Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I didn't have any interviews lined up at D23. It's not like Comic-Con where it's a mini-junket as well as a star-studded footage presentation. The only options for a chat would be to miss everything in the hall and hope to get a quick question in on a press line. Screw that noise!
Believe it or not I was contacted while actually in the live-action presentation asking if I'd like to have some time with Jon Favreau after the panel to talk about what was shown. The answer to “Do you want to talk to Jon Favreau” is always yes. The dude's a great interview and I should know. I've been interviewing him for almost 15 years now, going back to MADE. I have chats with him about Iron Man before he cast Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark. We even did a lengthy interview once where he excitedly laid out his vision for John Carter of Mars, which sadly never happened.
Whether it was our long history or because I just happened to pop up in a publicist's head I don't know, but I'm thankful it worked out.
I was led backstage about 20 minutes too late to harass JJ Abrams and the Star Wars cast, but I did have the pleasure of hearing Kristen Bell sing some Frozen stuff, practicing for a later presentation. Of course that was still going on when Favreau and I were talking about Jungle Book, so thanks for making the transcription a bit more difficult! ::ShakesFistAtForgettingSarahMarshallBluRay::
Our conversation covers a lot of ground for only being 15 minutes. We talk about the decision to go for photoreal CG, the challenges of that and how Favreau approached making a movie that honored both the Disney animated feature and Rudyard Kipling's original novel.
Hope you guys enjoy the chat!
Quint: When I visited you during the making of Jungle Book one of my favorite things you showed me was a little look at how photorealistic you were going with the animals, like Shere Khan. I think that really surprised the D23 audience, who are used to these live-action adaptations being a little be more fantastical or whimsical. Like Alice or Maleficent...
Jon Favreau: Well, you can do anything with CGI. It's very hard to constrain your team, but it depends on what your goal is. If your goal is to create beautiful images that are appealing and exciting, you can do that with CGI if you have good artists.
If the goal is to do it like one big magic trick where you don't know where one begins and one ends... and that's kind of what got me with Gravity. I didn't know where the matte lines were. My kid asked me, “Dad, how did they do that?” and I was like, “I don't know!” It wasn't obvious what the technique was. As a filmmaker there's something appealing about hiding the illusion. Sometimes that means doing things that are real that you think are fake and doing things fake that you think are real and always blurring that line, like a magician would.
We're hitting a point in CG... at the time of Iron Man they were doing hard surfaces well and that made me confident we could do the suit. Now, after seeing what Planet of the Apes looked like, seeing Life of Pi and Avatar and Gravity... those are films that each in their own way changed the game. Much of it is with the commitment and the approach that the director and the filmmaking team have going into the project. That's the thing that makes the biggest difference, is the way it is conceived and executed.
Quint: I remember talking with you a lot around Iron Man time and you were dead set against using CG for anything organic.
Jon Favreau: We've known each other a while. In my career I've done stop-motion, forced perspective, motion control, with the spaceships in Zathura... I filmed them the way they did the spaceships in the original Star Wars films. I used all these techniques and then I worked in CG little by little, trusted it in different way in different projects, but when it came down to fur and organic material I'm beginning to trust that it can be used well.
Of course, showing the triangle of expression of Mowgli's face... I don't want to get in there yet. It's coming. It's asking too much of the technology, but that being said it's amazing how much we find ourselves fooled in reviews when we're giving notes on stuff that isn't CG, asking for things to change that are practical.
I think it was good for people to take stock in what you should ask of CG. I think practical ages well in many ways, but if you can use CG in a way that disappears and helps tell the story and adds to the emotion and believability of a story, that's what's interesting to me at this point in my career.
Quint: There was a video that was going around recently about how CG is really awesome...
Jon Favreau: I saw that.
Quint: I remember seeing someone respond to it saying that the difference between great practical and great CG is that great practical is meant to stand out and be recognized whereas great CG is meant to go unnoticed, which is why the only time you see it is when it's shitty.
Jon Favreau: Right. Unfortunately, the good CG a lot of the time goes unrewarded because people don't even realize that it's there. It goes away. It supports the shot, it supports the story, it supports the frame. As you pull it back and work with this set of people, so much of the time it's really the set of parameters that are created around these craftsmen and the amount of time you give them and the way you load up their gun with ammunition of a well-executed element shoot.
