It was teased for a few weeks, but yesterday evening it really took place. The crew behind Max Payne: Retribution organized a live Q&A session with the help of Facebook’s live streaming function. Fans of the independent film project were tasked with sending in as much questions as possible. They were allowed to ask anything and the director of the film (Leroy Kincaide) answered all of the questions in all honesty. With the project nearing completion, fans were eager to know more as it took Kincaide over an hour of his time to answer more than 20 questions. PayneReactor had send in three of our own and they were answered right at the start! For those that would like to view the entire Q&A session, click here. Or continue reading for the answers Kincaide gave to my questions.
During your search for a lead as Max Payne, what requirements did you have for the role?
“For the right Max Payne, there was.. I would say a lot of searching that we did. I think we had over 32 different candidates for the role. Everybody had something very unique and very different that they could bring to the project. We literally sifted down through everybody, sort of meticulously down to like final little points; the look, the hair, the sound of the voice. The guy that we went with, we went with our good man Joan, he was just absolutely phenomenal. When we saw him, from the bat.. as you can see from the pictures. All you would have to do is search for a few of the pictures, or if have been following the project, you can see he literally just looks like Max Payne. Of course the look was heavily a big motivator for “Why?”. We wanted to basically give you guys a trip of nostalgia so you felt like you were seeing a modern day Max Payne that looked like it was lifted almost from the game. And that’s what I felt that we were able to create getting the right Max Payne for the project.”
Your story introduces us to various new characters. How did you guys got inspired to create these, and what is their function within the Max Payne universe?
“So with regards to new characters being brought in to the universe, which is Max Payne.. The biggest thing that I felt as an obstacle, trying to lift characters from the game into our project, was that in the timeline there’s so many variations of elaborate characters and people that really deserved more time within the project if we were to introduce them. So my way of introducing different characters was; one, creatively it gives us a little bit of juice to play with in terms of keeping the character-arcs between Mona Sax, Jack Lupino and Max Payne. Like, very similar to what’s going on within the game but the other characters just really add some extra dimensions that we might not have got just from individual characters from the game itself. So for me it was more about, how can I introduce something different, that doesn’t feel too different from the game. Almost like they could fit, if they were in the game.”
Videogame movies are often criticized for adding or altering the universe, directors giving their own spin to things, how will you avoid this videogame movie cliché?
“I would say the biggest obstacle that I think to overcome when you’re trying to translate a game into an actual film or TV show format, is that sometimes when you are trying to lift the storyline plot for plot, section for section, emotional beat for emotional beat, what usually happens is that the timeline doesn’t actually, in ways, merry well together. So sometimes this does require a tiny bit of, as we say, self-characterization. You have to give your own little bit of magic to the project to sometimes help it. Now with Max Payne, I think the biggest thing that we’ve had from day one is; how can we translate this wonderful epic story, which spans over three games.. The two that I mainly focused on primarily for this story as you probably can see was Max Payne one and two.. How could we bring that to life in the modern day. You know, bearing in mind we are not in New York, we are in the UK. Bearing in mind we are working with UK based actors, putting on American accents. To try and keep as much authenticity as possible we had to shift a small bit around in the timeline. But ultimately what we are doing is, we’re still telling the same story, just in a slightly different narrative. What you would see in our film is more rather than it being like a film on Max Payne, it’s actually more a day in the life of Max Payne. Which is shown in this timeline that you will see when the project is released. But I think to avoid any big pitfalls from the story, from where that’s concerned, you have to be passionate about the actual story you want to tell. And that is, I think, the biggest ethos Chloe and myself worked with. We’ve got to tell the right story, we can’t just tell the story it has to be the right one for you guys, the fans. That for me is how we are going to avoid any pitfalls that we might fall victim to. Because we are independent we get to create the film that we want to make. The film that we didn’t get, we get to create that.”