How Paul and Neville Rasheed are changing the interactive film space

Starting on Halloween, London’s Genesis Cinema is experimenting with horror – until the end of 2025, the independent East End venue will screen British director Paul Rasheed’s latest experimental film. Named Runninga survival horror game set in northern Italy, where a fitness trainer/influencer is besieged by violent men wearing mysterious masks. The novelty here, however, is that it’s unlikely that any two houses will have exactly the same experience over the course of the film’s two-month stay – as voted on by the audience, main character Rasheed will make a set of serious choices that will lead her through some 20 unique deaths to one of five or so possible endings.

What makes this all the more magical is that the audience will be given a glow stick to record their voices, an ancient method that its tech-savvy creators deliberately chose. “We’ve tested apps on mobile phones, etc., and found that they actually work against us. One reason is connectivity, but cinema operators don’t do that,” Paul says. He wants You have to have a good WiFi connection – the second is that it really took people out of the experience. The moment you look at your screen, you’re out of the story.

This is common in games, of course, but not so much in the world of traditional cinema, and Rasheed’s films have been particularly popular recently at festivals around the world. The director entered the interactive space for the first time after directing his second film, The white roomin 2018. “It put me on the map, career-wise, and at the beginning of 2019 I was approached by a producer called John Giwa-Amo, who works out of Wales, with Red and Black Films,” he recalls. He was just getting into this area of ​​interactive films, and Bandersnatchthe [interactive] Black mirror The episode has just come out. He said: I saw The white roomAnd I liked what you did. I have a similar exciting sci-fi project called The complex Which we are developing and believe you will be a perfect fit.

Working with Giwa-Amu led to another film, Five appointments (2020), before Rasheed set off on his own with his father, producer Neville Exhibition (1981 and 2021), Hello stranger and Running (Both 2025). talking to Delivery timeRasheed Sr. revealed that the show’s schedule is a trial run for a more ambitious project. “If the residency is successful, we hope that in 2026 Genesis will run a 12-month programme, entitled Interactive Film Club, showcasing Paul’s previous films, among other things,” he said.

Delivery time He sat down with the duo to discuss the basics of interactive filmmaking.

Delivery time: Where to start with an interactive film project? With writing?

Paul Rasheed: Basically, instead of just having a script, you have two main pieces of literature, and the first thing you start with is the flowchart. I start all the films I make with a flow chart. This is the Bible, this is the temple, this is the skeleton. And I think the thing that liberates me—which both limits me and liberates me—is that I don’t put pen to paper to the script until I’ve locked down that structure.

The old saying goes that you write your films three times: first when you write them, again when you shoot them, and then again when you edit them. With interactivity, it’s hard to break down that structure, because it’s all intertwined. There is causation, cause and effect. The decision you make at the beginning will have a reward at the end, so you can’t start moving things around after that. Once you have your structure and flowchart locked in, you can’t really change it anymore. That would break everything. Whereas in a linear film, you can [make changes in] Editing. But again, the flip side of that is that some movies end in hell.

So, I do the flowchart first, making sure I’m happy with the story, I’m happy with the characters, and how all the decisions fit into the grand scheme of things. Then, I write the script, which is in the form of a choose-your-own-adventure book.

Delivery time: How does this work?

pee: In a Choose Your Own Adventure book, you’ll have a page that says: “Paul goes out into the street – does he want to turn left, or does he want to turn right? If he wants to turn left, go to page three. If he wants to turn right, go to page ten.” So, according to the flowchart, I write scripts that work exactly the same way. From there, armed with these two key documents, it works in the same way as it would with any other text. But then, you have an additional department – your game engine department – and these are the people who build it. They take scenes and put them together in a game engine that ties them all together, and then you play them in cinema and release them on consoles.

Delivery time: People will understand this on a console, but how does it work in a cinema setting?

pee: In a cinema environment, we basically connect a laptop with the game built on it to the projector or whatever system is there. Literally, we give the audience glow sticks as they come in, and any time there’s a choice, the choices will appear at the bottom of the screen. The screen freezes momentarily. Whoever wants to vote for the first option raises his glow stick, and whoever votes for the second option does the same. I look at it, and whichever option is the most popular is the one that gets selected. So, they build the story together. All the good and bad things that can happen are all on the audience’s responsibility.

