Air America beta radio has mentioned last friday an unauthorized documentary about Leonardo DiCaprio’s life.You’re probably wondering, “What is this, the 90s?” In a way, yes. All of the footage featured in “Hangin’ With Leo” looks like it’s from the late 1990s, when DiCaprio was riding the wave of “Titanic” ending up on “The Beach.” If you would like [...]
Archive for April, 2010
Leonardo DiCaprio – Don’t Be Shy!
Posted By Taly on April 14th, 2010
BRJ/Fame Pictures
The pretty ladies don’t shy from him, that’s for sure.
Yet, he’s camera shy.
That’s DiCaprio hangin’ with the babes in Miami (Apr. 11).
As usual the “Shutter Island” actor covered up in a pair of sunglasses and a baseball cap but the shutterbugs still recognized him in the crowed.
Don’t be shy, Leo.
Did ya hear the news?
According to simplyleonardodicaprio.com, Life & Style magazine has conducted an in depth investigation in a bid to find out which movie stars measure up in the bedroom.
Leo, Ashton Kutcher and Jamie Foxx were among Hollywood’s big men.
So to speak!
In fact, one insider says, “They have nicknames like Tripod and Crooked Stick, in Jamie Kennedy’s case.”
No word on what Leo’s nickmame was but were guessing “Titanic” was under considertation
Posted in Internet
Movie stars in Yasuni-ITT
Posted By Taly on April 11th, 2010
Hollywood celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Glenn Close and Edward Norton, was committed to provide $ 1 million to the government’s proposal to leave oil underground in the area of the Yasuni-ITT. This was announced by Vice President Lenin Moreno, during Saturday’s link made from the island Santa Cruz, Galapagos.
The second president was in charge of the bond in lieu of President Rafael Correa, who is in the United States.
Moreno showed that during his visit to the archipelago, took the opportunity to meet with some of the actors and scientists involved, until yesterday, a convention environmentalist in the islands, called Mission Blue.
The vice president reported that held a “very nice conversation, but really useful” meeting with the participants of an ecologist.
“We exchanged views on the conservation of the Galapagos Islands and the world. I made the statement (on the Yasuni-ITT) and when I mentioned how it will operate the project, there really was a standing ovation,” said Moreno, who also reported that the actors expressed their interest in learning about the area of Yasuni.
On another topic, Moreno said that only 34% of companies in the country complies with the law to include in its roster, at least 4% of staff with special skills. “The results are not very flattering. I think the expected time (to meet) was more than enough.” Thus, Moreno announced that from now on, the Ministry of Labour will start to punish. “They will have to pay the fines respective interests of all the months and years that have not complied with this requirement. We must make them comply with the law,” he said.
Moreno, who also reported that the celebrities expressed their interest to know the area where he wants to leave about 850 million barrels of oil underground.
On the other hand, Ivone Baki, the team that promotes Yasuni-ITT initiative and who was invited to Saturday’s liaison, announced that former U.S. vice president Al Gore will also visit the country in November to support the project.
Baki said that Gore is expected to arrive in Quito on November 9 and said he expected to visit the Yasuni National Park, alongside President Rafael Correa and Lenin Moreno. (LM – SKY)
Time GMT: 11/Abril/2010 – 05:09
Posted in Internet
DiCaprio closes the shutters
Posted By Taly on April 11th, 2010
TOKYO —
Leonardo DiCaprio would be very happy if you don’t read this story. In fact, he doesn’t want you to find out anything about this new movie “Shutter Island,” before you go and see it. “Go in with an open mind and let the story take you along for a ride,” said the 35-year-old star.
Still reading? OK. Directed by Martin Scorsese, “Shutter Island” is his 4th film with DiCaprio. Set in the 1950s, it deals with a U.S. Marshal (DiCaprio) and his partner who go to the title island to investigate the disappearance of a prisoner from an institution for the criminally insane. As the mystery deepens, a hurricane hits the island.
“It’s got elements of psychological thriller and gothic horror and told in an almost Hitchcockian style,” said DiCaprio during his 6th visit to Japan and his first since January 2007. “At its heart, and what fascinated me, is that it is about one man’s journey to find out the truth about who he is and come to terms with his past.”
DiCaprio had plenty of praise for Scorsese. “I think that in 1,000 years’ time when historians look back on cinema as an art form, Scorsese will be remembered as one of the defining artists of the period,” he said. “He’s a master at storytelling, he’s a master with the camera and he is such a film historian. He is at his best in films like this—portraying the darkest side of humans. But it is his relationship with actors that defines him. His work with Robert De Niro has been one of the greatest cinematic relationships in history. I grew up watching all their films. Now, having worked with Scorsese over 10 years, I have learned so much. He looks to his actors to navigate the emotional narration and he wants to see where it takes him and you.”
DiCaprio said creating his character was the most intense work he has ever done. “Sometimes, when you read a screenplay, you don’t understand the impact until you do it. You come on set and realize that one scene, which might only have been a paragraph in the script, could be the most important part of the film. ‘Shutter Island’ is full of scenes like that.”
