Spielberg: I’ve always learned that the world is not as important as the story, and I think that is going to always be the case, no matter what technology, what tools we use to frame our stories and to create a tone, even to define a genre, or at least try to define a new genre. It’s really always more important to tell a story, so even though this was a very steep learning curve for me personally, and a very worthwhile learning curve – I had actually a blast working on this movie, as I continue to — it always gets down to the basics. All of the dialogue always returns to story, plot, narrative, characters.
Jackson: [N]either Steven nor I can use computers. The idea of an animated film is you always kind of get a little bit daunted by it as a filmmaker, because it feels like a lot of your communication is going to be with computer artists, and you’re going to have to kind of channel the movie through extra pairs of hands. You’re always doing that with a normal film anyway, but I just thought that the really interesting thing for us to build here…is to build a pipeline in which filmmakers with no real computer skill could step in and actually shoot their movie within this virtual world. [...] The idea was that Stephen could compose his shots as he would in a live action film. He was able to operate the camera himself too. In a way, even though it’s technology, I think we figured out a way to give ourselves enormous freedom as filmmakers. It was like shooting a super 8 film.
Spielberg: It WAS, because in those days, I would just run around with a camera, really running back and forth getting all my coverage with a little Kodak three-turn 8mm movie camera…and this was very similar to that, except…I had all the x/y buttons on my right, I could crane up and down, I could dolly in, dolly out. I could basically be the focus puller, the camera operator, the dolly grip. I wound up lighting the movie with some of the artists at Weta. I did a lot of jobs that I don’t normally do myself on a movie. And it gave me a chance to actually start to see the picture come together.
In a normal motion capture situation, including Avatar, which I guess is the most successful performance capture movie in history — the most successful movie in history, period — I was able to actually get in there, into the volume, with the actors, and not only direct the actors, being four feet, away but I was able to bring a kind of conventional wisdom, which is the only way I know how to make movies, to each day. I would wind up with 75 different setups per day. Usually with a motion capture situation, you get the performance where you like it, and then you come back two months later without the actors and you start getting your shots in a much smaller volume, the size of a small boxing ring.
I didn’t want to do that in this case. I wanted to try to be as immediate as the actors were being in giving their performances for the first time. I wanted to be inspired by those performances and be able to find the shots and choreograph the masters and the coverage at the same time the actors were discovering who they were. And that is a very conventional way of making a movie, but at least I found a purpose, not just directing actors, like a stage director…but I really found a creative way of making the movie in real time.
Spielberg: The greatest thing about this medium is, it stays in a constant state of fluidity. When I make a live action movie and I wrap the movie, I’m left with the remnants of what inspired me, what ideas I got, or what ideas the actors contributed, and it all happens in let’s say a couple of months. Three or four months, your movie’s done, and you go home with your assets, and you’re left with these assets.
Now, they always say a movie can be made or broken in the cutting room, and I really believe that too. But I only had the assets [with which] to be clever. If a scene didn’t work, I’d go in and recut the scene, or I’d cut the scene out of the picture totally. But it was a closed system. This medium allows you to continue telling your story, refining, creating shots close to release. I could do a shot today, I could do a shot a month from now, and that shot could be performed, rendered, and resolved, and make it to the final cut of the movie before it’s released at the end of October internationally.
So because it stays so fluid, it’s so exciting to get an idea, maybe two years after the initial performance capture production is behind us, and to be able to actually shoot a whole new series of scenes and make them fit into the current cut. So, that was one of the most exciting things about it for me.
Jackson: When you’re making a live action movie, you shoot your footage and then you get used to that very quickly…You get used to seeing the performances, because very early in the process you’ve chosen takes that are the best takes. From then on, it’s refining, it’s making trims and tweaks and doing whatever you’re doing in post-production. In a way, you’re looking at the same material over and over again.
One of the things with this process which is always exciting is the fact that everything evolves, continuously. I mean, this has been a long time. This movie has taken us upwards of six years to get to this point, from the very first discussions, and a lot of that six years has been working on the film.
I came in last night to do a sound check…and I was seeing shots for the very first time. Some of those fully rendered shots were shots that have only just popped out of the computer in the past day or two. I’ve just found you never get used to this film. It’s constantly evolving all the time, which is exciting…It’s a very dynamic process. There’s nothing stale about it.
The difficulty with this film is the same as with any movie. It was the script. The script, and getting the script right and getting it to the point where we were happy was no different to a live action film. And that, in some respects, was the hardest part of the whole thing.
Later in the day, Jackson gave us a tour of the motion capture studios and demonstrated the camera technology he’s using for The Adventures of Tintin. One of the writers there with me asked Jackson if, after using the technology behind Tintin, he was ever tempted to stop making live action films. I found his answer to be enlightening, but also encouraging (especially when you look at what’s happened to Robert Zemeckis’ filmography in recent years):
Jackson: You don’t allow yourself to do that. it would be easy to do that, but no. I am somebody who does stress a bit about the logistics. You spend a lot of money on a film set each day. We’re about to go on location for The Hobbit in a few weeks. We’ve sort of allowed a schedule [for travel and shooting]…but you just know as soon as you wake up in the morning and it’s pouring with rain, which it does in New Zealand from time to time, you just know everything gets thrown out the window. And suddenly, there’s a lot of tension. You’ve got people on the phone. You got costs. You’re blowing 100 grand with everybody sitting down and you’re not shooting a single thing. There’s huge money involved.
You can’t help but get a little bit wound up about that and thinking “Okay, we’ve lost a day. Are we going to over schedule by a day? Are we going to try to make it up? Are we going to cut something so we can catch up?” There’s a certain layer of basic logistical tension and anxiety that’s involved with any live action shoot…
The other thing too is you have practical things in a live action environment that are difficult. For instance, if you’ve got two pages of dialogue that you want to shoot and you want to shoot it just at that magic hour of sunset, with that beautiful light coming in. Unless you’re going to shoot it in one shot, which some filmmakers do really well, how the hell do you shoot two pages when you’ve only got 25 minutes of that beautiful light, if you’re lucky enough to get it? If a cloud comes in, you’re completely snuffed anyway. But here, you’ve got the freedom of creating this beautiful sunrise or sunset, and it’s there as long as you want it, all day long, for the scene.
It’s a different way of approaching filmmaking. There’s certainly freedoms with this. But of course, the flip side of that is that doing an animated film is a particular genre, and that’s great and it’s fun to do. But it’s always nice to see real people and real emotions, real faces. They do exist side by side and have their own pros and cons.