Paul Raschid Bridges the Gap Between Film & Games in “Hello Stranger”
For many years, there was a distinct difference between video games and movies. They differed from graphical and storytelling perspectives, but now, with the technological improvements of recent decades, the two mediums are becoming more alike than ever. For the past six years, writer/director Paul Raschid has been working in the world of interactive films. He’s made rom coms, thrillers, and now, a techno thriller with Hello Stranger. The film follows Cam (George Blagden), a techno hermit who never leaves his home. One night while browsing on an Omegle-like site, Cam finds himself in a real-life fight for his life.
Ahead of Hello Stranger’s run as part of the London Games Festival, Paul Raschid sat down with Beyond the Cinerama Dome to discuss the capabilities of interactive film, the added value of audience participation, and his second interactive film of 2025, The Run. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Beyond the Cinerama Dome: You've been doing interactive films since 2019. Even in those short six years, I feel like technology has changed immensely and opened up new doors for you. Can you talk a little about how it's changed from 2019 to your most recent films?
Paul Raschid: In terms of just platform, it's been an amazing period of growth, development, and change. Primarily, my work releases are on gaming platforms. Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch. It's kind of an ever-evolving situation with new platforms springing up, especially this year, that are more film- and TV-focused. These are platforms that could be supported on TVs that can support the interactive choose-your-own-adventure-style products. That’s great news for myself. To be able to have a film or a game or however you want to call it that can release to both the gaming market and the film market has kind of been the dream. Gradually, that's becoming more and more possible.
From the behind-the-scenes standpoint, initially, you had to build on a game engine. Unity is what’s still the primary engine that I build my work on. I have a close relationship with Stornaway.io, who are web-based. You can build a choose-your-own-adventure story on there and publish it all around the internet. There's another company called Adventure AI who are doing it as well. There are plenty of others who are making this a really accessible form for entry-level filmmakers, more experienced gamemakers, and filmmakers to really dabble in the formats. It's come a long way since I started out in 2019, when there was only one port of call for everything.
Courtesy of Paul Raschid
Have you made a traditional narrative feature recently? I feel like it's been all interactive.
Not recently, no. The last one I did was in 2018, called White Chamber. It was a great film for me. It was a really seminal project in my trajectory as a filmmaker. It got selected for film festivals around the world. Shauna Macdonald, the lead, won a BAFTA Scotland.
One of the doors that opened up to me was the interactive films. As a filmmaker, you're always strategically trying to look for a niche. It's so hard, at the best of times, to stand out and find your own niche as a filmmaker when you're making traditional linear films. To find something that excited me creatively was an added benefit. I've always been a gamer, so it appeals to that side of my sensibility. It's been such a privilege and a gift to be part of this format in its kind of more nascent stages.
I feel like for a long time, video games and film were very distinct mediums. I wish I was a gamer. I played BioShock for the first time last year…
Oh, amazing. What a great way to get into it. Absolutely classic.
That was my first experience of, oh, I'm getting a different ending based off of what I’m doing in this game. Then to see that through a film lens, these lines are becoming blurred. Do you feel like it'll have ripples to more traditional narratives as well?
I hope so. There's an attitude toward it being like, oh, is this going to replace traditional film? Is that good? I think we live in a world now where there are so many different forms of content. Maybe five, ten years ago, there was film, TV, and games. They were their own distinct, different mediums.
Now, with the rise of short-form content…and when I say short-form content, you've got your TikTok short-form content, then you've got your YouTube short-form content. You've got Twitch streaming and your live content. You've got all these different forms of visual entertainment that people are consuming nowadays.
I always found that interactive films, Full-Motion Video (FMV) games, however you want to classify them, are just an alternative medium that’s very much the halfway intersection between film and game. In that sense, I feel like there’s a huge crossover audience of people who enjoy film and enjoy games and want to see how those two different storytelling techniques can inform each other and create their own kind of hybrid entity.
Like you said, over the last five years, when perhaps the formats were very distinct, it's been like living through a formal renaissance, so to speak, of what we watch, what we consume, and what we look for.
Hello Stranger is your new interactive film. It sounds like the inspiration from you living as a gamer. Can you talk a little about that inspiration?
I feel like, especially post-pandemic, the concept of how someone can live in a smart home and conduct their whole life without needing to leave their home, not necessarily in a negative, counterproductive way, is being discussed. The character has his own gym set-up, he has his food delivered and eats healthily, he does his work, he socializes from home, and he's happy. I think that sort of a life has become more common, relatable, or acceptable since the pandemic.
The film is also that subgenre of the rogue AI that’s very popular and that's explored in things like Black Mirror, M3GAN, or Subservience or what have you. That's a very popular subgenre that I wanted to explore as well. What are the pitfalls and the potential dangers of this lifestyle?
In the instance of Hello Stranger, the character is on a randomized, Omegle-style video-chatting application, and he ends up talking to a person who can hack into the smart home and make him play a deadly game.
The inspirations definitely came from elements of my own life. I’m a little bit more active and get out a little bit more than Cam, the protagonist of Hello Stranger. It's something that, pre-pandemic, people would be like, oh, you know, they don't get out or it's not a healthy way to live your life, but it's kind of a new normal in the way people live their lives. I wanted to explore that and show that there is a healthier interpretation of that, but there are also massive dangers and pitfalls to it as well.
