Return to Silent Hill: why Christophe Gans took 12 years to return

But where was the director of Pact of Wolves and Beauty and the Beast? The filmmaker explains in the new Premiere why it took him so long to return to cinemas.

More than his Return to Silent HillFrench director Christophe Gans makes his return to cinema today. A long-awaited comeback for the filmmaker, twelve years after the release of Beauty and the Beasthis latest feature film, directed by Léa Seydoux and Vincent Cassel (in February 2014).

Now aged 65 and despite his status in the global industry, Christophe Gans has only directed five feature films – including the legendary Wolf Pact (2001) and the essential first part of silent Hill (2006). Twenty years later, he reopens the doors of the cursed city with a sequel directly inspired by the video game Silent Hill 2. At the same time a question floats like a stubborn fog: how to make up for lost time?

“Obviously, I’m thinking about it”the director tells us in the columns of the new First (number 570, currently on newsstands and on the online store), evoking these 12 years since his previous film was released. He explains:

“I have always had a lot of projects and I have never stopped working. I have written scripts and prepared films, but the cinema that I want to make is very atypical, very complicated. And often, you have to wait for the stars to align. What I call the stars are, for example, the desire of a producer, the desire of financiers and the availability of a casting…”

Especially, after the success of Beauty and the Beast – and its almost 4 million entries worldwide – Christophe Gans thought he could continue. But nothing went as planned.

“There have been plenty of moments in my career where I was absolutely certain that everyone would really want to see the film I was making, and I realized that ultimately… no. The stars didn’t align. I tried three times to make 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea! And Rahan! I thought everyone would want it, and I had to come to terms with the fact that it was a lot more complicated than that.”

The French filmmaker says it bluntly: “The films I dream of have difficulty finding their place within French cinema. And me, even if my films are released in the United States, I am a French director. I have always stayed in France, in fact.”

Christophe Gans evokes, basically, a “cultural” blockage. And insists:

“I feel like time is passing. Indeed… after Beauty and the Beast, I had several projects, and then there was the death of Samuel Hadida (in 2018), my historical producer. After that, Covid was devastating. During this period, I wrote Return to Silent Hill, and then another adaptation, Fatal Frame, also taken from a very big horror video game franchise (Project Zero in France). It’s ready to be launched… All that to say that, really, I never stopped working, not for a second.”

What if Christophe Gans was finally relaunched?