This is a huge project, what do you set out to achieve individually with this?
I wanted to create an emotional journey into the life of someone and really tell the story
of Jodie Holmes through fifteen years of her life.
And talk about different themes than the themes usually found in video games.
This is game about growing, learning and accepting who you are, it's about death and what's on
the other side and I wanted to the player to feel different emotions than the ones you
usually find in games.
For me it's like doing any job, you just want to do the best job you can possibly do and
hopefully give David what he wants.
I was moved by what he'd written and by this female protagonist and just wanted to give
everything I could to it.
Now this next question is a challenge for all of us, how can we summarise this game
in terms of the blossoming marriage of gaming and film?
I don't know.
I mean, for me, I'm interested in what David wants to do.
I'm interested in the idea of taking the cinematic scope of narrative, the wanting to be moved
by something - at least that's why I go to a film whether it's to laugh or to cry or
to share in someone's pain, whatever it is.
And the idea of doing that in this medium where you are in a way sort of responsible
for you protagonist and are making some very minor, or very very major ethical...
answering some ethical questions and making choices.
That to me is very interesting.
I was learning about the way you shot it and it just sounds incredible.
Can you talk us through how that worked with like the motion capture and the fake artificial
set?
Sounds crazy.
It is crazy, yeah it is crazy.
What's funny about it is that at first the things that are most intimidating and seem
the most difficult about it, so no sets, no wardrobe, literally creating everything in
your head, it's a lot of just total imagination, but then the sort of stripped down-ness of
it all and the fact that you're not playing to one camera, you're surrounded by 70 cameras,
you're moving and evolving in a scene with another actor in this way that is so immediate
that it actually becomes incredibly freeing and liberating that you realises that oh,
for the actual pureness of what I love to do, you're like oh wow when you shoot a movie
you actually have more constraints, you know you have a mark to hit and a place you need
to look and you wait while the camera turns around.
So this was so freeing because you really had nothing, you had nothing but getting to
act.
So it was really incredibly challenging in a way, but incredibly fulfilling, for an actor.
And in terms of gaming and innovation, do you think the industry needs to keep innovating
in this way and keep pushing forward.
What do you think the future of it is?
It's a very interesting moment in the gaming industry right now, because we see very different
types of games.
You have everything from Candy Crush to GTA5, and all these are games, but in different
games maybe you are achieving different objectives and maybe for different demographics.
And I think that's cool because for very long video games were targetting very specific
demographics, the more it goes the more we try to show that interacting can be interesting
and attractive to more people and not just to kids and teenagers.
So with Beyond we really tried to create an experience that can be appealing to more people
and we really wanted to show that it can be cool to just interact with a story and be
in the shoes of Jodie Holmes in Beyond."
Do you think film and gaming will continue to mesh together, will we eventually not even
watch films anymore?
No way, that's what I think is funny about this, people always try to be like will they
fuse and I always think they will be separate.
You know, gaming is a much younger media, so it is in a certain place, and I feel like
what David is doing, and the way people responded to Heavy Rain, and the way people are so passionate
and love that game, I think he's taken Beyond and taken that to a whole new level and he
will continue to do, and I'm sure other people will continue to do, because they'll see that,
well hopefully, that people like it and respond to it and enjoy the new emotional engagement
that - it goes to a whole new level with this.
Whereas films is a different experience, it's passive, a filmmaker is very meticulous about
everything that they want you to see and it's just a totally - I think it's just a different
medium and I think that gaming is now evolving to incorporate just different things.