the initial outbreak of the T-virus, designed by the Umbrella Corporation to combat aging and nerve-based diseases. The virus’ unfortunate side effect is its ability to reanimate dead cells, transforming its hosts into ravenous zombies. After sweeping the globe, the virus has turned the world into an unrecognizable nightmare where the rapidly evolving undead hunt the few remaining humans.
Picking up where the previous installment left off, Resident Evil: Afterlife finds Alice in Japan, armed with superhuman abilities and leading an army of her own clones against her longtime nemesis, Umbrella Chairman Albert Wesker. After leaving Wesker for dead in a showdown that destroys her army and strips her of her powers, Alice commandeers a two-seater airplane and flies to the frigid Alaskan wilderness. Her goal: to find survivors at the mysterious Arcadia—purportedly the only place on Earth not ravaged by the T-Virus.
But Arcadia, it turns out, is no promised land, and the only sign of life is her old comrade-in-arms Claire Redfield (Ali Larter), now suffering total amnesia. With Claire in tow, Alice’s search for answers leads her to the ruined city of Los Angeles, where she meets a handful of other survivors barricaded into a former prison, tenuously holding an army of the undead at bay. There she learns that Arcadia may be closer—but also more deadly—than she thought.With Claire slowly recovering her memory and martial prowess, Alice leads her band of survivors on a harrowing rescue mission—and discovers something far more terrifying than any of them could have imagined.
In the first three chapters of the highly successful Resident Evil franchise, Alice, the nearly indestructible zombie fighter played by Milla Jovovich, finds herself in ever more desperate straits as she faces off against the sinister Umbrella Corporation and the murderous army of undead its technology has created.Anderson has taken a bold approach with the latest film, reinventing the franchise with bigger effects, epic vistas and terrifying new adversaries. “And we shot with the latest in 3-D technology, the cameras used to shoot Avatar,” he says. “It is really exciting to be on the cutting edge of a new technology.”
The director started his career shooting such futuristic thrillers as Mortal Kombat and Event Horizon, films he says he always envisioned in 3-D. “I wanted to immerse the audience in the action the way simulator rides like Back to the Future: The Ride did,” says Anderson. “I feel like a filmmaker who is making the jump from silent pictures to talking pictures. This kind of moment in cinema history, when the technology changes in such a radical way, only comes along every 30 or 40 years.”
Resident Evil: Afterlife picks up where the third film, Resident Evil: Extinction, left off. “Alice has managed to escape the clutches of the Umbrella Corporation yet again,” says producer Don Carmody. “She makes her way to Alaska in search of any possible survivors of the plague. The adventure continues as she is reunited with an old friend and they try to find out what happened to their fellow survivors.”
What they discover on their journey is a terrifyingly altered world, overrun by the T-virus. Few humans still survive and the undead have become stronger and much more intelligent. The site of most of the action is a nightmarish simulacrum of present-day Los Angeles. “Paul came up with a great take,” Bolt says. “In the last one, we had post-apocalyptic Las Vegas. This time we were working with the idea of Hollywood in a kind of hot nuclear winter.”
The setting was inspired by the forest fires that raged on the outskirts of Los Angeles as Anderson began work on the screenplay. “Even with all of our modern technology and thousands of firefighters, it still takes weeks and weeks to get these forest fires under control,” he observes. “It started me thinking—what would happen if there were no human beings left to fight these natural occurrences? The fires would sweep down off the hillsides and go straight through L.A., through Beverly Hills, down Sunset Boulevard, past the Hollywood sign and just keep going. That’s the Hollywood we portray in this movie. It’s a burning city, which I thought was very fresh imagery.”
The cast of Resident Evil: Afterlife features some fresh faces as well as several that will be familiar to franchise fans. But no matter how popular a character becomes, warns Anderson, there are no guarantees of survival in the film’s brutal, futuristic world.“The Resident Evil franchise has become well known for bringing back popular characters for another outing,” Anderson says. “It’s also famous for killing them off without warning.With each film, Anderson tries to present Jovovich with a fresh challenge. In Resident Evil: Afterlife, he gives her the task of playing an army of Alice clones. Jovovich approached the multiple roles with enthusiasm. “There’s only one of me, obviously,” she says. “But I have to play each of the Alices. I wanted to get creative with it as well, so each Alice has her own personality. They’re not carbon copies of each other.”
Resident Evil: Afterlife reunites Alice with a fellow survivor from the previous film, Claire, played again by Ali Larter. Jovovich feels the same bond with her co-star that Alice has with her comrade-in-arms. “We’re really a team,” says Jovovich. “She brings such realism to the material. It’s a pleasure to work with a strong, intelligent, gorgeous female. It pushes me to be my best and I think I push her to do better and better. It’s so nice to work with someone who inspires you.”
Also new to the world of Resident Evil is actor Boris Kodjoe, who plays Luther West, the unofficial head of a small group of survivors barricaded into a prison.The film’s iconic villain is Albert Wesker, chairman of The Umbrella Corporation. “Wesker is the personification of the giant corporation that will stop at nothing to turn a profit,” says Carmody.A prominent character in the game series, “Chairman Wesker was a good guy in the early games,” says Bolt. “He’s become a tremendously fun villain because he loves his villainy. Just like in the game, he is very difficult to kill.”
From the Umbrella Corporation’s high-tech subterranean hideout in Tokyo to the smoldering Los Angeles skyline, Resident Evil: Afterlife is packed with eye-popping stunts, spectacular sets and stunning visual effects that take full advantage of the benefits of 3-D.