The film was also physically grueling. In order to create the hurricane, Scorsese had two gigantic fans blowing wind while firehoses drenched the actors. “It was chaos at times,“ said DiCaprio. Even worse, in another scene, his is nearly overrun by rats. “I was dreading it. They were real rats,” he said. “You know, they have people who actually train rats like you wouldn’t believe.”
DiCaprio said he likes to spend about three months in preparation for a role. “I think that is the most important part of making a movie. First, I read up on the postwar period in the 1950s, the conspiracy paranoia, what went on in mental institutions and so on. Then Scorsese had us watch lots of movies, such as ‘Laura,’ ‘Vertigo’ and ‘Out of the Past.’ He’s like that. I remember when we made ’The Aviator,’ he asked me to watch ‘His Girl Friday’ just to study one dinner scene.”
Such is the popularity of DiCaprio in Japan that his press conference was streamed live on the Internet in a rare move. He has been a megastar here since “Titanic” in 1997. So how does he feel about “Titanic” finally being surpassed by “Avatar” as the highest-grossing film of all time? “There was a lot of talk about whether ‘Avatar’ would make it. Good on them. ‘Avatar’ was an incredible experience. James Cameron has been able to tap into what audiences want to see on a worldwide level,” he said.
DiCaprio stayed a bit longer in Japan this time than stars usually do. He was accompanied by his girlfriend, Israeli supermodel Bar Refaeli, her family and some of his family. After Tokyo, they spent a few days in Kyoto where they managed to wander around unnoticed. Fans won’t have to wait three years until his next visit, only three months—the star will be back to promote his thriller “Inception,” with co-star Ken Watanabe.
Posted in Internet
Leonardo DiCaprio and other celebrities call on Vice President Moreno undertake a visit to Yasuni
Posted By Taly on April 11th, 2010
Puerto Ayora (Galapagos) .- personalities from the film, including Leonardo Di Caprio highlights, Glenn Close, Steve Case, Chevy Chease, Edward Norton, who are visiting the Galapagos Islands, heard a talk this afternoon Vice President, Lenin Moreno, on the importance of rescuing the Yasuni – ITT for the world, after which they asked the second president to visit this area of outstanding biodiversity.
About 100 actors, film directors and producers participating in the proposed Blue Ocean, aboard the Endeavour cruise in the waters of the Galapagos Archipelago, in order to closely observe the natural wealth of the islands and Ecuador.
“The international community knows of this proposal, in weeks past I visited Spain, Germany, Iran, Turkey and the UAE authorities for exposing their Ecuadorian initiative to give a contribution of 50% of the cost of exploiting these oil fields represent. The other half will be the contribution of the Ecuadorian people, “Moreno said during exposure to mariners.
There are a million and a half hectares of Yasuni, where there is oil, he explained, and the government and people have said that wealth is not exploited, although the oil could be used in the development of a poor country like Ecuador.
He noted that “could be fatal in case of an oil spill in the Yasuni”, an area where there is only one hectare of land, more living species throughout North America.
“The Yasuni is a small area of the Amazon where there are endemic species unique in the world,” he said.
In addition, the Vice President said that three-quarters of the national territory are protected areas and the government is not prepared to allow for any reason nature is destroyed, after which he was cheered with applause by the film personalities interested in the environment.
In the case of conservation of the Galapagos Islands, Moreno acknowledged that fishermen have the right to work, “but no way to destroy the marine nature.”
“So the government will give this sector, other job opportunities so that this body has a life of dignity, which could be the care of the marine reserve in the archipelago,” he added.
The Vice President noted that Galapagos has special characteristics and that is a laboratory of the world’s protected areas, “here shows the great harmony that exists between animal and man, the product of evolution of species,” he said.
In this cruise, the second president was invited to present the initiative Yasuni – ITT, and after a private conversation, celebrities, he was asked to take a trip to the Yasuni, in order to know and advocate for the Ecuadorian project to maintain raw land.
At the meeting, the actor Leonardo Di Caprio revealed that since short-researched age of the Galapagos Islands so stay almost was “a dream come true.”
It is noteworthy that the ship Endeavour travels the world, within the National Programme Conserve. / Vice President.
Posted in Internet
Leonardo Dicaprio, Ashton Kutcher & Jamie Foxx Top ‘Big Men’ List
Posted By Taly on April 10th, 2010
Leonardo DiCaprio, Ashton Kutcher and Jamie Foxx have topped a new list of Hollywood big men – and we’re not talking height or weight!
Life & Style magazine has conducted an in depth investigation in a bid to find out which movie stars measure up in the bedroom – and it seems Demi Moore, model Bar Rafaeli and Foxx’s latest girlfriend Stacey Dash are lucky ladies.
David Arquette, David Spade, Jamie Kennedy, Brian Austin Green, Jared Leto and the aptly named Andy Dick also make the big boys list, according to the publication.
One insider says, “They have nicknames like Tripod and Crooked Stick, in Jamie Kennedy’s case.”
