Commanding Operation Chastity

It’s 2552, and as a genetically- and bionically-enhanced supersoldier is cutting a bloody swathe through alien invaders in Africa, a team of ordinary men are locked in violent combat in Argentina, fighting a particularly ferocious group of Covenant from the fallen cruiser Chaste Ascendancy. They are losing.

“I remember watching a [fan-made] trailer for a Halo film,” says Peter Cooper, director of the upcoming Halo fan-film Operation Chastity. “[It] said ‘970 billion dead’. And you think – how many are left? Maybe 30 billion, maybe 100 billion – but 970 billion people have been killed. What is the story of those 970 billion?” It’s a number too big to comprehend, and the Spartans are a symbol of that war and those deaths. “Some of [the ones who are left] see the Spartans as being lifesavers, heroes. But one of the things that we’re looking at in our film is the possibility that someone might see a Spartan as a bad thing – as a bringer of doom rather than a bringer of hope.”

He wants to concentrate more on the secondary stories of the war, the soldiers who fight without the comfort of two tons of armour. It’s a big step to take the focus away from the Chief, but it’s not as if Cooper is the first to try it.

“ODST was fantastic, because the one game that I wanted to play was one which didn’t have the Chief in. [In Halo 3] you’re the Chief, you’re invincible, you are destined to win that battle. There’s no way you’re just going to [flat-out] die and that’ll be it. You’re going to win. It’s what’s going to happen. I always wanted to see what it would be like to be one of those guys who always walks around with the Chief, the guy who when the Chief is running around and killing everything, kind of ends up being left behind and then getting blown up by a Wraith or something. I was one of those people who always tried to keep all my Marines alive, because the Marines were cool! I always wanted them to survive every single engagement that I had, and of course it was always impossible because they’d always end up getting killed one way or another. And I just wondered what it would be like.

“But I didn’t want to create another fan fiction. Where someone goes ‘yeah, and we have the main character, and they meet the Master Chief, and then -’ and it’s just NO! That’s one of the main reason that game movies just don’t work – for example, Resident Evil Apocalypse. You have Milla Jovovich as Alice, and then she’ll meet Jill Valentine. And the some other characters that are made up, and then Carlos Olivera turns up. He’s cool and everything, and the actor has greatly improved on the character,because Carlos in the games is just fucking annoying, but even then, they’re not the main characters. It’s still Alice, who for some reason has turned completely superhuman. It completely missed the point and ruins whatever distance it had from the original story. If it had kept its distance from the games and not tried to interact with them, then it would have come out a hell of a lot better, because then Paul WS Anderson could have kept his blank slate, and wouldn’t have had to mess around with any of the characters.

“It’s very difficult taking characters that people already have their own set of perceptions about, characters that have already been created. They know how they act, they know how they sound, they know how they look. I wanted to be able to start in a position where I can go – okay. This is my story, I can develop this how I want. There’s no set rules. I can’t have somebody, however far down the line, say I got the character wrong. There’s only one character in our film that’s appeared in the Halo mythos before, and that’s Maria-062, who’s showed up in the Halo graphic novel, one of the Spartans. And she appears for ten pages, and that’s it. Again – blank slate. She’s a gung-ho soldier, but she’s a professional. She’s a Spartan. And that’s all you know. There’s something very appealing about keeping a Spartan as a faceless hero and being able to pretty much do what you like with it.

“It’s a massive universe, one that has so much scope, you’ve no idea what happens in most of it. Let’s just play a while.”

But far from taking the universe and taking it in an unfamiliar direction, Cooper is very keen to keep the film as true to the source material as possible.

“As a Halo fan I’ve pored over our script – I’ve given it out to a select few Halo fans, and they loved it. They said the action is incredible, the story itself is great. If we can pull it off, then it’s going to be amazing. But of course we’ve got to get into a position to pull it off, first. You can’t cast a whole load of people, get their hopes up and say ‘we’re going to do a Halo movie, awesome!’ and then just go ‘okay we still need to find £30,000, crap.’ And just completely disappoint them that way. I wouldn’t want to do that.”

Without a reliable source of funding, it’s a big undertaking for the first-time director.

“Yes, it’s petrifying. But if I’m going to direct something, it’ll be something I want to direct. And working with my own material, with this vision of how I see Operation Chastity being in my own head – while I wouldn’t say I’m the most qualified director, I am the most qualified person to know what my story is and how I want to see it portrayed. I’m not saying directing a movie is easy, but I’ve written the film. I know how it plays out. I’ve already seen it, so to speak. And I hope that when it comes down to it I can just say ‘okay – this is what I want.’ I’m recreating what I’ve already seen, and if I’m lucky, and if I have the right crew around me, I’ll be able to tap into their talent and their experience and go – okay. This is how I want to do it. Can we do that? Yes? Let’s do it.”

It’s clear, too, that what Cooper may lack in directing experience is made up for in spades with his love of the Halo universe.

“The first time I experienced Halo, one of my oldest friends from school’s sister had just bought a classic Xbox with the massive Duke controllers – loved those things – and I’d just been told about this game called Halo. It seemed very Aliens-esque, very cool. We sat down and set it to the hardest difficulty, because that’s just what we did. Because we were stupid. And within five minutes we had died a hundred times, and it was like ‘argh, This game is so hard.’

“But seeing that intro where you see the Pillar of Autumn come in from Slipspace, and you see the Halo, it’s a fantastic setup. It’s got that whole sci-fi military thing going on which I have a fascination with anyway. It’s that whole grim future, massive war, ultimate hero – there’s just so many elements to it, it really all came together and cemented itself in my mind as something I was going to love forever.

