Being Put to the Test by Video Game Fans: Radha Mitchell plays Rose, the mother frantically looking for a way to help her sick child in Silent Hill. Mitchell says she hasn’t yet faced a group of fans of the game but is looking forward to seeing how they react to Silent Hill the movie. “I was shooting a film when they did a couple of conventions with the fans and I didn’t get to them,” explained Mitchell. “I’m not sure what it’s like to meet all these fans, but I’m looking forward to seeing more because they’re participating a lot on the Internet. There’s a lot of sites where people are talking about what they think of Silent Hill and how they feel about it and what they expect from it and so on. So I hope that the movie satisfies them.”
Previous to starring in Silent Hill, the majority of Mitchell’s roles have been in independent films, not necessarily movies the typical video game fan may be familiar with. But Mitchell says don’t sell Silent Hill game fans short. “I think those fans are more sophisticated than you might expect, but also a lot of them have seen movies like Pitch Black [note: Mitchell played Carolyn in Pitch Black]. I think the thing with Silent Hill fans is they’re older than the average video game fan, so they have a kind of broad knowledge of film. So do I come to it with a clean slate? I hope so. I hope they just look at the film for what it is and judge it in that light.”
Facing Down Her Own Demons: “I think doing this movie you had to face your own demons because a lot of it was CGI and a lot of the acting was with puppets and so on. In order for it to be real, you had to go into your own unconscious and feel your own anxiety or pain and drag it out somehow on ‘Action’ and put it out there. So yeah, it was definitely going into some kind of weird place in myself to create the story.”
Mitchell admits facing off against puppets and tennis balls was a bit surreal. “Christophe [Gans, the director] I think expected us to just respond on cue. We were always like, ‘Give us a noise. Give us something.’ So in the end, we developed a habit where he would say, ‘Okay, monster. Okay, it’s coming. Now!’ So there was some kind of dialogue about what we were doing, but at first he didn’t quite understand. He thought that we should just be able to imagine it like that. But actually, acting is so interactive and you really need things to go off that we had the first AD making funny noises for the monsters through microphones and stuff like that. All of that would seem completely ridiculous to anybody who was watching what we were doing. But it definitely helped with the actors.”
Physical Conditions on the Set of Silent Hill: The weather was torturously hot on some days and freezing cold on others, but the variances in temperature didn’t have an adverse effect on performances. “I think because you’re in Silent Hill, whatever is going on just helps. If we were making a movie about an English tea party in the 1900s, that probably would have been a problem. Because we were in Silent Hill, anything just adds to what it is to be there. It’s an uncomfortable place to be so if it’s hot, that’s great. If it’s cold, that’s still great.”
The Weirdness of Working with Movie Monsters: “Every day you had to lighten it up. You’re either screaming or laughing because what you were doing was very intense. If you didn’t understand what was going on, it would look completely ridiculous. I mean, every week there was a new monster that would come to set with a crazy costume on. A lot of the monsters were played by real actors inside these suits, these latex suits. A lot of them didn’t have faces and didn’t have arms, and would be breathing through tubes that would come out the side of their legs. It looked really strange.
I don't know if they used it but there was a video we were making of the making of the film and so a lot of the time I’d go around and interview the monsters. That was something that I would do to entertain myself. That was funny.”
Page 2: Radha Mitchell's Reaction to the Finished Film and Her Next Project: Rogue
