Hey, everyone. “Moriarty” here.
I feel bad. I tried watching LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA last night. Love the novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I really wanted to like the film. But as soon as it started, I found myself disconnecting from it, and it took me a while to figure out why I reacted so quickly and so extremely. Part of it is because of the use of fairly awful old-age make-up on all the actors in the sequence, masking them so completely and inhibiting their ability to perform to such a degree that the entire exposition-heavy first ten minutes is rendered inert.
The reason I bring this up is to lead into something I’ve been thinking about regarding a movement that is about to explode onto the screens of your local multiplex. Well... in some ways, it’s already begun, but what we’re seeing right now are baby-steps compared to what we’re about to see.
And because we’re just seeing the baby steps right now, people complain about these films. Over and over, I read talkbacks or read e-mails from people that offer up some variation on “Why should I care about any of this silly motion capture 3D stuff? It’s all just a gimmick, and I don’t know why you’d do that when you can just do it live-action.”
You’re missing the point. And I don’t mean that in a patronizing “You don’t get it” way, either. I just mean that these filmmakers... James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, Peter Jackson... they’re working on the cutting edge of this sort of storytelling because it excites them. Nobody’s forcing them. This isn’t some guaranteed money-in-the-bank sort of commercial home run.
So far, none of the performance-capture CGI films have been gigantic blockbusters. They haven’t been disasters, either, but POLAR EXPRESS and BEOWULF were not blockbusters by any conventional definition. Making a film like this comes at a certain price-tag, about a million dollars a minute according to Robert Zemeckis. For an average feature length film, you’re talking about $100 million.
So why would these filmmakers who have all turned out monster giant hit movies all want to do something that is both experimental and also hugely expensive? What is it that has got all of them running back and forth to each other’s sets, giddy like first year film students turned loose with a camera and a few DV tapes? Why are they so much more excited about all of this than the audience that they’re making these movies for?
I talked to a friend of mine recently who has been around a whole lot of film sets, and he had a chance to spend some time on the set of A CHRISTMAS CAROL, which Robert Zemeckis is directing right now. This guy’s seen the production of a lot of films, both large and small, been involved in some fairly big-scale envelope pushing of his own. And he walked away from his time on the Zemeckis set sort of rocked by it.
“It’s really personal filmmaking,” he said. “I think you can argue that the director really is more of an artist on a film like this. Like a painter working on something intimate. It’s more like theater than film, at least as a process. I’ve never seen anything like it.” I knew a lot of what he told me from my time spent talking with Gil Kenan, director of MONSTER HOUSE, and from talking to actors who went through the process for Zemeckis, and from talking to the guys actually involved in various parts of the performance-capture process. Even so, I asked him about what sequences he saw them working on, or which performers he saw working, and his descriptions really intrigued me.
“When I was there, Jim Carrey was playing the Ghost of Christmas Past. I saw the design they’re using for him, and he sort of looks like a candle... real tall and thin and his entire head’s on fire. And the fire responds to him emotionally... so the more worked up he is, the brighter he blazes. Really cool stuff.”
“What really killed me, though, wasn’t the ghost stuff. It’s the way Jim Carrey is playing Scrooge at every stage of his life, from childhood on. There was a scene I saw where Scrooge is eleven years old, and Carrey gave that performance. And it really works. Same thing with [Gary] Oldman. He’s playing Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim. So he gets to do the father and son thing, and credibly play both roles without it being freaky. Tiny Tim really is this little kid, and yet, it’s Oldman’s performance driving it. And same thing with Robin Wright Penn, who plays Belle, Scrooge’s love throughout his life. She gets to play all those various ages as well.”