Techno Hermit was such an interesting adjective. I'd never heard of it heard before.
I don't know if I made it up or if I read it in a think piece or something, but it was just the best way to describe Cam's way of life.
Most movies struggle to make one good ending. You have to make quite a few good endings. What does that look like in terms of the writing process? Do you have a favorite ending? You don't have to spoil it if you do.
Absolutely. It's a really good question. I think with Hello Stranger, what I wanted to do with the endings anyway was explore a slightly different approach to what I had before with my previous interactive films. My previous approach with endings was that I wanted to have distinctive endings that would feel like complete endings, regardless of the decisions you made leading up to them.
On this one, I actually wanted to have them feel like they’re complete endings as well, but also have each ending work as part of a bigger narrative that you have to experience all of them to get an idea of what the true story is, who each character is, and how they all fit into the story. You can play it once, get an ending, and be like, yeah, I've played Hello Stranger. There are no loose ends, everything's tied up.
I wanted to find a balancing act in this film. There are definitely some endings where certain things are revealed and there are certain revelations that will hit you harder than in other endings. I also feel they all stand on their own two feet as endings on their own.
Courtesy of Aviary Studios
I read that you described this as your most ambitious and experimental project. Is that why? These different endings?
There's that in the sense of you effectively have to experience all ten of the endings to tie up all of the loose ends, understand every character's arc, and what the broader message of the piece is.
It's the most ambitious because it's the biggest step in the direction of integrating game mechanics into a film that I've ever done. Within the premise, the character has to play all these deadly mini games which have life-or-death stakes in them. It involves the viewer genuinely having to play games like higher or lower, truth or dare, or a memory game.
The memory test game plays really well with audiences, where they have to watch a video clip and then the question gets asked about what they watched. If you haven't been paying attention, you haven't spotted the thing that you get asked about and you lose the game. If you're engaging audiences in a gaming capacity beyond just sort of what's right or wrong or would they rather turn left or turn right, the more binary choices that you generally have in the plot-driven or character-driven interactive films. These are actually really challenging gaming mechanics that are at play as well. For those two reasons, I would definitely say it's, as you said, my most challenging, experimental, and ambitious project yet.
Hello Stranger is playing as part of the London Games Festival. They're using glow sticks to vote on choices in the film. When it comes to playing the games, how does that work in the theatrical experience?
In the theatrical screenings, the way it works is people will vote on certain aspects of the games. For the memory test example, you will get four options of what you think the answer is. There's a cup-and-ball game, and you get to vote for which cup you think it's under.
For the wider release, when it releases on gaming platforms, there are extra games within it that are a little bit more involved. Where you have to pick up a controller and play as well. It's integrated with the live-action footage of the character responding.
Whenever we screen in cinemas, which we are doing as part of the London Games Festival next week, we use the glow stick technique. It’s the more lofi, raucous, participative way of doing it. I definitely want to experiment with apps and other forms of doing it within a cinema setting.
The tech, for me, was a little less fun than them actually having a glow stick and seeing what everyone else is doing. You have these moments of audience interaction when you know all the glow sticks go up in unison and it's like, do you kill this person or not kill this person? Then there's an audience reaction and it just adds an extra communal, participative community feeling to it that I think is really special.
Courtesy of Aviary Studios
That's the best! Hello Stranger is also not your only interactive film coming out this year. Do you want to talk a little bit about anything you can say about The Run before it comes out?
The Run is the project that’s coming out a bit later this year as well. We just finished post-production on it, and we shot it last year out in Italy. It's ambitious in a different way. It's a really pulsating, action, horror thriller.
Most of it was exterior shots with a character on the move all the time in some really gorgeous estates. We were in the forest, up mountains, we were doing all of it. The stakes are really high again. Life or death? There are 20 different ways the character can die.
The thing I love about interactive is being able to explore different genres and subgenres of mechanics that are integral to how you play them. It's very different from Hello Stranger, but I think both of them are equally ambitious in their own way. I'm excited for them. Two great companion pieces to come out back to back.
I'm so glad you mentioned the genres, because I think when you talk about interactive films, most people’s only touchpoint is Bandersnatch, which is action, thriller, murder. You have written and directed interactive works that are rom coms. I think it's so cool that you're using interactive for every genre.
Fundamentally, it just goes back to one of the basic things you're taught as a screenwriter, and the basics of linear film as well. In all the books that you read or lectures that you'd go to or screenwriters that you'd take masterclasses with, they say your protagonist always has to be making choices throughout that shape them as a character.
Those choices define the plot, define their arc as a character, and where they go on that journey. What makes a good screenplay is to always have your character making choices. Choice can happen in a rom com, in a thriller, in a horror, in a comedy, in a kitchen sink drama. Being able to explore how you can interact with all those different genres is something that's been a great privilege to do over the past few years.
Thank you so much, Paul. I hope I get the chance to do the whole theatrical experience over in the States somewhere. I think that'd be great.
Yeah, no, that'll be fantastic! Thank you so much for your time, Tina.
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