Quint: I was live-tweeting the D23 panel and the biggest reaction from everything I tweeted, that wasn't Star Wars of course, was when I described Bill Murray's Baloo singing Bare Necessity, complete with Mowgli sitting on his belly as they float down the river. People were really surprised that you were incorporating the music and were all over the moon with that decision. Can you talk a little about finding that spot where you can be reverential to the animated feature while also making something very grounded with photoreal animals and environments.
Jon Favreau: That's it. You nailed it. That's the thing: Can you walk that line? It was an approach that informed the way I went about the first Iron Man. What are the images that I remember now, without looking at comic books or anything, what are the moments and images I remember? What are the ones that stand the test of time and fight their way through my memory? Sometimes those memories are flawed. Sometimes you're remembering things slightly off.
I used the same thing with The Jungle Book. I listed on a piece paper the things I remembered from the old movie, growing up with it. Clearly, The Jungle Book has a much deeper resonance with me than the Marvel comics I read. The Jungle Book you're seeing when you're forming your personality. It becomes part of you. I was born in '66. That was one of the first sets of images from the cinema that I have.
I remember having dreams about these characters. The earliest dream I can ever remember having had Mowgli in it. There are other people who feel a certain connection to the material, too. Yes, it's a Disney property, but it's something that now belongs to everybody because they've grown up with it. Although it's not ownership, it's a relationship that feels very personal.
So, what are those things (that you remember)? You remember the hypnosis with Kaa...
Quint: King Louie dancing...
Jon Favreau: Yes, you remember King Louie. You remember the temple collapsing. You remember the elephants.
Quint: You remember Baloo floating down the river...
Jon Favreau: With the boy on his belly, yes. You remember the fire. You remember the tiger. You remember the silhouette of Bagheera and Mowgli. You remember these things and many others, I'm just rattling off a few now, but what are those moments and how do you capture them? How do you incorporate the music when the minute you turn it into a musical it changes the tone? How do you incorporate music in a way that scratches that itch, but doesn't change the tone in a way that takes away from the enjoyment of what a photoreal Jungle Book could be and doesn't betray the Kipling roots of the whole thing? What's that Venn Diagram that includes both of those worlds?
Then there are other things. What's up with King Louie? There are no orangutans in the Indian jungle, so you explore what that character could be...
Quint: I noticed in the footage you made him significantly bigger than he appeared in the animated feature.
Jon Favreau: Well, the Gigantopithecus existed 100,000 years ago and their closest living relatives are the orangutans. Now you can play with scale and all of a sudden you're opening up the door to a whole other set of action sequences and fun that this technology offers.
The other thing I would say is that the 3D of it all... Because of the size of the screens and the viewing angle here at D23 we weren't able to show here. We captured in native 3D, everything was rendered in 3D. I would have liked for people to have seen the first footage in 3D. I haven't done 3D before. When I saw Avatar in 3D there was a sense that this was something special and I wanted to make sure we built on that tradition and continued to work in a way that pulls you into the illusion that well-executed 3D can do.
Quint: I find I like 3D that is used for a purpose. I'm not a big fan of just adding slight depth to an image. I want to see it used to help visually tell a story, the same way a director will use framing to visually tell a story.
Jon Favreau: I think there are different applications. Even stuff done natively in 3D there are choices to do it subtly. There's not a standard approach to 3D, but to do native capture and use the infrastructure that was created by Avatar and build on that has been really exciting and I hope to be able to figure out a way to demonstrate that to audiences, especially ones that might be skeptical about that medium because this is one that I can say the added cost for the ticket price is going to be rewarded by an amazing product. The volume and the realness that you get, the tactile quality that you get from seeing well-executed 3D with this quality of image is something that's really exciting and I can't wait to share that.
There you have it. Favreau's passion and excitement for how this all is coming together was clear as day. The footage was pretty great, definitely didn't feel like one of those “shot in a green box” movies, which is a testament to his digital team.
We'll see how it all plays out. Ultimately much of the success of the movie will fall on young Neel Sethi's shoulders. If we don't care about following Mowgli on this adventure then all the bells and whistles won't matter, but I've learned not to doubt Favreau's casting over the years.
Hope you guys liked the chat!
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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