“The other ghosts Carrey plays are pretty cool. The Ghost of Christmas Present is this big giant redbearded guy... like 12 feet tall... and then you’ve got your fairly classic death figure for the GOCF. Like I said... I watched him playing Christmas Past for a while, and it was really creepy. Carrey and Zemeckis were working together, and pretty much everyone else got tuned out. And Carrey was playing it with this sort of dead-eyed stare, with a deathbed whisper. Really extreme. And we were able to actually see an example onset of what Carrey’s performance translates to. It’s crazy. You’ve got this giant movie star, right? With the hundreds of dots on his face, a couple of stand-ins holding the space where old and young Scrooge are supposed to be as the Ghost shows him some moment of youthful bliss. There’s 250 infrared cameras and a couple of handheld roaming cameras for ‘dailies’. Zemeckis is doing it differently than Spielberg, evidently. I hear Spielberg’s still doing a lot more pre-viz, and he’s framing shots during the takes while he’s with the actors. Zemeckis doesn’t do that. He’s all about getting the performances, without any camerawork in mind. Everything he ‘shoots’ is reference. Some of the people onset wear these helmets that have these six cameras built in just below the chin, these wiiiiiiide angle lenses that record the room around a person.”
“There are also two different sets, which I didn’t realize. One is for the physical staging of scenes and for stuff where it’s more about how someone walks or runs or how people interact in a group. That’s the big room, and evidently, the first few films, they recorded all the data in that room.”
“Now, they’re actually using the first room where they put all the data sensors in place on the actors’ faces, and that’s the ‘close-up’ room, so to speak. They use that space to calibrate the responsiveness of the equipment, so it makes sense you’d record the delicate facial work in that room. It’s a ton of work, but the end result should be much more lifelike.”
The most exciting part of my friend’s time on the “set” of the Zemeckis film was when he witnessed that giddy exchange of ideas I mentioned earlier. The place where the film is being produced is the exact same place where they’re shooting TINTIN right now, and the CHRISTMAS CAROL crew talked about the conversations Zemeckis and Spielberg and Jackson are all having what they’re doing.
I’ve also spoken recently with several people who have seen some of the progress being made on AVATAR, and what’s interesting is the way their expectations for the film seem to be evolving as it comes into focus. One friend went from saying “It’s going to be a really expensive cartoon, albeit a very cool one,” to “It’s nothing like his other films... it’s very cerebral and the world is so immersive... it’s not what I expected, but it’s also not like anything I can reference.” Seeing how the live-action and the performance-capture are being brought together, my friend said he no longer believes in the word unfilmable. “If you can describe it, we can do it on film now. Scale, other worlds, deep space, some impossible location... it’s all within our reach. It’s all about imagination now... how big can these guys dream?”
I’ve heard stories about how actors are starting to really fall in love with the process... not all actors, of course, but some actors. Andy Serkis may have staked an early claim as King Of Mo-Cap, and no doubt he’s going to be seen as one of the pioneer performers in the field, but other people are starting to dive in, and I think we’re going to see some really beautiful, daring work in some of the projects in production or being developed now.
More than anything, when I hear someone dismiss this entire toolbox and say they don’t understand why anyone would tell a story this way, I want to answer right back, “I don’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to tell a story this way.”
The ability to focus all your on-set attention on your actors, not worrying about lighting or focus or an effect to work or traffic or background noise or anything else... just working on performance in a totally free environment like experimental theater... it’s the same thing Lars Von Trier and his cohorts were after with the Dogma 95 movement... a sort of purity of performance that we don’t often see in giant-budget event pictures. More than any sort of gee-whiz tech-geek wow factor, that’s why these directors are drawn to this way of making a movie. That’s why they’re all making movies this way at the moment. They suspect it might be a very special experience, and they want to try it and see. With filmmakers of this caliber leading the charge, I suspect we’ll see a lot of people get a chance to make more of these films in the future, and more and more individual visions are bound to find their way into the mix. So even if what we’re seeing now are just baby steps, as I suspect, of a whole type of filmmaking that we’re only just seeing the start of right now... even if this is a significant shift in the filmmaking vocabulary and we’re still just in the growing pains stage of things... I still find these films thrilling. I still find the experiment itself to be compelling.
And who knows... maybe someday we'll see all types of stories told this way, and we'll see someone make a version of LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA where the same actors could play the roles from youth to old age and I wouldn't spend the entire time thinking "What the hell did they do to Javier Bardem?!"
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
