Paul William Scott Anderson (born March 4, 1965 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England) is a British filmmaker, producer and screenwriter.
A self-proclaimed fanboy, Paul W. S. Anderson regularly works in sci-fi movies and video game adaptations. His respect for the material he adapts has been called into question by its intended fanbase, who have spent years debating his worthiness online.
Biography
Paul W. S. Anderson, already a graduate of the famous University of Warwick (UK), made his debut as the writer-director of the obscure movie Shopping, which starred Sean Pertwee, Jude Law and Sadie Frost as thieves who ram-raided storefronts. When released in his native England, it was banned in some cinemas, and only came to the United States as an edited, direct to video release.
After this, he directed the successful 1995 video game adaptation Mortal Kombat. While prior video game movies, like Street Fighter and Super Mario Bros., had been all-out disasters, the reaction to Mortal Kombat was mixed. The film was a moderate financial success but many fans were upset that it lacked the over-the-top violence that made the "Mortal Kombat" games famous. Though the film did have its fans, it received mostly negative reviews. Anderson declined to direct the sequel, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. Once again, it was not well received by critics, but this audience seemed to agree with them unanimously. Anderson was asked to direct a third movie, Mortal Kombat: Devastation, but declined again.
The success of Mortal Kombat gave Anderson free reign to choose his next project, Soldier, written by Blade Runner screenwriter David Webb Peoples. Intended as a "side-quel" to Blade Runner, the movie was set in the same universe (but not the same planet), and contained numerous references to Blade Runner. Kurt Russell was attached to star, but was unavailable at the time, which delayed the production. In the mean time, Anderson made Event Horizon, which took the premise of the classic sci-fi novel and film Solaris, but filled it with Hellraiser-style horror scenes. The film was poorly received by both critics and the box office, and Anderson blamed the failure on studio-enforced cuts. Others involved with the film assert that all the 'best' material is in the released version.
Soldier was eventually completed and released in 1998, and was a disaster both critically and commercially.
After the poor performance of both Event Horizon and Soldier, Anderson was forced to think smaller. His planned remake of the cult classic Death Race 2000 was put on hold, and he set about writing and directed a TV movie, The Sight, in 2000. It was a minor success, and Anderson returned the cinema screens in 2002 when he wrote and directed an adaptation of the survival horror series Resident Evil. It was at this point that, to avoid confusion to American auteur Paul Thomas Anderson, he began to credit himself as "Paul W. S. Anderson." Ironically, this only lead to him being confused with another American director, Wes Anderson.
Working with a moderate budget in comparison to his other movies, Resident Evil was a minor success in cinemas and on DVD, prompting Anderson to write (but not direct) the sequel, Resident Evil: Apocalypse. He once dated its star, model / actress Milla Jovovich.
Anderson's next project was the much-anticipated Alien vs. Predator, a concept popularized by a series of Dark Horse Comics and later hinted at in Predator 2. A movie version had been stuck in development for years despite the franchise crossing into every other form of media, from books to comics to video games. The fact Alien vs. Predator was being made at all was enough to get many fans of the originals onboard from the second the project was greenlighted. Some, however, were unhappy with the choice of Anderson as the writer and director, and had the opposite reaction, writing it off as a failure before it had even entered production.
In an effort to keep negative reviews for the film out of the media during the crucial opening weekend, 20th Century Fox decided against screening the film for critics. This worked temporarily, but negative reviews eventually started to surface. Once poor reviews and negative word-of-mouth started to spread, the film's performance dramatically dropped off. Because of this, "AvP" has the distinction of having the highest-grossing opening weekend of any film that ultimately failed to gross $100,000,000. It's average rating of 5.3/10 at IMDB puts it far behind the other Alien and Predator movies in terms of popularity. He is currently producing an adaptation of the video game Driver, as well as two horror movies, The Dark and Necropolis. A third Resident Evil movie, Resident Evil: Afterlife, has been approved, which Anderson will again write and produce, but no director is attached. He has also expressed interest in adapting the video games Castlevania and Grand Theft Auto, as well as Alfred Bester's science fiction novel The Stars My Destination, but none of these so far come to pass.
Fan backlash
Despite his ability and success to get projects that would be considered dreams off the ground, Anderson and his films are not well liked by their intended audience, many of whom mercilessly assault him over the Internet, even going so far as to post death threats and perform elaborate hoaxes to discredit him. While it is not uncommon for directors to be attacked anonymously over discussion forums, the amount of abuse that is heaped on Anderson daily is above and beyond even the backlash suffered by Joel Schumacher in the wake of his widely derided Batman sequels.
After the disastrous release of Soldier, which had suffered some on-set problems, a backlash against Anderson began which, seven years later, shows no signs of stopping. While his previous films had not been popular with critics, his intended audience began to actively dislike him, seeing him as emblematic of how major studios ruined potentially good ideas. These feelings began to be more and more visible following a scathing review of Soldier by another self-proclaimed fanboy, Ain't It Cool News webmaster Harry Knowles.
