'Uncharted' Creator Amy Hennig on Finding Her Calling and Taking 'Star Wars' Somewhere New at Rolling Stone (by Laura A. Parker)
- November 14, 2016
- By Laura A. Parker, Amy Hennig, and Rolling Stone
Profile[]
While Soul Reaver's dialogue is somewhat overwrought – "Gazing out across the plains of possibility, do you not feel with all your soul, how we have become like gods? And as such, are we not indivisible?" – Hennig did it on purpose. "The games needed to feel sort of gothic, ornate and otherworldly. If the dialogue was too grounded, the story and characters might have felt too mundane and ordinary," she says. (The game received mixed reviews, but the one thing most critics seemed to agree on was the script's charm.)
Voice actor and director Gordon Hunt (The Jetsons, Scooby-Doo, The Smurfs) was the game's voice director, and when Hennig was tasked with the script, the pair began working together closely. It was Hunt who taught Hennig to think of actors as collaborators, and to give them room to infuse their character with their own personalities. "Amy probably heard me doing my job in the only way I've learned how – taking the role of guide to the actors rather than that of 'the boss'," Hunt tells me. Since the dialogue was already a mouthful, it was important for Hunt and Hennig to be able to rework the lines with the actors to make sure it flowed when says out loud. "As serious as the dialogue was, in between takes it was all jokes and impersonations and laughter," Hennig says. "Obviously, we couldn't make the story a comedy, but their humor definitely influenced me to weave more wry commentary into the dialogue wherever I could."Evan Wells was also working at Crystal Dynamics at the time, on Gex, a franchise about a wisecracking gecko. Even though he and Hennig never directly collaborated on a project, they got along well, and when Wells eventually moved to Naughty Dog, he called Hennig and offered her a job on Jak 3. This was 2003, and Hennig was still in the middle of directing the last Legacy of Kain game. She told Wells he'd have to wait. "I would never leave a project in the middle of development," she says. There was also the fact that Naughty Dog was in Santa Monica, and Hennig didn't want to leave her family. Still, she accepted Wells's invitation to come and see the studio and, after Crystal Dynamics turned down her offer to take over the new Tomb Raider series, she packed her car and headed south. "At the time, I thought, maybe I'll do this for a year and see how it goes." ...
References[]
- ↑ 'Uncharted' Creator Amy Hennig on Finding Her Calling and Taking 'Star Wars' Somewhere New at Rolling Stone (by Laura A. Parker)
