Previously, we shared the tour to Quantic Dreams headquarter in Paris and unveiled the mysteries of producing “Beyond: Two Souls”. After knowing the storyline and game features, here are the in-depth interviews with David Cage and Guillaume de Fondaumière, the title and studio directors of “Beyond: Two Souls”. Let’s pry into their world of inspiration.
Interview with David Cage
Reporter: What inspired you to write the story of “Beyond”? I’ve heard that you started the story in about 2005.
David Cage: Yes, I started this story long time ago. I was interested in death and what’s on the other side. I wanted to write something about this. Sometimes you see people in the subway talking to themselves like talking to an invisible friend.
Reporter: Was there any movie or something inspired you to write this story?
David Cage: Well, actually since “Heavy Rain”, I discovered that I could write about things that happened to me. “Heavy Rain” was about me being a young father and the relationship with my son. “Beyond” is about death. I lost someone I felt really close to in my family. Death is something really brutal and finally, there is nothing you can do about it, so I wanted to write something about what had happened to this person after she died. “Beyond” is my attempt to that.
Reporter: Do you believe that there’s spiritual power and the other side?
David Cage: Actually I don’t believe there’s something on the other side. I am afraid that I don’t believe there’s a god and I don’t believe there is something after you die. But that doesn’t make a very good story, so I thought I should better write something - what if there is something after you die and if there is something and that’s it.
Reporter: So if we finish the game, can we get the answer?
David Cage: Yes.
Reporter: I know that in the very beginning of your writing, you chose Ellen page as the main character. Why was she your choice?
David Cage: What I really like about Ellen in the films was how she looked like a very fragile and vulnerable girl, but at the same time she is very clever, really courageous and she has some kinds of strength inside. She has something really unique. If you watch her in “Hard candy”, for example, or in “Juno”, she is really driven by something very strong inside her and that’s really unique and I thought that was really appealing. I didn’t want a blonde girl with big boobs and high heels. I mean I am not interested in this kind of characters. I am interested in people that are true, that are real, that are clever. Also I was looking for an actress would be capable of being this character between the age of 14 and the age of 23; be capable of being this young teenager or being this young adult and playing different ages in the life of Jodie, and this is what Ellen Page did.
Reporter: In the game, there is Aiden and he has some kind of link to Jodie. In your point of view, is Aiden a burden or a gift for Jodie? In the demo played this morning, it is interesting that Jodie wanted to escape from Aiden. She wanted to die but Aiden protected her and didn’t let her die.
David Cage: What is really special about the game is that these two characters have a link and they can’t be separated. But Jodie doesn’t want this link. She doesn’t want this entity. She just wants to be like anyone else but she can’t have a normal life because of Aiden, so she hates him for that. But she loves him at the same time because they were together since she was born. So it’s a love and hate type of relationship. Same thing with Aiden, Aiden probably doesn’t want this link. He doesn’t want to be with Jodie. He wants to live in this world. But they are trapped together, they are tied together and they need to do with it, cope with it and accept the situation. “Beyond” is not just a story of Jodie. It is the story of this relationship between these two characters.
Reporter: In terms of time, some people played “Heavy Rain” and said that the game was too short for them. Generally, to complete “Beyond”, how long does it take?
David Cage: Like most story-driven games, there is going to be between 10 and 12 hours for one walkthrough. But in one walkthrough, you can’t see everything and you’ll miss a lot of things.
Reporter: Are there any difficulties by using performance capture in the studio. Can you share them with us?
David Cage: As I explained this morning, we used what we called “Performance Capture” which is really about capturing the entire performance - body, face, voice, at the same time, so there were many issues tied to this technology, especially because we didn’t want the technology to be invasive. We just want the actors to feel free and dedicated to the performance. So we work on this wireless technology. The main difficulty was properly for actors to work without any set, without any wardrobe, without any props because you saw the set which was totally empty. My work as a director was really to explain to the actors what was going on, what space they were in, what was going on around them so they could really react with the surroundings. That was really a big challenge for them.
Reporter: From the experience of “Heavy Rain”, there are many endings in the game and your ending is based on your choices. Does it also apply to “Beyond”?