- Ya know, I don’t really care for Paul Anderson’s films. MORTAL KOMBAT was just loud and noisy without any characters or motivations that I got into. EVENT HORIZON was a real cluster of completely blown opportunities.
- [...]
- When given that script, Kurt Russell and an additional $60 million dollars and all you can do is come up with that...... ARGH!!! Did he realize the opportunity he had? I mean here... here was the fucking deal man. This was his chance to make a great fucking movie. He didn’t need to spend it lighting farts. But that’s what he did, ignited methane. A total waste. Too bad the fire didn’t back up into the internal organs and cook the bastard.
- [...]
- I mean, I can take cinematic douches like URBAN LEGEND, but dammit this was just mediocrity. There is nothing worse than mediocrity. Because it ain’t exactly the worst thing in the world, and it ain’t exactly great... instead it’s FORGETTABLE! I mean by next week I’m gonna fucking just forget it. But right now, my adrenal gland is crying for the fucking head of PAUL ANDERSON!!!! (October 28, 1998)
However, Knowles didn't forget about it next week, or even next year.
- But now it has been made VERY CLEAR by a good dozen or so sources that Paul Thomas Anderson is not involved, but rather... Paul Anderson, director of EVENT HORIZON, MORTAL KOMBAT and SOLDIER. I loathe those three films as movies that put style over substance, that personify the lack of humanity and soul in film. I hate those three movies completely. And I am completely and 100% unexcited about DEATH RACE 3000. (July 11, 1999)
Two years later, Knowles had still not run out of vitriol. When he appeared on the Comedy Central show Turn Ben Stein On, the following exchange took place:
- Ben Stein Who are your least favorite directors?
- Harry Knowles Paul Anderson.
- Ben Stein And what's he made?
- Harry Knowles Umm - God, I don't want to send people out to see this stuff. (March 22, 2001)
Knowles was not alone in his dislike of Anderson's movies, although nobody else was quite as vocal. As the Aint It Cool News website was so popular, Knowles' opinions of Anderson was hard to ignore, and began to become a more frequent topic of discussion. The bad feelings began to snowball, and Anderson became a kind of all-purpose whipping boy for the "hardcore" online fan community. He was denounced as a hack whose movies lacked both style and substance, and as someone who ruined ideas that could have been dreams come true in the right hands. Anderson did not have much support online, although JoBlo's coaxial site Arrow in the Head defended him and claimed he was simply misunderstood. However, this was confined to online discussion forums. The majority of moviegoers had no opinions of Anderson one way or the other.
While his Resident Evil adaptation was a minor box office success, his respect for the series was called into question when he jettisoned the look, feel and 70s horror-movie roots of the game in favour of a slick action movie halfway between Aliens and The Matrix. In his own words:
- It's a very modern, high tech, sophisticated movie. This is not the sequel to Dawn of the Dead, you know, it's not a 1970s George Romero movie, because those movies were very much of a time. This is very high tech, very sophisticated, the special effects are very sleek and slick, so it's kind of like The Matrix of zombie movies. [1]
Fans of the series claimed that he had totally ignored the essence of what made the games a success, and that the original storyline and characters he'd created were actually inferior to those in the video game. Those enamoured with zombie movies, were also angered because Resident Evil had originally been tipped as a 'comeback' movie for legendary zombie filmmaker George A. Romero, but had been given to Anderson instead, as producer Bernd Eichinger deemed Anderson's script to be more commercial. When Romero's jettisoned script began circulating online, fans still took issue with the changes it made to the series' established lore, but deemed that it was still a better representation of what the series was about, fully embracing its b-movie roots and over-the-top gore. [2] Whether the movie was good or not became academic; the complaint was that Anderson had claimed to be a huge fan of the games, but made a movie that was in no way like them.
Anderson had by this point become such a disliked person that, as an April Fool's joke, J.R.R. Tolkien's website www.theonering.net 'revealed' that Anderson would direct an adaptation of The Hobbit after Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies had finished. This was met with widespread horror from LOTR fans, although they calmed down after noticing what the date was. While posting fake news on April 1 is common for many websites, it is indicative of online resentment toward Anderson that he specifically was chosen. It would have been simple to get a laugh by saying that The Hobbit would be directed by someone like Woody Allen, but, by saying it would be helmed by Anderson, they presented something within the realms of possibility that truly frightened many LOTR fans.
When he was announced as the writer/director of the dream project Alien vs. Predator, the detractors he had gathered were furious, Knowles especially:
- FUCK THIS! I loathe Paul Anderson movies... Loathe them the way I loathe BATMAN & ROBIN or ROLLERBALL. They're just things that didn't need to exist. Paul Anderson continually makes mediocre films at outrageous prices. He has taken a great script (SOLDIER) and turned out trash. He's been given gobs and gobs of cash and flushed out on to our screens with turkeys like EVENT HORIZON. He made RESIDENT EVIL which felt like the pansiest loud noisy obnoxiously castrated zombie flick in years! Now they want to trust that guy with ALIENS VS PREDATOR? FUCK THIS!
