Exclusive: David Hayter talks METAL GEAR SOLID and LOST PLANET Movies

Yesterday I spoke with “Watchmen” screenwriters David Hayter and Alex Tse for about 20 minutes. Since the exclusive interview covers a lot of ground, I’ve decided to take out a few selected moments and post them right now, and I’ll post the entire interview sometime closer to the release date of “Watchmen”. Trust me, it’s a fantastic interview and really interesting…especially if you’re a “Watchmen” fan and curious what went on behind the scenes.

In case you didn’t know, David Hayter wrote the first two “X-Men” movies and he also was one of the screenwriter’s on “Watchmen”. But while that’s cool to a lot of people…to many video game players, all they care about is that he’s the voice of Solid Snake in the “Metal Gear Solid” games.

In fact, when I posted my exclusive interview with Mike De Luca awhile back, I received a ton of emails telling me that I had to tell Mike that David Hayter had to be involved with the “Metal Gear Solid” movie.

But while David’s involvement in the upcoming movie looked like it wasn’t going to happen, he told me yesterday that things might be changing….so if you’re a “Metal Gear Solid” fan, you probably want to watch this. Also, David says he’s currently writing the “Lost Planet” movie for Warner Bros. and Capcom!

David Hayter talks LOST PLANET

What are you working on right now?

DAVID HAYTER: I'm adapting a videogame called "Lost Planet" at Warner Bros.

Are videogames the next superheroes?

HAYTER: Not necessarily. I wanted to do it because Avi Arad was a producer I liked a lot. I worked with him on "X-Men" and "Black Widow" and I took it on because I thought it was a great world and it was about energy depletion which I thought was very applicable to our current situation.

The videogame, "Lost Planet", that's the one with the ice? I played it awhile ago. It was not one of my favorite videogames.

HAYTER: The thing about it is that…I lived in Japan and it was very Japanese in the way it was told. It's not very linear, everything is extremely ambiguous and you're not really sure what's going on and it wasn't the story so much as that world. The ice planet, what it is was an ice planet that was colonized to a huge extent a hundred years ago. And then, they sort of raised the temperature and these giant insects come out and kill everybody and when we come back seventy-five years later, there are all these kinds of American-style cities on this abandoned ice planet that are just crumbling and falling apart and I thought this was an incredible palette to set a movie in and when I realized I could turn it into a movie about energy and helping the Earth survive, then I started to feel that there was a worthwhile movie there. It's not the same thing as "Watchmen" where I said, "Oh my God, I have to do that story," it was "There's a structure I can really play in and create a story."

And I love "The Thing" and I wanted to do a movie in the snow and thought it would be beautiful and here is a whole planet that is under dispute so what I've tried to do is create a story is where this young guy, kind of a screw-up young pilot, like "An Officer and a Gentleman" or something, becomes "Lawrence of Arabia" and gathers these lost colonies together and takes back his planet.

Very much like "Dune".

HAYTER: Yes, very much like "Dune". I don't have any original ideas! (laughs) Fortunately, I work in Hollywood and they don't want any.