Genki Kawamura talks about adapting the horror game for film and getting advice from Shigeru Miyamoto.
Few video game adaptations understand their source material quite like the Exit 8 film. It takes the rules and structure of the game — which strands players inside of a looping hallway in a Tokyo subway station — and then builds on them with actual characters and a story. And according to director Genki Kawamura, one of the reasons that the movie feels so fresh could be because of how he approached it. “I wasn’t necessarily thinking about a film adaptation of a video game,” he tells The Verge. “I was thinking about how to create a new cinematic experience that blurs the lines between video game and cinema.”
The two are very similar, and the film even starts out with the game’s first-person perspective. And like the game, the movie features a person stranded inside of a hallway that repeats itself, and the only way to get out is to spot “anomalies” — basically, weird shit that changes in each loop — and then switch directions. Kawamura says that he discovered the game because he plays a lot of indie titles, and he was immediately attracted by just how much like Tokyo the space felt. But he also realized the premise could make for a much more universal story. “I felt like a lot of people who live in cities have had that experience of getting lost in a passage like that,” he explains. “I felt like combining the Tokyo design and the very universal experience could create something cinematic.”