“When I was writing it, I knew it was going to be a 3-D movie,” says Anderson. “I tried to write situations and environments into the screenplay that would play well in 3-D. I firmly believe 3-D is a paradigm shift in cinema right now. Soon, it will become the industry standard, and it’s very exciting to be making one of the first real 3-D movies. And I do say ‘real’ because we shot a three-dimensional film. It’s not something that was shot as a 2-D film and then had 3-D layered over the top of it.”
One of 3-D’s most exciting qualities is the ability to immerse the audience in the story, says the director. “It sucks the audience into an environment. It’s similar to the advances that sound has made since I was a kid. Instead of sound coming just from the front of the theater, there are speakers inside and at the back of cinemas, so eventually you are completely cocooned in sound. Now, with 3-D, the image is doing what sound has already been doing for twenty years. It’s helping immerse you in the world that’s being portrayed by the movie.”
Working with the new technology required adjustments in virtually every aspect of the production process. “I was lucky to have some very strong collaborators,” says Anderson. “Both Arvinder Grewal, our production designer, and Dennis Berardi, the visual effects supervisor, were designing the movie with me even before we shot a frame of film.”
Berardi’s realization of those concepts was critical in a film where the locations were as much visual effects as they were physical sets. “We created a completely decimated Los Angeles cityscape,” he says. “It’s L.A. like you’ve never seen it. We completely destroyed Tokyo. In some shots, we’re seeing upwards of 500,000 undead zombies. Our goal was always to have our effects seamlessly integrate into the visual style of the movie, so you don’t know what is created digitally and what is practical.
“Using 3-D technology elevates the franchise,” he continues. “It puts an exclamation point on everything. The 3-D adds a really exciting nature to the visual effects. It makes you feel like you’re enveloped in the story, so that whole visual aspect is brand new.”Jones was also responsible for creating a new look for the mutated zombies. “We have burrowing zombies,” he says. “We have water zombies. We have what I’m calling L.A. zombies. The distinctions between each of those were fun to work out. The burrowing undead have been living underground in the sewers and using their teeth and fingernails to chew through concrete and rebar and dirt,” he continues. “They’ve stripped themselves of their lips and some of their facial tissue, and of their fingertips, essentially. And because of the T-virus mutation, they have these lovely mandibles coming out of their mouths.”
Glenn MacPherson, the film’s director of photography, who also shot The Final Destination in 3-D, says the biggest surprise for his crew was the amount of hardware required. “There’s a big footprint,” he says. “The first time we set up a shot, half the studio was the set and the other half was entirely filled with the technology.”
Although for much of the shoot, MacPherson used twin Sony F35 cameras, Resident Evil: Afterlife is the first movie to shoot 3-D using twin Phantom cameras for certain scenes. Phantoms, which were developed by NASA to capture minute cracks and stresses on Space Shuttle tiles during launch, are designed to shoot at 1,000 frames per second (fps) or more, as compared to 24 fps, at which standard movie cameras operate.
According to MacPherson, the Phantom was notably used in scenes with bullets or drops of water. One such instance was the rainy scene at the Shibuya Crossing scene near the beginning of the movie. “Shooting raindrops at 200 fps is remarkable. You can follow the individual drops all the way down. 200 fps makes regular time look four times slower than real time. Shooting at 1000fps would mean you could walk out of the theater, get another tub of popcorn and be back in time to see the end of the shot.”
Cutting-edge innovations sometimes tested the filmmakers’ ingenuity. “Most conventional camera equipment didn’t work for our purposes,” says Anderson. “Stabilized heads, motion control rigs and high-tech camera cranes are all built for lightweight film or digital cameras. A 3-D camera is essentially two cameras tied together, so it’s extremely heavy. We couldn’t just put them on existing equipment. Techniques we’ve taken for granted for twenty years, like Steadicam rigs, no longer worked. We ended up putting the camera operator on a Segway and it looked exactly like a Steadicam shot.”
Niven Howie, who edited Resident Evil: Extinction, cut the fourth installment as well. Although it was the third movie Anderson and Howie have made together, the pair had to learn to work in new way. “Normally, you cut the whole movie, and then hand it over to visual effects,” says Anderson. “In this case, we would fine-cut the action scenes, do visual effects and then start trying to assemble the movie. I felt like I was back to making my first movie all over again, when I had no money and no film and no time and I had to really shoot to cut.”After a battery of test shots, Anderson was able to devise strategies for the specialized demands of 3-D. “We found that you really don’t need as many close-ups,” says Howie. “There’s so much to look at within the frame. If someone moves in a 3-D stereoscopic environment, you just don’t cut as quickly. It is a kind of throwback to an old-fashioned form of moviemaking, but with incredibly modern technology.”
Even the franchise’s signature stunts were adapted for 3-D. A seasoned stuntwoman, Jovovich still had one unexpected surprise. “There’s a lot you can get away with in 2-D that just doesn’t work in 3-D—like the simple punch,” she notes. “In 2-D, you swing at someone, the other actor falls back, you add the sound effect and you’ve sold the punch. In 3-D with the almost 360-degree coverage you get with double sets of cameras, you can see if the fist doesn’t connect with the face. We were doing one fight sequence and I kept hearing, ‘Get closer, get closer, get closer’ until I was actually hit in the head. It’s a super 3-D experience! It’s not just an actor acting anymore—you might really get hit in this movie!”
It all adds up to a totally fresh Resident Evil movie, according to Anderson. “Even if you’ve seen the other films, I guarantee you that you’ve never seen anything like this one. It’s going to reinvent Resident Evil and make it brand new again for people. People who’ve seen all four movies have told me that it doesn’t feel like Resident Evil 4. This feels like Resident Evil 1. It’s like the start of a whole new franchise.”
(Source : Sony Pictures, Edited and compiled by Team – Artooz)