EXCLUSIVE: ‘UFO’ director talks ‘miniature revival’ on Shutter Island
Posted By Taly on April 5th, 2010
The miniature strikes back! In this exclusive Shadowlocked interview (with loads of exclusive pics), ‘UFO’ director Matthew Gratzner discusses the return of ‘real’ models to VFX for Shutter Island…
Beyond spaceships – Motion control model work integrating with real actors on Shutter Island
We’ve all seen the promos for visual effects on sci-fi movies such as Cloverfield. We now know that is doesn’t matter how shaky or raw the footage may be that the director provides – those Hollywood CGI wizards can insert impossible scenes of apocalypse/invasion/destruction seamlessly into the background. It’s one of the reasons why movie model-work is dead. Hanging miniatures? Pah. Locked-off shots and plastic spaceships encrusted with model-bits, being encircled by motion control rigs? It’s a bit 1970s, no? A bit New Hope. It’s yesterday. Movie miniatures are the past, and CGI continues to be the future.
Unless you’re Matthew Gratzner, whose New Deal Studios has created more visual effects on more Hollywood blockbusters than we can list. He’s about to direct the movie adaptation of Gerry Anderson’s 1970s SF series UFO. But he had one last big VFX job to complete first. The movie came out this month, and it’s packed with as many visual effects shots as any summer tent-pole flick.
I couldn’t spot one of them. And every single one is a ‘miniature’ shot…
“We’ve taken the technology that’s the newest of the new and mixed it with the old-school technology.”
In Shutter Island there’s a tremendous amount of match-moving between first unit and actual miniatures. We’ve all seen pre-and-post footage from movies like Cloverfield, where the first-unit match-moving plates [i.e. 'hand-held' shots that end up with real and CGI elements combined] go straight to the CGI end of the production pipeline…but what was accomplished in this field in Shutter Island with real-world miniatures is really something else. Are there greater problems in match-moving with real-world models?
Absolutely. One hundred percent. There was no motion-control shot on the first unit – nothing encoded, nothing match-moved, no motion-control heads recording the data on set.
Everything we did, we had to track. We used a combination of Maya LiveTrack and BouJou to track all the shots, and we were often lucky if there were any tracking points in the shot at all! I actually went to the set for a month and supervised [the VFX on] first unit while [Shutter Island VFX supervisor and 2nd unit director] Rob Legato was out shooting second unit. So it was exciting but also very trying.
No CGI in sight…
Sometimes I’d be sitting there blocking out a shoot with [Shutter Island DP] Bob Richardson and [first AD] Joe Reidy and just say ‘Okay, this is the composition of the shot – what do you think?’. It wasn’t like we had storyboards or a very elaborate series of pre-vizes that we were blocking stuff to. It was great, because it was a kind of ‘on the fly’ deal. It wasn’t stressful, because it was a very fun, open and creative process.
One of the hardest set/miniature matches on Shutter Island – the ‘Ward C’ ‘Escher’ stairwell
Anyway, having tracked the footage in Maya, we take the Maya data and create the digital background from our [real] models, and then we have to link everything together and make sure it lines up. And then we have to hope that the motion control rig will follow exactly the path that we created with Maya, which it does. It’s a question of making sure that the right lensing is used, that you’re zeroing out the rig correctly.
“You’re giving the computer this data saying ‘Okay, the lens is tilted down ten degrees, it’s panned over fifteen degrees, and now the move begins’. So if the model doesn’t line up – you’re screwed!”
You have to have a point in space that becomes your ‘zero’, where the rig starts. You’re giving the computer this data saying ‘Okay, the lens is tilted down ten degrees, it’s panned over fifteen degrees, and now the move begins’. So if the model doesn’t line up – you’re screwed! Whereas if you do it as a post-digital shot with a digital background, you can hammer it into place one way or another.
I think the big thing that working on Shutter Island did for me was to solidify the post-tracking process [where miniatures are inserted into non-static shots from principal photography]. We had a lot of very complicated hand-held shots. It’s one thing to be able to take a series of graceful crane shots, or even lock-offs, take them and do line-ups and comp them in…it’s one thing to be able to do that. But to be able to take these very visceral, almost cinema verité, hand-held shots, track them, put them into a Cooper system, shoot the motion control to match-move on a model and seamlessly lock them together…it really solidifies that it does work well.
We can really, really take a free-form, shoot-from-the-hip, whatever-it-takes film and really expand upon the background without – though I hesitate to say it – without the proper planning that you would expect in miniature visual effects.
I recall Richard Edlund doing some of the same kind of work, to a more limited extent, in Alien 3, but match-moving with real miniatures – whether there’s first unit tracking data available or whether it’s tracked afterwards – seems to be a fairly little-used technique…?
That’s a very good point. Not to be disparaging to my fellow visual-effects supervisors and companies, but I think it’s an insanely under-used technique. The key thing is that you have to know what the shots are going to be before you do them in regards to building the models.
You can actually build a set, shoot wild and do anything you want, and as long as you get that data and the data is accurate, then you can build a miniature and track it, and then you’re done. It’s actually a very straightforward approach.
