Interesting People #3: Robyn Miller on filmmaking, character writing, videogames and more

Myst co-creator Robyn Miller discusses TV shows, filmmaking, The Immortal Augustus Gladstone, characters in videogames vs film and much more in the conclusion of our interview. You can read the first part here.

"Robyn and his wife, Mischa Jakupcak (producer of The Immortal Augustus Gladstone), enjoying a day amongst the flowers. Notice: Robyn is neurotic and always freezing. Mischa is cheery and perpetually warm. How do they do it?" View full size.

So, your game has touched people’s lives, the game has had great commercial success, but there’s also the recognition of this thing you created. It’s been inducted into MoMA, there’s the pop culture references, plus magazines and websites still want to talk to you about Myst, and now I’ve even heard about a television series in the works too. I don’t know much about the TV series at all, so could you please comment on that?
Robyn: Yeah. Well, here’s what I’m thinking about the television series and this is just my best guess at this point: in order for the television series to really happen, it’s going to take a huge effort on the part of Cyan, and I don’t know that that’s their focus right now. I think that in order for a television series to really be successful they need a great script, and right now that’s the issue that’s keeping it from being made. Now, they might have that at this point – I don’t know. I don’t have the latest information and I don’t know where it’s at, but the last time I did know, it hadn’t really moved very far. 

Ah, OK. So you’re actually removed from that, then? I ask because I know you moved on to filmmaking and so I thought you were involved with the TV series.
Robyn: I’m totally not a part of the TV show at all, no. I think it’s unfortunate that if there is a TV series, well, they’ve not invited one of the creators to be a part of it - one of the creators who is incredibly sensitive to and familiar with the original aesthetic of the games and the look and feel of the world… you know, that’s probably just not good for whatever it might become. There were a lot of rules and design concepts that we spent a lot of time formulating. We didn’t just make them up off the cuff and they weren’t arbitrary. We really spent time creating these ideas for what this place was going to look like and why.   

What does it feel like, then, to know that there’s this offshoot of the world you’ve made and people are taking it in a direction that wasn’t part of that core vision that you guys originally had? How does that sit with you, from the perspective of the artist?
Robyn: Well as I mentioned before, it’s not my baby anymore. It’s something bigger than myself and it’s something bigger than what we created, and it’s become its own entity. It’s become something that belongs to the world at large. So, there’s been a lot of other Myst games and I didn’t have anything to do with any of those. I think that’s fine, even if I’m not excited about them. I just think that for something like a TV show, potentially, is that all that people will remember about Myst will be the TV show. They won’t remember the original games when they talk about Myst, so it makes sense that if they’re wanting to really pull out whatever it was that people were interested in when they played those original games and enjoyed them, it would be good to consult with the designers. And I’m just saying that for the good of the end result. 

That makes complete sense. You know, one thing that came to mind while you were talking now is that Myst and so many other games from back then were products of their time in terms of what the technology allowed for, and there’s a lot of people today who simply wouldn’t go back to the original game for a first experience of playing Myst – even some of the sequels or remakes since. But you would find, say, someone, in their 20s who comes across this on TV and so all they would experience of Myst is in a way second-hand, and thus would never get a grasp of the real thing that you and Rand put out. Personally, I think that would be a shame. So, back to what got me asking about this in the first place. How did you make the transition from games to filmmaking – to thinking, “OK, I am going to make a movie now”?
Robyn: Well, that’s interesting. I was working on Riven and we were a very small team doing a lot of work, and I think the fact that there was a lot of work and internal pressure and expectations, well, I got to the point that I just sort of got burned out. That was the first thing – I just didn’t want to make videogames anymore after being so burned out specifically with that game, but also within the confines of Cyan. But, I also wanted to tell stories. I wanted to tell stories generally, and I realized about halfway through Riven that I was having a lot of difficulty doing that. We tried to do that with Myst and we achieved that with a really gross and simplistic way, but it was really good because not a lot of people had been telling stories in videogames back then. In Myst you were simply inside the game, and you meet the two brothers, you’re the main character and you have to figure out what to do, etcetera, etcetera. Then we wanted to make things a little bit more complex in Riven, and we kind of achieved that. But I realized that even though we had made it all more complex, it wasn’t really provoking any of the things I really wanted to provoke in the audience. For me, a simple movie was still so much more important in terms of an emotional provocation. That had always been my interest since even before The Manhole, our very first game. I had been working on a couple of novels – and that was my love. Reading books was my love, and as you know, making games was something I fell into accidentally. I felt like I wanted to go back to that and so I started working on films. So that was the decision to move away from the gaming world. 