David Cage: The thing that is difficult to demonstrate is that you got the feeling that it was really linear except in this moment where there were dialogue choices but that’s not the case actually! There were many different ways of playing the scene and you just saw one possibility, but this morning we could have showed you many different ways of playing the scene with different results and different consequences. People sometimes get confused because they don’t see big prompts on screen “Do you want to do this?”, ”Do you want to do that?” flashing and then they are “Oh, here is a choice!”, but actually there are many moments where you just make choices by interacting and you don’t fully realize that you made the choices but actually you made the choice. It’s a strange thing to explain, but when you play it, it’s obvious and organic. This is how it works. Same thing than in “Heavy Rain”, in “Heavy Rain” you make choices all the time, but there was no big sign flashing “Oh, be careful, you are about to make a choice!” No, it was just like as you play, you told the story, same thing with “Beyond”.
Reporter: Is Aiden a ghost or something?
David Cage: Well, it’s one of the goals of the game to know exactly what Aiden is.
Reporter: There is no picture of Aiden. Is there an image of Aiden?
David Cage: You never know what it looks like. It’s a ghost!
Reporter: In the story, Aiden always protects Jodie. Is it because if Jodie dies, Aiden disappears too? Is this their relationship?
David Cage: Aiden does not always protect Jodie. It can be very possessive and jealous sometimes. And about your question, this is something you don’t know when you start the game. I can’t tell you too much as it’s really part of the story.
Reporter: Can you tell us more about the technology of Performance Capture? It is amazing that it captures facial expression, movement, actions at the same time.
David Cage: You know what “Heavy Rain” and what most games did in the past. We shot facial animation and voice, and then we went on the performance capture stage and tried to do the body on top. But it was done in two different takes, so all the body language was lost in the process. All the very subtle things that you do with your body when you speak were lost. There are some tiny things that very few people know. For example, when you turn your head, you blink your eyes all the time, just because your brain needs to reset. It’s very rare that you move your head keeping your eyes open. It looks very unnatural. When you shoot in two different takes, this is something that you lose because there is no sync between the face and the body. But when you shoot in performance capture, you get these kinds of subtlety back. You get body language. You got perfect sync between what you say and how you move and your face. Everything is in sync because it’s captured in one take. This is where all the subtlety and nuances come from. We have also developed the specific technology about eyes animations. How the eyes move is also something very important in understanding expression of someone and reading the expression on their faces. It plays a big role. What I really enjoy about what I see in “Beyond” is the fact that sometimes you can just film Jodie being silent and just know what she thinks or how she feels by just looking at her face. That’s something really new in games because before that, you needed a dialogue or a GUI (Graphical user interface) telling you “Oh, you feel tired. You feel good. I am injured” but now you can just look at the character and you can see “Oh, I get how she feels.”
Reporter: What is your expectation of “Beyond”?
David Cage: What I hope from “Beyond” is that when people switch off the console once they are done with the game, they would really feel that they like Jodie a lot that they knew her by heart because they knew her since she was a kid and they saw all the very important moments of her life, so they’ll feel that she is someone real, someone they know, someone they like and someone they will miss like their friend. This is what I really want to achieve with this game.
Reporter: Thank you.
David Cage: Thanks!
Interview with Guillaume de Fondaumière
Reporter: My first question is that “Heavy Rain” has made a great success in 2010, so why did not Quantic Dream play safe to release a sequel, but to make a totally new one?
Guillaume de Fondaumière: First of all, the reason is that it’s an author thing. David Cage felt that he had already said everything he had to say about the story of “Heavy Rain” and didn’t want to work on another sequel or prequel to the story. He had tons of ideas for other stories, one of which was “Beyond”. And at that point we felt that this was the next story that we wanted to tell. Yeah, from a commercial point of view I agree with you that it might have been interesting to do a sequel, but we thought that there was something more interesting from an intellectual standpoint. So we decided to go with a new project.
Reporter: Do you think that it is risky to work on such a large title? Do you have the devices or the technology for developing this title? I heard that the number of staff at Quantic Dream has increased from 100 to 200 in the past 3 years. What’s the anticipation for this new title? I think it’s a bit risky to take on such a large project.
Guillaume de Fondaumière: I don’t think that it’s a risk. I mean, the sales number of PS3™ has risen by 50% since 2010? So that means there are more PS3™ out there than there were in 2010. So we expect that the market will be larger for “Heavy Rain” and “Beyond”. This is the first thing. The second thing is we did increase the headcount. But let’s not forget that we are not only working on one title, I can’t tell you more. But indeed “Beyond” is a bigger project than “Heavy Rain” so its budget is higher. I think it was a bigger risk to produce “Heavy Rain” than to produce “Beyond”. We have more confidence and we have proven with “Heavy Rain” that the return of our investment is very positive.