The hardest thing on Shutter Island regarding this technique was the Ward C model. It was one of the hardest tracking line-ups you can do, because we’re not just extending the live-action set, but the live-action set is nothing but vertical and criss-crossing and diagonal lines. That interior of Ward C, what we call the ‘M.C. Escher stairway’ was a series of brickwork and steel girders, and the steel girders all terminated into a green-screen. So everything we built had to line up exactly. There must have been about two dozen different vertical struts, criss-crossing, and it all had to match the same patterns. Our Digital Effects Supervisor, Bob Chapin, accomplished an amazing feet hand tracking that shot then prevising the finished shot with a digital version of our physical model; This is how he was retooling and exporting the data for the motion control system.
Still no CGI…
If they didn’t match, you couldn’t fake it, and you couldn’t fix it in post any which way.
One scene that was very difficult to do was when Leo was being attacked by that bald guy, the insane patient, on a catwalk – it’ s a big crane shot and you’re following him looking through another catwalk. And behind them there’s this insane cacophony of steelwork and grating in layers, and you’re getting moiré patterns…and then beyond that, there’s a green screen.
“The effects we’re doing on Shutter Island – that’s the same sort of thing I’m planning on UFO”
We had to extend all that, and it all had to be hand-tracked. There were no tracking markers. So it was a pain in the ass, but it looked really good.
Shutter Island seems to be completely free of any visual effects. That must be the ultimate accolade, and at the same time, not great publicity for you!
To be honest, that is the bane of my existence [laughs]. It’s a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because I’ve always believed that visual effects should be 100% seamless and you should never know they’re there. Even if it’s on a big film. Not to go off on a tangent, but the effects we’re doing on Shutter Island, that’s the same sort of thing I’m planning on UFO.
Okay, they’re a little more fantastical, like Skydiver bubbling up from the surface of the water…that’s obviously not the same as a lighthouse in Massachusetts, but it’s the same sort of idea where you have to absolutely believe it and not even question it.
Leonardo DiCaprio next to Matthew Gratzner’s ‘Lighthouse’ miniature on location for Shutter Island (2010)
I guess the point is to have a reference – we’ve seen lighthouses, and – as regards Skydiver in UFO – we’ve seen Polaris missiles coming out of the ocean, so these are embedded cultural images that you can draw on, I’m thinking…
Exactly! That’s the big thing, and I do this on every picture that I work on, regardless of whether it’s a Martin Scorsese thriller or a sci-fi movie, or a comics-based picture like Dark Knight…I try to find reference that is ‘real world’. That gives us an idea of what something actually looks like.
The one thing I never do, and I’ve never done in my entire career…I never look at other movies for reference. I always look at the real thing. When we were doing Pitch Black many years ago, all our reference was from looking at real aircraft. I go to air shows from time to time – I have a pilot’s licence and love flying. I have a huge library of military aircraft photographs. So when we designed the ship and all the details, it was all based on aircraft assembly or helicopter assembly. This was the kind of research I did, as opposed to ‘Oh, here’s some pictures of TIE fighters in Star Wars or the Vipers from Battlestar Galactica’.
It was the same thing for Shutter Island. I was looking at references of real civil war forts. Ward C, the most predominant set, did not exist.
Motion control photography that will blend Leonardo DiCaprio into the scale model of ‘Ward C’
SHUTTER ISLAND SPOILER ALERT…
I should warn your readers that what I’m about to say is a big spoiler for Shutter Island, but all of the horrible things that Teddy [DiCaprio's character] believes are happening in structures and places that don’t even really exist in the real world. It never really occurred to me until now. This is something we talked about with Martin Scorsese, that we need to remember that this is all in his head. So if there’s a continuity issue, one really shouldn’t worry too much about it because the audience really is going on Teddy’s own delusional journey.
The two main structures in Shutter Island really don’t exist. There’s no real lighthouse and there’s no real ‘Ward C’. Some of the other structures, such as the administration building and the clock tower – those were real. The film was shot in a defunct insane asylum in Massachusetts in a town called Medfield. They went in and dressed up the ground. That whole portcullis and the huge entry point with the giant brick wall all around the compound was designed by (production designer) Dante Ferretti. That’s not real. But the courtyard and all the buildings that were brick, and mid 19th-century, those were 100% real.
Regarding Ward C, did Martin Scorsese look at locations before he decided that he had to have a miniature?
Marty never really pitches things in that way. He wouldn’t know whether it has to be a matte painting or a miniature, or anything like that. He’ll just do whatever looks the best. But in the original plan there was some kind of water-containment tank that was already on the property, and the plan originally was to use that as the existing core structure. It was colossal. It was three or four storeys tall. The original plan was that Dante was going to build a giant wall around that. It was going to be turned into…I don’t want to say a medieval keep, but kind of like a giant tower, and that was going to become Ward C.
It went through a number of iterations in design. There are some tremendous forts on the East coast in the United States, and there was one down in Florida called Fort Jefferson, which is a huge pentagonal structure with these cannon ports all around, from the civil war era, and when we saw that we said ‘We should make Ward C an old civil war fort’. Funny enough, that’s what it said in the script too, that it’s an old civil war fort, so that’s nothing that we made up.