So was The Immortal Augustus Gladstone an idea you’d had for a long time? Obviously we’re spanning a lot of years here, and I don’t really know when that was conceived.
Robyn: The very first thing that happened is that I kind of made an announcement to the world that I’m moving away from games to move into film. Then a very funny thing happened, which was a producer called me and said, “So you want to make a film? Great, let’s make films!” and I was like, “no, no, no – I am going to take some time and develop this project”, so I had this project and gave it a working name. 

I began work on this very ambitious film project and started putting together designs for the story and multiple writes and rewrites and rewrites for this fantasy film project. I did so many production sketches – you know, hundreds and hundreds of production sketches for this world – and still to this day I have all of these drawings of this world designed. I spent probably about two years creating this project, and I think it’s pretty damn good! (laughs) I think the story is very good, but I had created something by the end of it that was very ambitious, and you know, it’s a really, really big budget film. The problem with that is that it’s not easy for somebody from one industry to just hop into another. And so, after that I began to regroup and scale back. 

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In terms of the ambition and the scale of the project?
Robyn: Exactly. You know, I said it was two years but now that I think about it, it was more like three years. It’s the kind of thing where I wish I could just show it to everyone because I invested all of this work into it, and it’s work I am proud of and I hope someday I can actually do it. It’s one of those large, ambitious projects that I believe in, still to this day, and I’ll go back to it every once in a while and play with it some more and continue to evolve it. It’s one of those very large types of projects. 

When it comes to Augustus, well I’d worked on a lot of other projects for a few years, including a music project, some other writing projects… and after a few years I decided to make something very small and totally within grasp. It would be a film, and very character-centric, and kind of an experiment as well. The main purpose of it was to be as far away from these carefully planned things as possible, including this ‘Project Green Tea’ thing, which kind of hampered me and held me up, and getting away from things like Riven which was carefully planned. So I was doing something that was largely improvised and much more loose – I just wanted to give that a try to get the ball rolling, in a way, and that’s what Augustus was. It was based on a story, but the whole outline of the film was just a loose outline – and we knew each scene we had to film, but there wasn’t particular dialogue for them. Instead, the dialogue was improvised. And then there for these points in the film where Augustus talks about his past, there was this massive, broad history he had lived. He knew what his history was and he could just be interviewed about this history. At the time we had hours and hours of him being interviewed about his history. We literally just filmed him like a documentary asking him about his past. 

For me it was like a breath of fresh air, and I did everything as opposite as I could to anything I’d done before. Another thing that happened was with the crew – when they came on to the project I told them, “OK, you’re actually going to be in the film”. 

Watch the trailer for The Immortal Augustus Gladstone.

Ah, so that means the people who were behind the cameras, operating the boom etc that appear in the film are same people who were actually making the film?
Robyn: Yes – so, one of the things that happens during the making of the film is that the filmmakers become a real part of Augustus’ life. It’s set up like a documentary, so you’ll see the lighting guy or the cinematographer, you see them all interacting with Augustus. There’s a party on Augustus’ roof at one point and they’re all there. They’ve stopped filming, almost, and are interacting and laughing with Augustus, and you see them slowly being pulled into his life, and that’s the actual crew (laughs), many of whom hated being filmed. There’s also these interviews about their time with Augustus, and it was really interesting because those are real interviews – they’re not faked, and they’re really talking about their time with Augustus.  The film was done sequentially, in that we did it from the very first scene all the way through to the last scene, so the entire crew had this feeling like they were kind of living this story. Because there wasn’t a script, they didn’t really understand what was going to happen next, and they really felt like they were seeing the story unfold. By the end, when they gave these interviews about Augustus, they really were just talking about him,  you know? Just sharing their feelings about Augustus.    