Reporter: Why did you have the idea to find actual people to be the characters of the game, other than just creating them with computers?
Guillaume de Fondaumière: We are of the opinion that actors are capable of portraying human emotions in a very peculiar way. Since our games are very story-driven, one of the objectives is to steer the players’ emotions. We believe that it’s far more efficient to work with actors than with computer-generated animations, for instance, and things like that. And I think that in “Beyond” this is going to be very, very obvious. Working with Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe had been a tremendous plus. I guess you have already seen it this morning. There is already a difference in the acting performance between “Heavy Rain” and that we have in “Beyond”. I think it raises the bar quite significantly.
Reporter: Will “Beyond” be released on the PS4™ platform?
Guillaume de Fondaumière: “Beyond” is going to be released on PS3™.
Reporter: But it is announced that PS4™ will be released this year, is it possible to have a new version?
Guillaume de Fondaumière: It would be possible but nothing has been decided yet.
Reporter: Was Ellen Page your first choice as the main character?
Guillaume de Fondaumière: Yes, both Willem and Ellen were a first choice. So it was kind of easy for me. I am negotiating with the agents, the managers. So I only had to give one phone call each time.
Reporter: Why did you choose them as actors for the characters?
Guillaume de Fondaumière: This is a question to ask David. When David starts writing, he’s basically always projecting known actors onto the faces. Even if the design is going to be different, he likes to think of the characters as known actors before starting to write. So for Jodie Holmes, it was Ellen Page; and for Dr. Dawkins it was Willem Dafoe, right from the beginning. When it came the time of casting them, we thought “why don’t we try contacting them?”. Maybe they are going to be willing, available, accessible from a financial point of view. So we tried. We sent them the synopsis, and very rapidly in both instances, I first contacted Ellen Page. She was the first to join the project. Then we met her in LA, spent a few hours with her, discussing the role, the project but also explained to her that “it’s not going to be easy, you will have to learn everything by heart”. Because the last thing you want is an actor coming without knowing his part. And not being willing to do what you expect from them. So, we wanted to be very clear of what we would be expecting from them. And when they accept “Ok I understand”, I think they didn’t really understand. And then they realized “Ohhh it’s a lot of work!”. But after a few days, they knew exactly what this was about. So again, this is how things came into play. Same with Willem, discussing with them, showing them the script and then he said “Ok I will do it.”
Reporter: I am curious how long did the performance capture for Ellen Page take?
Guillaume de Fondaumière: 4 weeks.
Reporter: 4 weeks? Just like a short movie.
Guillaume de Fondaumière: Four weeks every day, from 8:30 until 6pm. And Willem stayed 2 weeks.
Reporter: Did they do the performance capture together or separately?
Guillaume de Fondaumière: They did all the scenes together. When you have a stage like this for performance capture, it’s very important to have both actors as much as possible. We have to make sure that each time there is an ensemble of actors to perform together.
Reporter: The game tells of the story of Jodie when she is 8 years old to 23 years old. How did you create the character of her when she is 8? With CG?
Guillaume de Fondaumière: We are using another actor who is a child. So there is another actor called Caroline Wilson. She’s playing Jodie Holmes when she is 8. What we did actually is creating a blend from a facial standpoint between Caroline and Ellen when she was young. So she would resemble Ellen. And we were very much helped by the fact that Ellen has been playing in films and series since she was young. So we have documentation to see how she looked like when she was a child and be able to recreate Ellen Page when she was younger.
Reporter: What is your expectation of the sales of “Beyond”?
Guillaume de Fondaumière: “Heavy Rain” sold 2.5 million copies. If you take second-hand games, we were like 3.5 millions. So, that’s naturally my ambition for “Beyond”.
Reporter: When did the idea of making “Beyond” come up? Was it after finishing “Heavy Rain” or during the production?
Guillaume de Fondaumière: It came earlier. It was a project that David had started to write at a very early stage a few pages of concept. Probably in 2005. It was before “Heavy Rain”. It was a very rough story about a girl. And then he really started to work on the writing after we released “Heavy Rain”, in October 2010.
