GAME FOR ANYTHING

AT FIRST I didn't believe it.

AWas Neil LaBute really involving himself with a PlayStation 3 game? The mordant American made his name writing chilling plays such as In the Company of Men and The Mercy Seat, which explored the very worst that nice, apparently normal people are capable of. His darkness is evident in the films he has directed, such as Nurse Betty, Replica IWC Watches or his misconceived remake of The Wicker Man. Surely that commercial and critical disaster hadn't reduced him to playing with pixels for a living? Well, no, not exactly. Sony's Heavy Rain for PS3, written and directed by Harry Cage, marks a step forward in gaming. The graphics have a downbeat realism to them but it is in the emotional field that the game is most innovative. Instead of randomly blasting aliens, the player is required to investigate a serial killer who preys on children. The moral choices your character makes alter the outcome of the game as much as your skill in beating up bad guys.

LaBute's involvement amounts to a supporting eight-minute documentary entitled How Far Would You Go ...? It consists of a series of talking heads, including film directors Nicolas Roeg and Stephen Frears and actor-producer Samuel L Jackson, responding to the central question of how far they'd go for love (in Jackson's case, the answer is "not very"). Each talking head then discusses how much the emotions of love and hate inform their work. The responses are sometimes surprising, sometimes funny, sometimes touching: film director Peter Bogdanovich sings, while writer Hanif Kureshi agonises over whether he would kill to save a loved one.

LaBute considers his film "a supplemental exploration of the game's themes". He says he was attracted to the project because the notion of the "boundaries we put on love" touched issues in his own work, and because it gave him the chance to examine the creative processes of people he admired, both former collaborators and long- term heroes.

"It's a humanising thing, like getting a glimpse behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz," he explains. "You get to see that Samuel L Jackson is just a person -- a gifted person but otherwise no different from the rest of us. Also, I'd never done anything like this before, and that always interests me." (For the record, he has directed two commercials, for footwear company Airwalk, in Bedat & Co Watches the past.) LaBute is not a committed gamer himself, beyond having played the odd fatherly session of Super Mario when his son Spencer, now 18, was growing up. But he can see how the film and gaming worlds are converging.

Heavy Rain aims for a more realistic look in the skin tone and eye-movement of its characters. Meanwhile, films like Avatar, and the motion-capture animations of Robert Zemeckis, are making film actors more like figures in a game. Movies such as Resident Evil are now derived from video games, while action films are plotted with at least half an eye on a playable spinoff.

It's hard to see that happening with LaBute's own, psychologically complex, character-driven dramas, "but if DVD sales continue to fall, it's logical that companies will look for other ways, like that, to make revenue", he says. "And I can imagine a good director might want to get involved in a game [based on a movie] in the same way they would get involved with the soundtrack, or with a novelisation of the script."

So how far Replica Audemars Piguet Watches would he go for love? "Pretty far," he says, amiably. "I think we all have the capacity t
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