That’s really interesting fourth-wall-y kind of stuff, and it’s quite something to think about. I didn’t know that the crew that you see is the actual crew. That’s some interesting stuff going on there, stepping between complete fiction and the humans that are busy building this fiction, and their interaction with it. Is this what your plan was from the outset, or is it something that evolved during filming?
Robyn: Oh yeah this was the plan, absolutely. I honestly wish I had told more people when we were sending the film around and talking about the film. I wish we had shared this with more people because I think that’s what’s really interesting about the film. If you watch the film and you know that, it becomes fascinating to watch the film, just because you know that there’s no actors in the film – everybody in the film is the crew, it just becomes a fascinating thing to watch that unfold. In other words, what I’m saying is I think we really screwed up in the way we talked about the film! (laughs) We kind of sold it a little as, well, not as a real documentary but we certainly pushed it a little bit more in that direction. 

More of a mockumentary thing?
Robyn: Well, it’s not funny – I mean, there’s funny moments but it’s definitely not a laugh out loud documentary.   

OK – so you mentioned something called “Project Green Tea” - can you please give us a bit of a rundown of what that is?
Robyn:  Yeah - it’s the project I was working on after I left Cyan when Riven was done. It’s the story of a prince who has… wow… you know, I’ve never mentioned to anyone what it’s about, so I don’t have an elevator pitch for you! (laughs) So, it was the story of a father and his son and basically, at its simplest form, it was the story of a son rising and becoming crown prince of this kingdom, and the father, the king, just overtaken with jealousy, and how this rather simple relationship impacts the entire kingdom.   

It sounds like an epic – like an epic tale that you couldn’t fit into a normal 90-minute movie, which might be better served as a trilogy or a TV show. Have you got a screenplay for this that you’ve been boiling over for… for almost two decades?
Robyn: (laughs) That’s so funny, because, you know what? I just opened it up today. I have other projects that I’ve been having people read, try to get them sold here and there, I have a TV show I am trying to get sold… but I just opened this one today and thought, “oh my god, this sounds like a TV show!” (laughs) It was ambitious in a number of ways back then, but yeah, I do think it was too ambitious for a film. I think there was a lot about film that I didn’t understand twenty years ago, so yeah, I agree with you.   

OK well I’d love to talk more about that in a future interview when it’s the right time. It sounds really interesting. Maybe we could round things off here for now by having you talk about the reception of Augustus Gladstone, do you consider that project finished and closed, and what is your opinion on that creation?
Robyn: Well, it got a very mixed reception. We would play it at places and certain audiences loved it. There was a certain type of person that absolutely loved it, and they tended to be like a quirky, younger audience and they fell in love with Augustus and they just wanted more of him – they didn’t want to stop seeing him. It was interesting, the kind of person that liked Augustus.  Then it was in a couple of festivals, like a sci-fi festival in London, and I never thought it would ever be in a sci-fi festival, but they got in touch with us. It was in a horror festival in the States, and again, that surprised me. We didn’t send it to many festivals at all, and that was just out of our own ignorance. We didn’t really, at that point, understand that we should just send it to as many festivals as possible. So our main response to the film was just at its showings, where we’d either get people sort of quizzically not knowing how to respond because it’s a weird film, or we’d get people really just loving it. The same is true from online responses. Overall, because we never really took it around, it never really got picked up, we didn’t get distribution, and we just didn’t get a lot of people seeing it. The film did not do well, and that’s how it ended up – we put a lot of effort into it and it just didn’t do very well. 

