Sony Pictures' Yair Landau Talks Convergence

October 16, 2007 | By: John Gaudiosi

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Convergence between Hollywood and the video game industry is at an all-time high and there is perhaps no one better suited to discuss this phenomenon than Yair Landau, who oversees Sony Pictures Entertainment and Sony Pictures Digital. He envisions even more overlap between Hollywood and gaming in the future.

Yair Landau is one of a growing number of powerful executives in Hollywood who grew up playing video games. He took his love of games and in 1999 he formed Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment, which is now parent company to Sony Online Entertainment, Sony Pictures Imageworks and Sony Pictures Animation. The company now creates special effects for Hollywood blockbusters like Spider-Man 3 and the upcoming Beowulf, as well as computer-generated features like Monster House and Surf's Up.

Gamers know the company best for SOE, which is home to such hit massively multiplayer online gaming franchises as EverQuest I and II, Star Wars Galaxies and the upcoming The Agency. Mobile gamers are familiar with SOE's cell phone games based on the Spider-Man, Wheel of Fortune and God of War franchises. Landau took some time to talk with GameDaily BIZ about the evolution of games in Hollywood and what the industries can learn from one another.

GameDaily BIZ: What is your gaming background?

Yair Landau: I used to play Centipede for quarters and then I played games on Sega Genesis and later I had a PlayStation and PlayStation 2. I played online games, as well.

BIZ: Was there something from a personal standpoint that got you interested in games from a business side?

Landau: From a personal standpoint, I viewed it as a media form and an art form that was significant to our audience and significant to me, personally. To some extent, all Hollywood engagement is driven personally by the executive in charge, at least to a degree. I'm in the movie business because I like movies and I'm in the games business because I like games.

BIZ: Will video games eventually eclipse the cinematic experience?

Landau: I believe there are three fundamental human forms of communication entertainment�play, story and song. Storytelling is storytelling, gameplay is gameplay, and music is music. Now, music overlaps across all three because you can do it as a secondary experience. The basic human aspect of sitting there and having somebody tell a great story is what we do in the movie business. The play aspect is what we do in the games aspect. Thanks to the birth of the console game business, play has become an out-and-out meaningful experience on a single-player-against-the-machine basis.

At its core, it's a community experience of interactivity and that's where it's headed in terms of the evolution of online gaming. It will overlap with the movie business. Movies will shape games as they do, cinematically, today and games will shape movies. But I don't believe that they will eclipse each other. I think that they will continue to be basic forms of human interaction. Another thing is that the hardcore gamers I know are some of the most avid movie watchers I know. At Sony Online, when there's a big movie that comes out like Casino Royale, we basically give the guys the afternoon off to go and see it because everybody in the shop was going to go see it anyway. They went back and they played games, but they still all went out and saw the new James Bond.

BIZ: What are your thoughts on Hollywood-licensed games?

Landau: I think that certainly video game extensions of big movie brands are successful from a business standpoint, in large part because you have a market phenomenon that goes with the movie. Activision has done a great job translating the Spider-Man experience to the game. It's different from the movie. Playing the Spider-Man game is very different from watching the Spider-Man movie, but it's a positive experience and it's still driven by the Spider-Man brand and who Peter Parker and Spider-Man are.

It's not the same as watching Tobey Maguire, Kirstin Dunst and James Franco go through their love triangle onscreen. Nobody would want to play that. You do want to swing through the streets of Manhattan and beat up bad guys. If the whole movie was swinging through the streets of Manhattan and beating up bad guys, nobody would want to go to the movie. So that's the balancing act between the mediums. They will continue to influence each other and there are certainly games to be sold on the backs of movies and there will be movies to be sold on the backs of games. But they will still fundamentally remain two separate businesses for the most part.

BIZ: Did you see games borrowing from Hollywood in the early days?

Landau: Well, you could argue that a lot of the classic games like Defender, Galaga, Space Invaders and Missile Command were to some extent fueled by Star Wars. They weren't a direct exportation of Star Wars, but your basic dogfight and laser gun experience was really [defined] in Star Wars. It was just translated into more creative ways. I think that what a bunch of those early arcade games did was opened people's eyes to the ability to tell stories in worlds you couldn't have otherwise conceived. It also allowed you to create games in worlds that you might not have otherwise told a story in.

I don't think that Asteroids was necessarily shaped by Star Wars, but Asteroids was part of the Star Wars phenomenon. Even though all you had was essentially an arrow shooting dots in outer space, you could pretend you were dodging asteroids like Han Solo. It's hard to imagine today that Asteroids was a space experience. But given the limitations of the medium, it was a very effective space experience. Today you could probably play it on a cell phone and have a better experience than you did at the arcade.

BIZ: How influential were video games on actual films?

Landau: I think that you see it more and more. I think that The Matrix was very much shaped by some gaming experiences, and I think that 300 was very much shaped by game experiences. We had a film a few years ago, Bad Boys II, which had a tremendous sequence where Will Smith and Martin Lawrence are in this drug dealer's hideout and the camera rotates around from both the good guys' and the bad guys' points of view. I think that whole scene was completely shaped by video game experiences. I know that with our movie Monster House, Gil Kenan, this young director, he modeled a lot of what the characters, environments and experience were on his favorite '80s video games.

BIZ: Why have so many game adaptations failed as Hollywood movies?

Landau: At its core, a video game experience is a personal experience where you are the character and your imagination drives the activity. A story experience is one in which we have created a compelling character for you to watch. Most video games don't have, at their core, a great character that you want to see do something. They have an experience that you want to do yourself.

BIZ: Thanks for your time.