When Manitoba audiences catch their first glimpses of Silent Hill, the new based-on-a-video-game thriller set in a deserted mining town possessed by demonic forces, they may be surprised to learn some of the inspiration comes from our own seemingly sleepy city of Flin Flon.

But screenwriter Roger Avary -- much-feted for his contributions to the screenplay for Pulp Fiction and for his own directorial efforts Killing Zoe and The Rules of Attraction -- insists no disrespect was intended.

"It's a composite but, yes, I did base it on (Flin Flon)," says Avary, who was born there but later relocated to a number of mining communities, stretching from Brazil all the way to Bulgaria. "There's no negative reflection, and really it could be based on any of the small towns I grew up in.

"I always, when I write, am looking to bring something from my own life into the work, so I'm making it about something real, instead of just cultivating widgets."

Avary says his memories of Flin Flon are few (save for his first recollection of childhood, watching the end credits of The Prisoner while sitting on a drab green couch with his mother) but enough that he was able to draw on them -- and other stories passed on by his mining engineer father -- while translating the Silent Hill experience from video game to screen.

"Silent Hill is one of the only games that is very, very close to a having a film-style narrative ... unlike most games, this one has a cinematic feel to it," he explains. "I wanted the movie to reflect that spirit.

"You know the source material will always exist in its original form. What's most important in translating something to a new medium is bringing that original spirit, instead of just focusing on the details."

It's a task Avary is well-suited to, having also adapted Rules of Attraction, Bret Easton Ellis's account of the "emotional vampires" caught in a bizarre love triangle on a Long Island college campus. Even more so than the bigscreen adaptation of Ellis's more controversial novel American Psycho, Avary's film hews closest to the spirit of its source, which saw readers repulsed by the level of emotional cruelty on display but still drawn to the universality of the protagonists' plights.

Attraction, like Avary's debut Killing Zoe -- an ultra-violent tale of a bank robbery gone wrong -- polarized audiences and critics upon its release. But in subsequent years, his works have attracted much more generous notices, as audiences return to the films to give them a second chance.

"(Jean) Renoir made a number of movies that were very popular, but when he made The Rules of the Game, it was vilified and almost destroyed," Avary says. "It was 40 years before it was appreciated as a masterpiece. I'm not saying my films are masterpieces, but sometimes history or time is your strongest ally as a filmmaker."

The term masterpiece can certainly be applied to Avary's most famous work, the screenplay for Pulp Fiction, to which he contributed the story of a boxer who throws a fight, then becomes mired in a bloody daisy-chain of events while trying to retrieve a lost watch.

Avary and Quentin Tarantino (a former pal from his days as a video-store clerk in L.A.) collaborated on the Oscar-winning script but later had a well-documented falling-out when Tarantino began claiming what some saw as more than his fair share of the credit.

The two rarely discuss the rift anymore, although Avary was happy to see the script ranked at 16th on the Writers Guild of America's list of The 101 Greatest Screenplays.

"My first thought when I saw it was, 'The Godfather and The Godfather II are both in the Top 10 -- they couldn't have bumped us up a couple notches?' " he jokes, noting Pulp Fiction won accolades from almost everyone but the Writers Guild when first released. "These lists come around all the time, and they're always changing. Things fall in and out of vogue, and at the end of the day it's not so much what other people say about my work. There are people who despise my work and people who love it, but the person you need to please is yourself."

These days, Avary is busy collaborating on a screenplay for the comic book Black Hole (alongside graphic novel god Neil Gaiman), one for a digitally animated version of Beowulf (one of the oldest known epics in the English language) and yet another Easton Ellis adaptation, this time the celebrity satire Glamorama.

But don't rule out a possible return to Flin Flon, a setting he'd like to revisit at least once before his days behind the camera are through.

"Just the name of the place, Flin Flon, has followed me all my life," he says, adding he still checks out the city's website at least once a month.

"There will be a time where I'll want to go back and explore it, just to see how many of my memories actually match up."

Silent Hill is in theatres this Friday.

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