But the design we locked down was a pentagonal fort with a central tower, which became that staircase that [DiCaprio] climbs up, with these large grass berms on the rooftop. The berms, and this is all very historically accurate, were used in an attack because cannonballs would deaden on these grass-laden rooftops, which were basically giant dirt mounds with grass on it. So they would take the impact of the cannonballs with inertia. Everybody keeps asking ‘Why is there grass on the top of the roof?’. That’s why – it’s a period thing, and that’s how it was.
Working on the grass-laden ward c miniature at New Deal (Shutter Island, 2010)
So Dante decided that Ward C was the inside of a fort where all the cannon ports were bricked over and turned into cells.
They ended up building a foam-core maquette of what the model should look like in the terrain, and then the first unit built a forty to sixty-foot foreground brick wall with a door in it, and then they had a stone wall behind that with fencing. The wall was about twenty feet tall and sixty feet long, and that was the entire ‘real’ Ward C. That was all first unit had.
Looking at the Shutter Island VFX footage, the before-and-afters, at your site, we see the first ariel shot of Ward C, and it looks pretty ‘modelly’. By the time we get to the final shot, it looks indistinguishable from reality – is there some particular process that was used on that footage, or is it just a question of context and grading?
We just did colour-correction. I think it is a question of context – it looks modelly in the first shot because you’re looking at a blue-screen behind it…to be honest, we didn’t really do anything. What you see was completely photographed as is – there was no digital magic to it. We didn’t go back and add detail or texture. The trees are the same, the vehicles are the same…
But once we put in the water-plate, the people and the colour-correction over the whole thing, it just ties it all together and makes it feel believable.
I remember a miniature fly-over of a stadium in second Jurassic Park movie where a tower just came a little bit too close to the lens and ‘gave the game away’ with depth of field, and with the kind of movement that we would expect in a real ariel fly-over. What are the tricks in frames-per-second and depth of field, in order to avoid that kind of false movement in filming miniatures?
The only technique is that if it looks good in a photograph, and you believe it, it’ll look fine on film. When it comes to depth of field, that’s a different story. We shot that outside with a silk-over, so you get the natural light through the silk, and we shot it twenty four frames a second, believe it or not.
It was a motion control shot, but the thing is that we had so much daylight pumping in that we were able to hold depth of field. Now, if we’d shot this on stage and couldn’t get the same exposure, we probably would have shot it at six frames per second [on a slow pass, not real-time]. Obviously depth of field is what can kill any model shot – if your foreground is not as sharp as your background, you start to have a problem.
What also helped with the Ward C model was the infinitesimally small detail that was applied to it.
“I built Ward C in insane hyper-detail, and I figured that there was going to be a point where they were going to want more shots of this, and I wanted to be prepared for that eventuality”
There were actually a couple of things that were tough, that we did struggle with. One was that the first-unit set felt a little artificial in that the stones were beautifully detailed and everything, and it did look real…but because the design of the fortress itself was devoid of any very coarse lines, pilasters or columns, or anything else that might break up the structure, the wall surfaces – while they looked real – didn’t have a lot of protruding detail.
So that was a struggle – I had to match what they built in first unit; I couldn’t start changing the architecture around. The second problem was that in the opening of the picture, Ward C is revealed in two different shots, the drive-by shots. Those sections were added after the film was photographed and cut together…
Just on a side note, originally with Ward C we were just going to build a partial section of the wall in miniature, and the original opening reveal was not going to be a helicopter shot. It was a low shot breaking across the field, and then Ward C comes into view. And at that point we were going to do our model and extend it.
Essentially a matte painting with a model, or hanging miniature…
Yeah. So what I ended up doing was talking toRob Legato, and told him that we were building and budgeting for this 35th-scale model – a pretty small model, only eight feet across – and I pitched this helicopter-shot idea to him. I just thought that we could do better than this kind of 50-foot crane shot that was planned.
So he asked me what I wanted to do, and we pre-vizzed it and ended up adding a little camera-bobble to not make it so perfectly motion-controlled. Rob Legato showed it to Marty, who loved it, and that became the shot.
I built that model in insane hyper-detail, and I figured that there was going to be a point where they were going to want more shots of this, and I wanted to be prepared for that eventuality.
When the VFX and miniatures budget is tight, do you end up normally building to exactly the level of detail that’s been storyboarded, or do you have to get that extra work in just in case the director wants to go close?
This was the fourth Martin Scorsese film that I’ve worked on, and basically you build as much as you can build within the money, and you detail as much as you can, because there will be shots that come up on the spot…[Scorsese] will have an epiphany. And usually his ideas are terrific. So you want to be able to be prepared to cover those sorts of things if they come up.
But there wasn’t a lot of that on this show. Ward C was the only miniature where we were adding other shots.
But the trick was with the ‘drive-by’ shots…
Spot the 1-inch tall shrubs!
There’s a wide shot where the camera’s low – we dug a hole in the ground and shot it with a truck. You see the truck drive by, and we composited our model into the background of that. But then [Martin Scorsese] asked on the day of shooting, in a conference call, ‘Hey, we’d love to have a shot where we’re in the truck, looking at [the Ward C miniature] while we’re driving past it’.
