The Losers Director Sylvain White on Race, Remakes and Video Games

You're getting to adapt a lot of things you loved growing up, it seems. How did that happen...you got meetings after Stomp the Yard, and you lobbied hard for these properties?

You know how Hollywood works: after the success of Stomp the Yard, I was offered every dance movie in town. That's not where I wanted to direct my career. I look at everything: newspapers, books, graphic novels. I'm a huge video game player. There are great ideas and great IPs in many different things. Right now, I'm developing a King Arthur original story and a UFO project based on a newspaper article. Generally, I like underdog stories, and I've spent the early tier of my career doing PG-13 films. I like targeting the young, teenage audience because I feel like they know what's cool out there. I try to stay diverse. Luckily, so far, I've been able to really jump from one genre to the next -- a drama, a dance film, now an action comedy -- and I hope to keep it that way.

You're also attached to adapt the graphic novel Ronin, by Frank Miller.

Absolutely. It's a project I was developing before, and I had to put it on hold to direct The Losers. Now that I'm free, I'm actually going to get back into it in the spring and get back into the writing.

After having now adapted a graphic novel, what have you learned about it that you can apply to Ronin?

They're so categorically different, it's just apples and oranges. I mean, Ronin is set in the year 2098 with a time-traveling samurai. [Laughs] It's just a completely different world, and the source material is so different and esoteric. It's a completely different process and a different kind of movie.

As a fanboy yourself, do you ever go see other directors whose films are adapted from source material you love and have those classic fanboy reactions..."Oh, why did they cut that?" or "Oooh, I hope they include this"?

Absolutely. In the past when there's been really good adaptations, I get super excited. I think The Dark Knight is a good example of that. Then again, when there's a bad adaptation [laughs], it's very upsetting to me. Especially in video games, I'm a big fan and I think they're full of such great ideas, and it feels like the great adaptations of them are very few. It's like video game adaptations have a bad rep or a stigma, and I think that's unfounded because there are some really great ideas out there. Very original ideas, in fact. It just hasn't necessarily been done right.

Why do you think there have been so few video game films? You tried to adapt Castlevania for a while to no avail and there are so many classic video game franchise untapped; meanwhile, every obscure comic book or graphic novel is being rushed to the screen.

I think it's a new thing, and there have been a few attempts and they weren't that successful. Hollywood is a little tentative about the video game thing, and I think the video game industry is hoping that Prince of Persia is going to do really well and become the first big, successful video game adaptation. I guess Resident Evil and Tomb Raider did OK, but though those movies were commercial successes, they didn't necessarily appeal to or satisfy the fans of the source material. I think it's about time, right now...they need something that does what The Dark Knight did.

[Photo Credit: Chelsea Lauren/Wire Image]

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