Game Informer Interviews Joe Kucan & Carl Lumbly

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Game Informer have posted two new interviews with Joe Kucan and Carl Lumbly (Brother Marcion in Kane's Wrath). These are basically the standard get to know the actors behind the characters they play interviews.

 

Here is some of the Joe Kucan interview.

 

GI: So you've not only played Kane throughout the Command and Conquer series, but you've had a pretty big hand behind the scenes. Can you give a little history of how you've been involved with everything?

 

Kucan: In terms of everything, well that's a big question. Well, back when video games were making their transfer from floppy to CDROM, I was brought on to Westwood Studios to head up the voice recording, because we had more available space based on CDROM, so we started putting in voice instead of text, and that was pretty much uniform across the board-everyone was doing that, and it seemed like a pretty natural step to start doing video, if we could figure out a way to compress it down far enough and get that on the CDROM as well. It was just sort of an evolution of my job at Westwood to go from audio director-director of dramatic resources-to video direction as well. So we started putting together some stub video sequences for the early Command and Conquer games and played with some compression technology.

 

At that point, it was talking heads and really very static sort of shots because we couldn't track anything. As the technology evolved, so did the work. We started to approach it more and more like movie shoots, and I brought my theatrical background and background in film to bear as a director of all of those things, making up a lot of stuff up as I went along, as I am wont to do, as I'm still doing. [laughs] It became what it was. I still would like to call that the golden age of video games, because we were really discovering the new genres, inventing new genres, and in a lot of ways developing processes and approaches to storytelling that are still used today.

Read the full Joe Kucan interview for more. And now here is a sample from the Carl Lumbly interview.

 

GI: It seems like it would be pretty intimidating jumping into such an important character, and it's not as though this is someone who people are familiar with-you have to take control of their attention and make them believe that you are this powerful figure almost immediately.

 

Lumbly: If I was doing it representing myself, that would be very, very difficult. But once I have a character, no, no, no, I have no problem in owning that. Brother Marcion was a serious piece of business, he was entitled to all that he thought about himself, and he was in a desperate position, because, in the first place, he was trying to keep the Brotherhood of Nod together, and in the second place, he also had to answer for the fact that he had been a devotee of someone who he had felt that had gone astray and that he was hewing the line-he was not going to go astray. I thought that the task was to be as believable and as sincere as possible. In regard to that, it was easy. The script actually made it very easy-he has some quite heightened language, and it's not equivocal. He is right where he is, and that makes it a lot easier in terms of playing the character. Now, the back story is a different thing. Obviously, as people, we're sometimes called upon to represent things, and we may have questions within ourselves about how we feel. It may not be as black and white in our minds as it has to be in our presentation. But that's the fun of being human.

The interview with Carl Lumbly can be found here.