D.B. Weiss on Writing Halo for Hollywood

Everything that has succumbed to glitz and glamour of Hollywood has inevitably turned commercial, boring and tasteless, most especially for devoted fans of that book, play or game, being turned into commercial success. But, avid fans of the Halo game franchise by Bungee, can rest their pretty, little gamer heads, because their favorite game, is in good hands.

D.B. Weiss is an accomplished writer, a graduate of Wesleyan University, he earned a Masters of Philosophy in Irish Literature from Trinity College in Dublin and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is best known for his critically acclaimed fictional story entitled Lucky Wander Boy. The story is about Adam Pennyman, who decides to make an analysis of every videogame ever made and compile to what he calls, The Catalogue of Obsolete Entertainments.

And what’s all introduction about D.B. Weiss got to do with Halo? He’s just the one writing the screenplay for Halo that’s going to be executive produced by Lord of the Rings Trilogy and King Kong  director Peter Jackson, that’s all. Here’s Weiss talking about Halo, in an interview with Game Set Watch.

The full interview awaits after the jump!

Everything that has succumbed to glitz and glamour of Hollywood has inevitably turned commercial, boring and tasteless, most especially for devoted fans of that book, play or game, being turned into commercial success. But, avid fans of the Halo game franchise by Bungee, can rest their pretty, little gamer heads, because their favorite game, is in good hands.

D.B. Weiss is an accomplished writer, a graduate of Wesleyan University, he earned a Masters of Philosophy in Irish Literature from Trinity College in Dublin and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is best known for his critically acclaimed fictional story entitled Lucky Wander Boy. The story is about Adam Pennyman, who decides to make an analysis of every videogame ever made and compile to what he calls, The Catalogue of Obsolete Entertainments.

And what’s all introduction about D.B. Weiss got to do with Halo? He’s just the one writing the screenplay for Halo that’s going to be executive produced by Lord of the Rings Trilogy and King Kong  director Peter Jackson, that’s all. Here’s Weiss talking about Halo, in an interview with Game Set Watch.

What are you working on at the moment?

I write for film now, mostly – appropriately enough, I’m currently adapting Halo for producers Mary Parent, Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh. I’ve got another novel finished that needs a second draft – and maybe someday, I’ll be able to work in games. I certainly hope so.

That’s pretty exciting – I know you mentioned being a fan of the game’s multiplayer mode a few years back, but were you attracted to the storyline of the single player game back then?

Yeah, IÂ’m pretty excited about it. And I did always think there was a lot more to the Halo universe than most games — I remember switching to “Easy” mode on the first game, so I could plow through it more quickly and find out what happened next.

How did you become involved with the project? It wasn’t anything to do with an interview you did where you said:

“Far more work went into the LWB screenplay excerpt than any other section of the book, except possibly the end. I think someone ought to hire me to write terrible, techno-mystical action screenplays. I think I have a knack.”

Was it?

That’s pretty damn funny – I’d forgotten about that. Let’s hope that, except for the “terrible” part, I was right!

Actually, it came to me in a far more prosaic way – producer calls agent and mentions project, agent sends sample script to producer, I go meet producer and we really get along, etc.

How far along with the screenplay are you?

Just starting in on an entirely new second draft.

How long have you been writing for film, and was this something you wanted to accomplish from the beginning?

Yeah, itÂ’s something IÂ’ve always kept a hand in, so itÂ’s very gratifying that itÂ’s finally starting to work out. I was writing scripts for years, sometimes even for extremely small sums of money — but IÂ’ve only been working in Hollywood proper for around two years.

Going back to your views on criticism, you must realise to some degree that the screenwriting projects that you’ve taken on will inevitably attract criticism from some elements of their associated fanbases – does this worry you?

Not really. I do think about it, but itÂ’s inevitable. There will be the 5% on the fringe of any hardcore fanbase that get angry about any change you make to the source material. The truth is that novels, games, comics, and what-have-you are not usually ready to be slapped up on screen as-is. If you did do a 100% faithful version, 999 times out of 1000 it would be a mess, and even the 5%-ers would recognise as much.

What can we expect from your new novel?

17th century, 30 years war, lots of weird stuff with alchemists…really have to get back to that…

Finally – regarding your desire to work in games, Ron Gilbert recently criticised the state of storytelling in videogames, saying:

“Honestly, I have not played anything in a long time that I thought was doing a particularly good job at telling a story.”

Is that something you’d agree with?

Well, I loved Psychonauts and think Tim Schafer’s story is smart and a lot of fun. God of War was great too…but in general, I think Ron is more or less right.

There are a lot of writers in film (and presumably in fiction as well) who love games, but IÂ’m guessing that many of them get caught between stations, in a way. What I mean is, maybe they donÂ’t feel comfortable with the world of games to try to kick-start their own game projects as a creator — which is a nightmarishly difficult process anyway, probably much harder than getting a movie made — but on the flipside, thereÂ’s no equivalent of the spec script in gaming, to the best of my knowledge. Honestly, even in film, the role of the original script has shrunk to almost nothing. And if theyÂ’re lucky enough to be working for film…well, it does pay better.

Still, I think that games will inevitably up their game in the writing and story departments, theyÂ’ll have to, if they really want to be mainstream. All the “games are bigger than movies” talk is ridiculous, of course, total ‘lying with statisticsÂ’ type stuff. The truth is, for better and for worse (very often for worse) movies make so much damn money because lots and lots of people go to see them. TheyÂ’re made for everybody. Hardcore gaming audiences exert a lot more influence over the direction of games than cineastes exert over the direction of film. But a move in a mainstream direction is inevitable, from a business point of view. Which, alas, is usually the point of view making the decisions.