CraveOnline: You joined X-Men as one of the new students in The Last Stand. Do you have a bigger role in Days of Future Past?
Ellen Page: I feel like Kitty has some stuff to do in the movie, yeah, but the problem with this is you just don’t know what you’re allowed to say. All I can say is I had such a great time being back, couldn’t be a more insanely talented but also just lovely group of people to work with every day. Going to work and watching Hugh [Jackman] play Wolverine in front of you and watching Patrick [Stewart] and Ian [McKellan] between takes goof around makes me so happy to no end. It’s so much fun.
Queen & Country could be good progress but surprisingly it can still be tough to get movies with female heroines made. Gaming can be a male audience but is the gaming world more open to female heroines than movies sometimes? There’s Lara Croft, the Resident Evils and more.
I don’t know. I feel like I’m not enough of a gamer to know but I think with these things, if people would just be willing to maybe take more risks, I think they would be surprised. I think that audiences respond to a compelling story, whether it’s a male or female. I just saw Gravity and Sandra Bullock’s incredible in that movie. I think because it is her specifically, it makes the movie more compelling and more interesting. That movie opened incredibly well and it’s also because it’s just a beautiful movie that is just so insane visually.
I think it comes down to the work and to the material and the film that’s being made. The more that we have female directors and women writing screenplays, I’m sure the more we’ll see hopefully better roles for women in film because yes, right now there’s a horrible gender inequality in film, and just generally towards any minority quite frankly. So yes, one hopes that as the times evolve that films and video games also will reflect that.
It’s heartening that video games can embrace that equally, or maybe more than films do.
Yeah, exactly, and with this game, let’s get real. I think we can both agree, as many others would, that I don’t look like Lara Croft. And Jodie is not dressed like Lara Croft either, so I’m super stoked that this character is going into the world because she is a real, strong, also vulnerable, sad, very, very complex and ultimately I think a very real character. And she also happens to be a girl.
She does go on glamorous missions in foreign embassies though.
And she still wears a red gown from time to time, so yeah, she’s still very much a woman. She’s not just some sort of crazy badass in camouflage for the whole game. She’s complex, she’s all the things that make a woman a woman I suppose.
Did they have wardrobe or was that added in the game?
No, no wardrobe. That’s all added.
Maybe because of the writing and the technology has evolved to show this, but she’s a much more dramatic character than maybe Lara Croft was in the beginning.
Sure, I mean they’re just different games too. To be honest, the new Tomb Raider, I had a blast playing. Loved it! I thought that was a great game, but it’s different. This game is not as traditional as other video games. Yeah, there’s a lot of awesome, exciting, cool gameplay for sure, but there’s also a narrative. The narrative is very cinematic in its scope and it is emotionally complex. It’s just different.
Were there any points where it was very technical work, where you had to do a performance that teaches the player how to play the game?
No, not really. Sometimes there’s dialogue that you might not say by yourself as a regular person, like, I don’t know, “Cook the chicken.” You don’t really say that. Sometimes dialogue driven things that of course are about guiding the player, but I don’t really recall doing anything physical in regards to telling the player how to play the game. Yes, of course, some of the dialogue and some of the voiceover is helping guide the player.
It’s actually far less obtrusive in Beyond: Two Souls than in some others.
Yeah, of course and I think the device that helps is Aiden. Communicating with Aiden is sometimes communicating with the player because of course you play as Aiden sometimes.
Did you work with Willem Dafoe and the other actors in those scenes?
Yeah, sometimes I was by myself but a lot of the times I worked with actors. Any scene Willem and I have together we did together so that was a tremendous experience because he’s just a phenomenal actor who I’ve always loved and also just an awesome person. Getting to do this with him was so great.
Did Beyond: Two Souls take longer than a movie?
No. It’s so different that it’s hard to [say]. No, it took me four weeks but I was doing 30-40 pages of work every day which is totally different from a movie. I mean, that’s just impossible in a movie. It’s insane. On a movie you do three pages of work a day.
Were you seeking out a new medium? You said you were surprised how fulfilling the video game experience was, but were you looking for something like this and open to something new?
No, no, it came totally out of nowhere but I think I’m a person who always wants to do things that are new and different, whether it’s different kinds of films, whether it’s different kinds of filmmakers. I’m interested in working with different people because of how they work. Going from shooting something that has a massive budget and then wanting to follow up that with something with a tiny budget just for the sake of experiencing the different worlds. Then to get to go do something that was so wildly different and new and literally like nothing I’d done before was such an exciting opportunity.
Besides Tomb Raider, what were some of your favorite games, even going back to when you were a kid in the Nintendo era?
Oh, huge Sonic the Hedgehog fan, NHL ’94. That’s dating me a bit. Then Playstation, I loved Crash Bandicoot, I loved FIFA, Medal of Honor, that kind of thing.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Shelf Space Weekly. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