So we had to come up with it on the day. All the actors in it are doubles, of Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo…so we had them in the truck with Rob Legato operating the camera. The truck’s not moving – it’s just locked off against green-screen, but we’re shaking the vehicle and there’s wind on the guys to ruffle their coats. I was literally next to Rob, storyboarding the shot and visualising what the background was going to look like.
“That model shot where they drive by Ward C…there are shrubs that are projected in the cinema eight feet tall that are literally an inch tall!”
So we took that footage and created the pre-viz and the perspective and what it would feel like, driving past it.
We shot three different versions of that truck-driving shot. We did one where we were in the truck, one where we’re looking at it from a distance and it’s driving past, and we had to consistently create and re-speed the background to give the illusion that it’s moving faster than it was. It was a very complicated trick.
From that pre-viz we were able to export all the [motion control] camera moves from the model shot. I have to tell you…talk about insanely small scale: that model shot that you’re looking at, where they’re close to Ward C in the compound, there are shrubs that are projected in the cinema eight feet tall that are literally an inch tall!
It was crazy. We shot that, I think, at around 4-6 frames a second, and again we were outside and had an amazing amount of luminance from the sun, so it wasn’t like we had to pump a lot of light into it artificially. But the camera lens was a sixteenth of an inch from those shrubs!
Do you think that Martin Scorsese, if he were of the younger generation of directors, would be so keen to use techniques for which the younger ones automatically favour CGI?
He doesn’t really call what it should be – he just wants it to look real. If we deliver something that looks sort of painterly, he’ll say ‘It doesn’t look real – you gotta fix it’. He doesn’t say ‘Oh, this has to be a model, this has to be digital’…he’s not making those shots because that’s not really his job.
We’re making the shots collectively, or rather the choices. Rob would come to me and say ‘I think this should be a model’, and I’ll talk to him about how I’d approach it, the scale, and how I’d shoot it, and then that’s how it ends up happening.
But there must surely be a budgetary factor in these decisions…?
Sure, the visual effects budgets are generally quite small on Martin Scorsese’s pictures, because nobody ever considers them a visual effects film. It’s kind of ironic, because that’s what they said about The Aviator – ‘It’s not a visual effects film’. Even though there was maybe one airplane in the whole movie that could actually fly!
I like working on pictures like that. Sometimes a limited budget really does make you come up with the best and most unique techniques, and sometimes it gives you the best results. Too much money sometimes can be a problem.
You mentioned how you ‘sold’ the ariel shot to Rob Legato, but how does the division of various VFX shots take place between the various companies? Is it a question of bidding on price and portfolio, or is it down to the director and someone like Legato to make these decisions? Do you ever get consulted first and then don’t get the shot?
On Shutter Island there were two big companies that worked on the show, plus one kind of in-house company. It was us, a company called The Syndicate, which was a subsidiary of Café Effects – and Syndicate went out of business although Café are still in business – and then Ron Ames, who was a visual effects producer on the picture as well as the visual effects editor, did a lot of in-house stuff where they brought in independent artists…these guys are doing simple composites, a shot out of a window maybe. But anything that involves heavy art direction, miniature effects and live-action, that usually just comes to me.
This is because we do the production design at New Deal, we build full-scale sets and we also do a lot of second-unit work. On Shutter Island we actually shot a number of shots that were not just second-unit, using doubles and stunt-people, but we also shot a lot of shots with Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo, when they came to the studio, and we did inserts and pick-ups.
“Scorsese’s visual effects budgets are generally quite small, because nobody ever considers them a ‘visual effects’ film. It’s kind of ironic, because that’s what they said about The Aviator – even though there was maybe one airplane in the whole movie that could actually fly!”
So we’re a full-on production facility that mixes all the techniques and all the tools, and that’s usually how I end up getting that kind of work. If there’s a key component that has to be physically built and then added into the shot, they’ll come to me; if it’s strictly digital they would go to Café, because that’s sort of their forte.
The funny thing is that if they had come to us for more of that cliff-climbing stuff, I would probably have done more of that miniature than matte painting. Even my matte paintings – I’ll build models!
One of the things that makes the film so convincing is the lack of whacky CGI camera moves, even though you had all the means to really move around the models. Was this a group decision? How does that kind of policy come about?
That’s Marty together with Bob Richardson, who in my opinion is probably one of the best directors of photography in the business right now. In the end, Marty just doesn’t want to do a shot that gives it away as an effect. So if you’re doing a shot where there’s like some crazy zoom or some crazy camera move or a cable-cam, he’ll say ‘No’. He has a very distinctive style, as doe Bob Richardson, and we just have to carry that out in the visual effects. When you’re designing a shot, you try and get as much as you can to look like first unit.
Is the process of creating a miniature much the same as it was thirty years ago, or has the computer had an influence there as well? Is it still a genuinely ‘old’ technique?
I would call it a new and old technique; the physical construction is very similar, obviously, the materials are very similar, but the design…art departments don’t really have the time to do a lot of the heavy design. They never really have, to be honest. On this show, for Ward C, we only had the foam-core maquette and the full-scale ward drawings. I did a lot of extrapolation to design it. It was literally a foam-core, flat-sided thing, so in terms of textures and different detail, those we came up with.
