Just How Much Directing Did John Hillcoat Do for His Red Dead Redemption Short Film?

How do you follow up a bleak, underperforming, confusingly marketed film like The Road? If you're director John Hillcoat, you get hired by Rockstar Games to make a 30-minute film to promote the new game Red Dead Redemption, using only in-game assets. The short premiered on Fox at midnight last month; now it's online, and...this is basically just a compilation of the scenes that are already in the game? Who knew?

There are a couple of alternate angles and some new transitions between the scenes, but one can hardly picture Hillcoat breaking a sweat over the enterprise. As he told Vulture, he hasn't actually played Red Dead Redemption despite making a film about it -- although when Hillcoat also admitted, "There were the precut scenes; we could go into and reframe the material, but they're pre-existing scenes where the animation and the characters are set," I didn't picture him meaning it to quite this extent. Today, we are all n00b auteurs.

Watch The Entire Red Dead Redemption "Short Film" [Kotaku]