“It does have a very deep story. It’s hard to look at [Combat Evolved] and see anything that says it’s not worth playing. I know that there’s the whole repetitive element where you have to go through the Pillar of Autumn twice and go through the massive Library, and while some gamers have named that as the one thing that put them off Halo, that’s the one thing that actually gets me the most excited. Because it’s intense, and it’s long, and its hard. I just love that.

“Combat Evolved, for me, is timeless. I can play that game over and over again. Some people are turned off by the ‘bad’ graphics, but it’s not bad, it’s just slightly dated. Like Clash of the Titans – horribly dated, but people watch the movie because it’s a classic. People should play Combat Evolved for the same reason. It’s just the ultimate game and I absolutely adore it.”

Given his adoration for the lore, it’s no surprise that Cooper wants to keep as much as he can authentically Halo.

“We’ve got a fantastic team. Ed Woodward, he’s doing some great work with the armour. We’ve got Matt Worsdell in the States – he is a master with resin. He’s a qualified armourer, he knows guns inside and out, and he has designed some beautiful weapons for us. His SMG that we released the pictures of recently, it’s been a long time coming, but it’s been worth the wait. That thing is a thing of beauty. Everything he’s going to churn out, the Magnum, the Assault Rifle, the Battle Rifle – every one is going to be better, one by one. I can’t wait to see his Assault Rifle. It’s going to be amazing. And we’ve got some ODST armour coming from Sean Bradley in the States, and we’ve also got another American, Emil Smicklas – his Spiker’s well known, it’s been seen on Bungie.net – he’s actually making some even bigger ones, so they’re properly in scale.

“That’s the one thing I really wanted, because a lot of prop-makers scale everything down. If you want to be a Spartan, but you’re only six foot tall, it doesn’t quite work, so you see a lot of prop makers make 6/7th scale weapons. So you’ve got an Assault Rifle that’s still big – but it’s not full size. One of the prerogatives for our design for every single thing from armour to vehicles to weapons, was that every single thing had to be as close to the original scale as possible. It had to be big. Because that’s Halo. It’s just how it is. I want it to be as authentic and to feel and look as Halo as possible. That includes 6′2” long sniper rifles. It’s big stuff.

“There’s so much stuff going on from America, from over here. The original concept art we had done in Singapore was phenomenal. That really got us going, because people saw my vision of Halo. How I would interpret the warzone in Argentina – they saw that and thought ‘that’s pretty cool.’ Fans love that, and as a fan of Halo I love that too.”

It’s unfortunate, then, that Cooper appears to have little contact with Microsoft or Bungie.

“So far it’s been none. It’s been a completely independent feature. But if Bungie [or Microsoft,or 343 Industries] called me up today, and said “We’ll take a pass of your script, and say what we think is right and what we think is wrong,” I’d rather they do that now than in six months’ time, but I would instantly hand it over. Print out as many copies they want, and ship it over to Washington state. Because the one thing that I want to do with this film, which while it’s fan generated and low-budget compared to the original $200 million Halo movie will be, I want something that people can look at and say – that’s Halo. It looks like Halo, it feels like Halo. It’s a Halo story. Even if it isn’t necessarily the Halo story, it’s a Halo story. It has to feel like it. And in the same way that you watch the Neill Blomkamp shorts, it feels like Halo, it looks like Halo. If Halo was real, that’s what it would be like. And I want people to look at what I’m trying to do and what the rest of my team are trying to do, and go ‘yeah – yeah, I can go with that.’ I think that would be the biggest achievement of all.”

The showpiece of this effort is the converted Land Rover Defender that Cooper and his team have unveiled to crowds of fans recently – a fully-working, authentic Warthog, emblematic of Halo, built single-handedly by one man over the space of a year.

“Daniel Carey-George, through all the troubles we had, having to relocate it, having the original company who agreed to make it pulling out – he stuck by the project from start to finish, and he is absolutely commendable for that. And I’m so happy with how it turned out. It’s so beautiful. I cannot think of the vehicle turning out any better than it did. And when I pulled that sheet and people were clapping and for the rest of the weekend people weren’t saying ‘that looks like a Warthog’, or ‘a cool Warthog replica’, they were saying ‘the Warthog’ – that shows that we’ve done it right. That’s an amazing thing.”

Given so little contact with the owners of the IP, it seems a risky move for Cooper to tackle such a large property, especially after investing so much time and man power into creating the Warthog he has on display. It’s especially risky considering the history independent projects have with Microsoft. Cooper, though,is surprisingly genial about the whole thing.

“If they feel that I’m endangering their IP, in a way that’s kind of a compliment. In the same way that Halogen was seen to be a potential threat against Halo Wars, for example. If they said that my small fan film, my £30,000 movie, was a potential threat to a $200 million dollar movie? That says a hell of a lot. I’d take that as a personal compliment. I’d cry into my tea for a while, if they did shut me down. It’d be tragic if they actually decided that. But if they took that decision, I’d understand, take it as a compliment, and hope that it could be solved in as swift and amicable way as possible.”

“At the end of the day, they as much as anyone else want to see a Halo movie done right. And if Microsoft wanted a pass, it might not be a bad thing, it might be a good thing. I’d hope they wanted to support our film.”

It isn’t as if they aren’t aware of the project. Bungie has featured Operation Chastity multiple times on their community website, and 343 Industries has been posting updates on the production through the Halo Waypoint Twitter account. It certainly seems that if they wanted to force the project to close, they could have done so. And it doesn’t appear that Cooper is about to stop.

“I’m dedicated. My entire team are dedicated.” And as for the games themselves? “I play it on Legendary,” he says. “Because I’m not a pussy.”