Last week, Nexus Hub along with Crispin Stopforth got the exciting opportunity to interview the live-action Monster Hunter movie's lead actress, Milla Jovovich, and writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson. Being no stranger to video game adaptations, Jovovich's previous defining role as Alice in the Resident Evil movies helped catapult her to becoming one of cinema's biggest action stars. Anderson, on the other hand, continues his work on adapting video games to the big screen, having previously worked on both Mortal Kombat and the numerous Resident Evil movies. This time, we virtually sat down with Jovovich and Anderson to talk about Monster Hunter, another wildly ambitious undertaking for the duo.

READ MORE: Review: Monster Hunter

Crispin: I've been wanting to chat with you since you blew my mind with Event Horizon, so this is a really great opportunity for me. I wanted to ask, let's say for example I am a Monster Hunter fanboy, it's my life, it's what I do, I sit in my chair all day and I play this game till my eyes bleed. What am I gonna get out of watching the movie that I couldn't get from sitting and playing the game?

Paul: "You're gonna see those monsters come to life in a way that the games just can't do, you know, when you build creatures for a feature film, you build them to such a great level of detail. It's far beyond what you can kind of get from a video game engine. So I really think you see the creatures come to life and especially if you have the opportunity to go see it in a cinema, on an IMAX screen, or even watching it at home on a big-screen television. The level of detail, the excitement that the creatures deliver I just think is fabulous. Whereas, you're watching a video game, it's clearly animation here, it's clearly photo-real - I mean, these things look like they really exist and are really rampaging around these epic South African and Namibian landscapes."

"So there's that level of excitement, and I know it delivers on that because I worked very closely with the actual creators of the game, Tsujimoto-san and Fujiyoko-san, the producer and director of the video game. And I would see the look on their faces when they saw some of these action scenes happen, like the stampede of the Apceros. They were delighted, and I have to feel like the actual people who created the game and it's been their life for, you know, fifteen or twenty years now - if they are super excited, how can the fans not be?"

Crispin: Thank you, that's a very cool answer. I thought the monsters were amazing.

Paul: "Thank you! I mean, we also delivered them on the kind of scale that you can't get in a video game like just the sheer number of creatures that we could animate at one time... Also just diving into the mythology and exploring the mythology of this ancient civilization, you're learning something new about the Monster Hunter world, even if you think you know everything about it as a fan, you're learning something new and I think that's very cool."

Milla Jovovich offered her perspective on filming Monster Hunter across massive real locations, having played Monster Hunter World, her experiences with Capcom's landmark RPG, and just generally being attracted to video game to movie adaptations.

Sam: You mentioned that you played Monster Hunter World while researching the film, what was your experience like with the game itself? And having completed the movie, do you think that it captured your favourite aspects of playing the game?

Milla: "I think definitely what were able to capture was many parts of the games that I think fans are gonna love, some of their favourite characters; the most iconic characters are in the movie. One of the main aspects of the game is these incredible, huge and immersive landscapes, and I think that we've captured them really beautifully in the movie. The fact that we filmed everything on location and that everything was real - these incredible, untouched places that are hundreds of miles from any habitation, any town, any village. We were able to really capture these alien landscapes that look so much like the game, especially when you watch them on a big screen, it's just such an immersive experience. And I think that's one of the aspects that I loved about the game, was falling into this other universe and world that was so lush and so big."

"There were times when I would play the game and I would avoid the monsters and just try and explore the forests and explore the desert and find different mushrooms or find different ingredients to make potions... I just wanted to be a tourist in this landscape because it was so beautiful."



Crispin: Milla, through your career, you've played a number of different kinds of roles. You've done a number of different kind of movies, you mentioned you imagined to do these things in almost superhero-esque aspirations. But is there a special allure to video game adaptations that draw you in?

Milla: "I've only done two, Monster Hunter and Resident Evil. The allure for me is to go into these other universes; the allure for me is playing superhuman characters and being able to really challenge myself and escape into these worlds. The video game aspect is more my husband [laughs]. He's always been a gamer, and he gets these properties and of course he writes these scripts and he wants me to do them, and we have so much fun doing them together. But for me, if it was a book adaptation or video game adaptation, I just love the sci-fi aspect, I love these different universes, I love playing these kind of bigger than life characters. And [Paul] gives me that opportunity! Albeit it's a video game character as opposed to a book character."

Monster Hunter is now showing worldwide in theatres.