Delivery time: Have you ever been surprised by the audience’s choices? Do you ever worry that people will be perverted and choose the darker option?

pee: never. I think that’s the beauty of it, “What if?” The nature of it. We have reached a point in cinematic discourse where audiences are familiar with the traditional structures of filmmaking, and know what a screenwriter would choose in a traditional film. I think a lot of them like the idea of ​​being able to explore other options, like, “If this were a linear movie, I know what the character would do, but I have these other options…” You can see it in video games like grand theft auto Or whatever – once people are given control of a character, they want to explore the possibilities of what that character can do. It’s been really interesting to see the trends, because some audiences make very similar decisions, while other audiences make very different decisions. There’s also the whole psychology of how being in a group environment changes what you’ll vote for, as opposed to playing a game alone.

But it’s all really encouraging. I don’t want to try to make people feel like, well, we’re given a choice, but there’s only one real choice right answer. This is what I try to avoid when I organize these things. I mean, obviously, with a movie like Hello stranger It’s a bit different, because its nature is that if you make the wrong choice, the protagonist will die! But I want to try to make films where you can make different choices that will then have a ripple effect, and nothing is a wrong choice or a right choice, in terms of constructing the story that you want to construct.

Delivery time: Approximately how many permutations can there be in the story?

pee: So, there are ten different endings to Hello strangerIn all, there are about four and a half hours of edited footage. This is the total blessing. But the average playback duration will be between 40 minutes and up to 75 minutes, so during one playback, you’ll be playing a small portion of your total available footage collection. I mean it’s hard to calculate. Maybe I need to put it in one of the ChatGPT programs to compute actual A number of distinct permutations you could play, but it would be a very large number.

Neville Rasheed: in ExhibitionIn the 2021 version, there were six different endings. I mean, in one ending the hero lives, in another ending the hero dies, in another ending the hero lets the other person live, and so on. It’s just wonderful. I mean, in your three-hour show the protagonist can live, and in your six-hour show the protagonist can die. It’s very rich and that’s exciting. I mean, I find it really exhilarating that there’s a new cinematic language.

Delivery time: How do the actors feel about it?

pee: He – she He is Different language in this sense. But what I’ve found is that actors who have theater training, in particular, tend to handle it really well. There’s something quite liberating about actors. In a linear film, in the end, you have to focus on making a final decision, so that there is a consistent through line with your character. Whereas in an interactive story, you can keep a lot of those things that you might otherwise ignore. You can keep it, use it, and actually explores They have different branches of these stories.

Some actors don’t handle it well, but a lot of actors really do. George Blagden, is the leader Hello strangera very special case. He’s a gamer, and he’s very tech-savvy, so the branching narrative is a really interesting thing for him, creatively, along with just having all this training he did at the Guildhall. So, besides having the training to actually do it, he has a real interest in this kind of storytelling. I mean it varies. But I generally find that actors who have been on stage, or have had some sort of performance training, are the ones who can pick it up a little quicker.

Delivery time: One last question for you both. What do you hope for the future of interactive film?

Neville: There was a time when 3D and IMAX were seen as gimmicks, right? They are now considered part of the mainstream. I would like to see a time when interactive film grows from being event cinema to something more regular.

pee: Yes. In a lot of the early interviews I did, people were asking, “Is this going to replace traditional movies?” I said: No, definitely not. But I think what’s important is for cinema to continue to evolve and modernize, to give audiences alternative ways to experience content rather than just the traditional relaxing experience, which I think, especially younger audiences, are becoming less interested in. So, this is from a cinema point of view. But for me, what I love is that we’ll be able to have a strong path to market for smart TVs in the movie and TV home entertainment world. This to me is the final frontier in terms of presentation, because we have the ability to have a product that can be released to the gaming market in one way, in one form, and then also to a film and TV market audience in another way. We’re not there yet, but in the near future, that’s what I’d like to see.

Neville: Yes. The cinema experience is a nice kind of complement to the online experience. If you missed it [a normal film] In the cinema, you’ll say, “Okay, okay, I’ll watch it at home when it’s released on streaming.” But what distinguishes the interactive film is that the cinema experience is very special and participatory. I find it very complementary. You’ll never miss a cinema experience with the interactive movie.