When the movie was released, it again came under attack from its intended fanbase, who claimed it violated many of the rules established in the previous movies. Predators appearing in sub-zero climates, Aliens growing to full size extremely quickly, Predators losing fights too easily, toning the violence down to PG-13 and tying both creatures into the origin of the Aztec civilization infuriated longtime fans. More casual fans, while not concerned with the way the movie "broke the rules" were still unhappy with what they considered a weak script, badly edited fights, one-dimensional characters and numerous plot holes. [3] There were no pre-screenings for critics, but those that did see it were unimpressed. [4]
During a promotional screening, it was widely reported that Anderson blamed the poor performance on 20th Century Fox, who insisted it be less than 90 minutes and PG-13 only a few weeks before it was finished. [5] However, this was later revealed to be a hoax to make Anderson appear duplicitous. Anderson and Fox have confirmed that no other footage exists, and that the PG-13 cut is the one which they had always intended to release.
When the movie's shooting script began circulating online shortly after its release, there were no other scenes of gore or violence, and it specifically mentions being PG-13. However, the phony promotional screening was still accepted as fact by many websites, who seized upon Anderson's "lies" to further discredit him.
So what's did you learn this summer? Don't believe a word that comes out of Paul Anderson nor Uwe Boll's mouth. (bloody-disgusting.com)
In November of 2005, an "unrated" cut of the film was released on DVD. The bulk of the deleted footage features no violence or content that would have earned the film an "R" rating. Upon simple analysis of the footage that does contain additional gore it is obvious that CGI blood was essentially painted onto the existing blood-free shots.
However, this is not the first, yet alone the most ludicrous hoax concerning Anderson that was widely believed. Shortly before the release of the first Resident Evil movie, issue #211 of Fangoria magazine, received a bogus interview, in which Anderson "explained" that his version of Resident Evil was based on an old screenplay he wrote, titled The Undead. Even though this "interview" looked completely ridiculous and fake, many people believed it and still do to this day.
What many people do not realize, is that the decision to make Resident Evil different from the games was made by Constantin Film and Capcom and not by Anderson. He simply obeyed to the instructions that were given to him by his employers. Many fans question why a director that is loathed by the majority of his intended fanbase manages to find regular work when his films have ranged from massive financial disasters to only minor successes. "Alien3" director David Fincher clashed with studio executives on a regular basis when his vision was compromised and though he ultimately lost most of the battles, he continues to be vocal about his negative experience to this day, and it has been suggested that Anderson is appealing to studio executives because of his willingness to follow orders without resistance.
The controversy did not end there, however. Screenwriter Peter Briggs, who had penned the very first Alien vs. Predator screenplay, disputed some of Anderson's other comments in an online interview, saying Anderson's claim that Briggs' original screenplay was "locked down" was incorrect, and that many elements of Anderson's screenplay were suspiciously similar to his. [6] Strangely, Knowles was one of the more forgiving critics, who said it was Anderson's best movie yet, labelling it "a curiously entertaining floater."
Though his filmography has proved profitable on DVD, his box-office failures have lost more money than his successes have earned. The very people he claims to be "the voice of" almost uniformly despise his body of work. Anderson's defenders claim that this is because they have unrealistically high expectations, and that their constant nitpicking is stopping them from just enjoying the movies on their own terms. The fans retaliate that, if Anderson is handling something with such a large and dedicated fanbase, he should be more respectful of it and not simply make a "popcorn movie" that bears a superficial resemblance to its source. This debate has been going on for years and often becomes quite heated, but it is confined almost totally to the Internet.
Trivia
- His films often have a rock score at the end, as apparent in Event Horizon, Soldier, Resident Evil, and Resident Evil: Apocalypse.
- Anderson has cast actor Jason Isaacs several times, appearing in Shopping, Event Horizon, Soldier, and Resident Evil. In Resident Evil, he has both a voice-over at the beginning and appears as a masked doctor uttering "Put him in the Nemesis program" at the end of the movie.
- His films often end without any kind of closure. The characters find themselves in a new, even more dangerous situation in the final scene. In the case of Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil, the sequels picked up immediately from this point.
- If Colin Salmon is in one of Anderson's movies, he is frequently shown being diced to bits as in Resident Evil and Alien vs. Predator.
Filmography
Director
- Alien vs. Predator (2004)
- Resident Evil (2002)
- Soldier (1998)
- Event Horizon (1997)
- Mortal Kombat (1995)
- Shopping (1994)
Producer
- Resident Evil: Afterlife (2006)
- Driver (2006)
- Necropolis (2005)
- The Dark (2005)
- Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)
- Resident Evil (2002)