For the M.C. Escher stairway, we had blueprints that we followed to the letter so that it matched the live-action. But the thing is, as you build a live-action set, carpenters and welders change thing slightly as they’re building it, so when I’m on set I do a tremendous amount of measuring and photographic reference to make sure it all matches.
The Miniature Effects Supervisor, Scott Schneider, did a terrific job with all of the digital set design. He computer-models everything now. That’s one of the big differences between ten or twenty years ago is that everything is done in the computer first. A lot of the parts of the lighthouse were prototyped off a wax printing machine, which we have here. For the body of the lighthouse we did a computer-controlled hot-wire cut to get the shape exactly right.
There’s still a tremendous amount of hand fabrication, but I will admit that the computer-techniques not only make the project faster, but they give it a certain edge in terms of flawlessness that’s hard to match manually. For instance, the lenses in the lighthouse: we built two different scales of lighthouse – the one for all the exteriors, and that lighthouse was about ten or twelve feet tall and was sitting on a piece of rock that was about twenty-five by twelve feet wide by fourteen feet tall. So the whole thing was quite massive.
For the interior of the lighthouse, we did a one fourth scale interior that went all the way up from the ground floor to the top of the peak of the roof, and that was about thirty-five feet tall. For the Fresnel lenses, we built a computer model of a section of them, grew those in wax and then moulded and cast those out of a clear resin. And they were fully functional in that if you put a light inside, they would translate the light as the real thing would.
Detailing the gangways of the Ward C miniature at New Deal studios
“It really is absurd that people aren’t doing this technique more. Not to sound bitter, but it bugs me.”
The great thing is that if we’re building a computer model, I can take that model and use it in the pre-viz and know that everything will line up to the letter. And that’s how we were able to do all the post pre-vizes with ward c, and even some of the lighthouse blocking shots. Even with the lighthouse, I could take the digital model and line it up in the camera, and I’d know when we went to shoot the miniature that it would be perfect.
It really is absurd that people aren’t doing this technique more. Not to sound bitter, but it bugs me. We’ve taken the technology that’s the newest of the new and mixed it with the old-school technology. These techniques should be mixed – visual effects is a magic show, and you should never know how it’s done.
The lighthouse miniature at New Deal studios
The problem is that when a film is as devoid of visual effects as Shutter Island seems to be, there’s no ‘hook’ for the young audience who have a particular interest in movies featuring ‘obvious’ visual effects.
[Laughs] That’s why I try and advertise, and talk to people like you – so that I can get the word out and say ‘Look, there are ways to do these things.
And to be honest, that’s why I’m jumping in head-first on projects like UFO, where I’m in more control to direct the film, and have more control to decide how the film’s going to look. This way, instead of being somebody else’s sub-contractor, who’s begging, borrowing and stealing to do a shot, I’m like…screw it, I’ll do it myself, I’ll make my own movies. This way I can take these techniques and do them on my own show.
Even so, don’t you wish Martin Scorsese would make a science-fiction movie?
Well he is making the kids’ movie The Invention of Hugo Cabret in England right now. He’s in pre-pre-production. I don’t know if we’re going to be working on it. One of the mandates, I think, was that they wanted to keep it in England, which is sad because it’ll be the first Martin Scorsese movie I haven’t worked on in…it’ll be about six years now. But UFO is taking precedence right now.
For full video showing the pre and post stages of various shots in Shutter Island, check out this link at New Deal.All photos and visual material courtesy of New Deal and Paramount.
An Island No More???
Posted By Taly on April 5th, 2010
Working with director Martin Scorsese, CafeFX visual effects supervisor Ben Grossmann blurs the line between post and production for Shutter Island
It’s difficult to estimate the number of visual effects shots created for Martin Scorsese’s film Shutter Island, and that’s a good thing.
“Ballpark, I’d say we ended up with maybe 200 of the 700 visual effects shots in the film,” says Ben Grossmann, visual effects supervisor at CafeFX. Grossmann worked with overall VFX supervisor Rob Legato, and with CafeFX’s affiliate, The Syndicate, which gave the Santa Maria, California-based studio a base in Los Angeles closer to the production.
“But, over the course of the project, we created 300 or 400 shots because of the way Marty [Scorsese] and Thelma [Schoonmaker], the editor, work. “It’s surprising,” says Grossman. “You could think of [Scorsese] as an old-school filmmaker, but he’s more comfortable with visual effects than most directors. That’s what was most unique about this picture. He treats the visual effects department on par with all the other parts of the film. There’s no delineation between production and postproduction.”
That resulted in a new way of working and a new business model, as well. What it meant in practice for the visual effects crew was that they would rough-out shots during production so that Scorsese and Schoonmaker had rough composites to work with in editing. “We did that with the dailies,” Grossmann says. “If there were three takes Marty liked, we would temp all three takes. We’d do them flash to flash–from when the camera kicks in to where Marty yells, ‘Cut.’ And, if Thelma didn’t know what her edit would be, we’d do a rough take immediately after the shoot.”
