Return to Silent Hill star reveals why the film is not a perfect Silent Hill 2 recreation – and why he avoided game inspiration for performance

While video game adaptations have been enjoying a great moment on the small screen of late – thanks to TV hits such as The Last of Us and Fallout – we're perhaps still awaiting the first truly great film based on a popular game.

Certainly, the previous movies in the Silent Hill franchise have failed to win much acclaim – with both 2006's Silent Hill and 2012's Silent Hill: Revelation faring negatively with critics.

Now, almost 15 years on from the previous attempt, a new entry in the series is here, with Return to Silent Hill taking its cues from Silent Hill 2 and starring Outlander: Blood of My Blood star Jeremy Irvine in the lead role.

Unfortunately, early signs suggest this is set to be another critical dud – it sits on just 9 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes at time of writing – and speaking exclusively to RadioTimes.com ahead of release, Irvine explained the difficulties of adapting such a well-loved property in a different medium.

"I mean, you're walking a tightrope," he said, "I think whenever you do something that means a lot to a lot of people, I don't think you're ever going to please everyone – especially with fans as passionate as they are for this."

He added that while it is based on Silent Hill 2, writer/director Christophe Gans had taken bits from various different games to create something a little different, explaining that a movie version of a play-by-play of the game simply "wouldn't work as a film".

"I mean, how many hours is the quickest speed run to get through all of Silent Hill 2?" Irvine said. "So it needed some sort of story, and it needed to work in a movie. They are vastly different art forms, you've got to do a completely different thing, rather than someone being completely interactive, just sitting back and expecting you to just put it on to them."

He added that it was "exciting to see how it all came together", and noted that while Gans's vision always remained the same, the final version of the film "was almost completely different" to the first script he had read.

In playing lead character James Sutherland, Irvine is following on from actors Guy Cihi and Luke Roberts, who played him in the original and remake of the game respectively, but he explained that he didn't look to those game performances while deciding how to approach the role for the movie.

"The way I saw it was that the character is very much a blank slate for the player to go through the emotions the character is," he said. "And I think when you're playing a video game, you're the one inputting the controller, deciding what happens. So having that sort of two dimensional character works very well in a video game, because you then put that on to you.

"So I was sort of aware that when we're doing the movie, I couldn't just get away with doing that. I think it'd be a quite boring performance. All of those emotions that hopefully the player feels when they play the game, I needed to do through James in the movie to make it work for the film."

Of course, throughout the film, James encounters all sorts of terrifying creatures and antagonists that fans will now extremely well from the games, most of which were brought to life using real actors and prosthetics rather than through CGI.

One of the most iconic of those is Pyramid Head, who Irvine noted was "just someone in a great suit with a big helmet on" in the film, and there were several other aspects of the various villains that impressed him on set.

"I was very impressed by the choreography with all The Nurses in tandem, all sort of synced up," he revealed. "That was very cool to watch. I noticed there was a lot of work to get this entire troupe into that very unnatural way of moving, that on set was genuinely terrifying – until they called cut and then all these lovely Serbian ballet dancers all start giggling!"

And the nurses weren't the only frightening characters played by actors who in reality were anything but.

"The Armless, which is a really sort of horrific, disgusting creature, is played by the most beautiful Italian dancer," he recalled. "There's a very glamorous, beautiful Italian dancer inside there! So they use a lot of performing artists, lot of dancers."

He added that by not relying on CGI it also made his own job a little easier.

"I didn't have to do too much of the sort of imagining what was in front of me," he said. "There were obviously some bits. But it was something I know Christophe was very adamant about – where possible doing it for real and not doing CGI. And I think however good [CGI] is, I think you still can tell. So it's really nice to have a real thing!"

Return to Silent Hill is now showing in UK cinemas.

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