20-year-old “Backrooms” director Kane Parsons has expressed a strong desire to direct a film based on the “Portal” gaming franchise.
In a recent interview with The New York Times, Parsons calls a “Portal” adaptation a “dream project” and indicated he grew up with Valve titles like “Half-Life” and “Portal” and made a short film for the latter on his YouTube channel long before creating “Backrooms”.
Various attempts have been made to adapt Portal with JJ Abrams’s Bad Robot attached to previous adaptation plans over a decade ago. The closest we’ve gotten to one is a 2011 short film, “Portal: No Escape” from “Predators” and “Prey” filmmaker Dan Trachtenberg.
Parsons also recently appeared on The Town podcast and was asked if he was curious to do a film based on an existing franchise like “Star Wars” or “Star Trek” to which he replied he has little interest in existing IP:
“No, I’m not too interested in IP work. I pretty much entirely want to focus on original projects. Just because I do this, because it’s my way of processing life, as is art, and I typically find needing to step into someone else’s view of life tends to just kind of damage the initial point for me.”
That said, he’s not against a few select titles, but most are based on stuff from his childhood in the 2000s:
“I think, barring like one or two things from my personal childhood, stuff from the early 2000s, like one or two things really, without naming them out loud. The only ones I would look at are ones that have shaped my own experience of life so much that I feel like I have something to do with that conversation in the first place.”
He also shot down recent reports he was looking for a writer for a “Backrooms” sequel: “I’m not sure where that got out, that seems more like a hallucination.”
