Exit 8’s director was inspired by watching people play the game

Few video game adaptations understand their source material quite like the Exit 8 film. It takes the rules and structure of the game — which strands players inside of a looping hallway in a Tokyo subway station — and then builds on them with actual characters and a story. And according to director Genki Kawamura, one of the reasons that the movie feels so fresh could be because of how he approached it. “I wasn’t necessarily thinking about a film adaptation of a video game,” he tells The Verge. “I was thinking about how to create a new cinematic experience that blurs the lines between video game and cinema.”

The two are very similar, and the film even starts out with the game’s first-person perspective. And like the game, the movie features a person stranded inside of a hallway that repeats itself, and the only way to get out is to spot “anomalies” — basically, weird shit that changes in each loop — and then switch directions. Kawamura says that he discovered the game because he plays a lot of indie titles, and he was immediately attracted by just how much like Tokyo the space felt. But he also realized the premise could make for a much more universal story. “I felt like a lot of people who live in cities have had that experience of getting lost in a passage like that,” he explains. “I felt like combining the Tokyo design and the very universal experience could create something cinematic.”

But turning the game, which has no characters or story and lasts less than an hour, into a movie required adding a lot of elements. The main character, known only as the Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya) is struggling with both keeping a job and the potential of becoming a father when he encounters the strange, looping hallway. While there, we meet other characters, including the Walking Man (Yamato Kochi), who starts out as a source of terror, along with a young woman (Nana Komatsu) and small boy (Naru Asanuma), who are similarly trapped. There are also new anomalies that weren’t in the game, and Kawamura says the idea was to create unsettling moments that related to the outside world. For Ninomiya’s character, for instance, this means some pretty creepy baby-related sound design.

One of the most interesting things about the film is how each character approaches the rules of the hallway, which require carefully inspecting the surroundings before deciding whether to walk forward or backward. Some take their time, some rush, and they all look at things in a different order. It’s a bit like watching different people play the game — which was exactly the intention.

Kawamura says he had a discussion with Shigeru Miyamoto, in which the famed Super Mario and Legend of Zelda creator told him “a good video game is fun to play but it’s also fun to watch somebody play.” So some of the inspiration for the characters came from places like YouTube, where the creative team watched playthroughs of the game to see how players approach and react to things. “Everyone is playing by the same rules and in the same space, but each player makes different mistakes, and they have different reactions to each failure,” Kawamura says. “And I thought that because of that, the personality of the individual player comes to the surface.”

If you have played the game, watching Exit 8 is a surreal experience. It takes place in a space you already understand intimately, and then twists it in new and uncomfortable ways. Kawamura had a similar experience on the set itself. The hallway was built on a sound stage and consisted of two corridors — nicknamed Hitchcock and Kubrick — connected by a small pathway dubbed Mizoguchi. Kawamura says this structure allowed the team to create long, continuous shots that made it seem like the hallway was looping. The idea was to confuse viewers — though the filmmakers weren’t immune.

“It was a good tool to disorient the audience,” he explains. “Even we got confused about where we were on set during the shoot.”

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