Do you mean financially, or in terms of reviews, and secondly does that affect your personal feeling of its success? Because I don’t know what your goals were – so when you say it didn’t do well, how is that affected by what your goals were for the film?
Robyn: We didn’t get a ton of reviews, but the reviews we got were mixed. I don’t know that we ever got a Rotten Tomato-meter for it, but I’d say they were pretty good… most of the reviews were pretty good. Financially, it was a disaster. If we want to count Augustus Gladstone as a business – because with films you have to count them as both entertainment and a business – then Augustus was a disaster. Fortunately it didn’t take that much money to film, and it looked really great for what we did put in. We used small cameras and a lot of natural lighting, so we tried with a very small budget to make it look like a big budget film, and it does. But still, we didn’t make any money out of it. We lost money – and that’s why I say it was a disaster! (laughs) 

But as an experience – did it tick off a life goal, or was it not as simple as that? Was it more ‘well I’ve made Augustus and now I want to do something else’ or was it ‘now I’ve made Augustus and I want to do something more in film’?  
Robyn: I would say, personally speaking, I was thrilled I made it. It really proved to me what I wanted to know, which was ‘do I have any ability to understand character?’ – and one of the things I really hated about videogames was that we have these characters that are flat and you just can’t connect with them. I thought, “is it me? Maybe it’s me! Maybe I’m making the videogame characters flat!” So I needed to know whether I could make something, anything, and really make a character with depth and that I really had some powerful amount of empathy for. That was such an impetus for me making Augustus Gladstone – I wanted to know that I can do that, and it really proved to me that I could. It probably is the medium of videogames that stands in the way of this thing, because it wasn’t that big of a deal – it wasn’t that hard. In the first few minutes you are connected to this guy’s life. You’re there, and you can’t accomplish that in a videogame in the same way to a film, where you are just there and connected to the character. 

Well is it not something to do with the intention the user has when they sit down to play a videogame, compared to watch a film? When I play a video game I want to accomplish something, solve some puzzle – just engage with it in a particular way that is different to film. But then when I engage with the text, if you want to use art theory terms, when I engage with the text of the film, it’s because I want to empathize with Augustus and follow his story and see the narrative play out. But when I engage with a videogame, I have different desires as the reader of that text. So it’s just inherent to the medium that we’re not engaging, usually, with a videogame to get the same out of characters as we would with films. Of course, there are examples like Planescape: Torment or The Last of Us but by and large, what we want out of the two mediums is very different. What do you think about that?
Robyn: Oh, I absolutely agree. In fact, I have been playing the new Zelda for a while now, and I am insanely in love with this game. It has a pretty good and interesting story in it, but I don’t have any desire to be connected to the characters. That’s not what the game is about – it’s about being connected to the environment. I am so connected to the environment and I absolutely love this world. I just can’t stop playing! So there’s a different power that games have over film, and it’s this ability to just totally envelope you in a space. You get to know that space as if it is a living, breathing thing, and nothing else can do that.  It’s not that films are better because you can get to know a character – it’s just that they are different. Games have this other power that nothing else can accomplish. And so I’m a total believer in that ability that only games can accomplish. For a time, I didn’t understand that, I think. When I walked away from games I think I was too close to it to really understand that that was such a powerful thing, and it took me being away from games for a while to be really hit in the head by how powerful that was.

Robyn, thanks very much. I’ve really enjoyed this a lot and I appreciate the time you’ve taken to talk to me. 
Robyn: Yeah, this has been fabulous, thanks so much. I’ll talk to you later! 

That wraps up my two-parter interview with Robyn Miller - a huge thank you for the time he's taken out of his schedule to discuss so many things. If you're interested to learn more, visit his website at www.robynmiller.net or follow Robyn on Twitter. The full version of The Immortal Augustus Gladstone can be watched on YouTube here.

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Interesting People #2: Robyn Miller on Myst

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Interesting People #4: Tim Donley, Lead Artist on Planescape: Torment