To do this, the crew worked with Autodesk’s 3ds Max for 3D modeling, The Foundry’s Nuke for compositing, and Andersson Technologies’ SynthEyes for camera tracking/matchmoving.
“I call them rough takes because we knew the quality would be higher,” Grossmann says, “but they were pretty high quality. Our goal was to make them so good that the effects wouldn’t take Marty [Scorsese] and Thelma [Schoomaker] out of the story. They’re crafting the story with these shots. We wanted them to be free to edit with shots that functioned.”
Grossmann had first created digital environments for Scorsese to help him with a sequence in his short film Key to Reserva, which released in 2007. “We wanted to shoot in Carnegie Hall, but we couldn’t work out the schedule,” he says. “We could get a four-hour window, though. So, I set up a camera rig to capture a 360-degree environment at extremely high resolution. Marty did a quick walk-through and said he wanted to shoot from here, here, and there, so I did a lot of coverage for those locations. I shot high-dynamic range 360-degree domes using around 160 photographs for each position. When we finished, Marty could say, ‘I want to point the camera here,’ and we could rotate the world and give him a quick comp.”
For Shutter Island, Grossmann, CG supervisors Adam Watkins and Luke McDonald, compositing supervisor Alex Henning, and a team of VFX artists replicated and extended the process. For some shots, the team replaced the digital stills with moving footage, in others they brought the stills to life using animated CG objects–debris, blowing leaves, seagulls, and so forth.
“There are a couple scenes in the film where Teddy [Leonardo DiCaprio] and Chuck [Mark Ruffalo] stand and talk for what feels like forever on a cliff-side,” Grossmann says. “You’d never think the backgrounds are visual effects, but all the trees, the seagulls, all that life is in one of the domes we created.”
Cliffhanger
Many of the scenes that benefited from this process centered on Teddy and Chuck on coastal cliffs. The film, based on a book by Dennis LeHane, takes place on a creepy island in Boston Harbor where a patient has disappeared from an asylum for the criminally insane. US marshal Teddy Daniels investigates the disappearance of a patient, a murderer, from the hospital.
“The big sequences with Leonardo and Mark on cliffs were filmed with just those two guys on bluescreen,” Grossmann says, “so it was challenging for Thelma [Schoonmaker] and Marty [Scorsese] to edit the scenes without seeing what the environments would look like.” Although the crew would build these environments in 3D for the final shots later, Grossmann’s team used still photos of cliffs and waves to stitch together the temp domes, and fast matchmovers created a virtual camera that replicated the movement of the camera on set. By placing that camera, footage of the actors, and the dome in Nuke, Scorsese could see the entire scene that would be in the film from the camera’s point of view.
“We’d take the temp, apply footage, and see what we’d have on the day,” Grossmann says. “Wherever the camera moved, the actors were in this 360-degree representative environment that replaced the bluescreens.” Scorsese and Schoonmaker could use these composites as they edited the film, and comments from Scorsese and Legato about the digital stills used for the environments helped Grossmann’s team as they moved toward creating final images.
“On most pictures, the process is to wrap principal photography, lock a rough edit, do visual effects,” Grossmann says. “We were doing visual effects the entire time during principal photography, and we kept shooting with a visual effects unit for a year after principal photography wrapped to flesh out the scenes and fill in holes. Rob [Legato] and I would do location scouts, take film footage, and send the pictures to Marty. He say ‘Fine,” or ‘Oh, no. Not high enough. Not violent enough,’ and we’d look for another location until we could film the actual plates that we’d use in the movie. We’d put [the new footage] into the dome and see how it worked.”
For example, in one sequence, Teddy climbs up and down a cliff that juts up from the ocean. The cliff was on set. Everything else was digital, created in a dome. “We knew what the sky needed to be, so we used digital stills that we touched up in Photoshop,” Grossmann says. “And, we added animated clouds or used time-lapse photography of clouds moving to that matte painting.”
Obviously, though, they couldn’t use digital stills for the crashing waves. “There was some pressure to do the water digitally,” Grossmann says. “People would say, ‘Oh, you can do that in the computer, can’t you?’ But Rob [Legato] and I like to have real elements if we can. And, in this case, we didn’t need to control the water, we just needed to find something that looked right.”
The visual effects film crew shot some of the water for that scene at Acadia National Park in Maine, using a SpyderCam, which is a camera on a stabilized rig, that they hung off the edge of the cliff on a construction crane. “We divided the area into quadrants and then shot tiles using 35mm film,” Grossmann says. “We might shoot 600 frames, 15 seconds, for each tile. Then we blended them together and stitched them into moving footage. So, we had tiled motion-picture photography of waves crashing on rocks, matte paintings and textured geometry for the cliffs, animated matte paintings for the sky, and bits of stuff blowing in the wind. We had 180 degrees of coverage. The camera could point up or down and see continuity in the waves.”
Similarly, for a scene in which a character apparently catches fire, the crew used practical elements. “We could have done the fire digitally, but we’ve done production at The Syndicate,” Grossmann says, “and my background is production-oriented, so we decided it would be just as easy to do practical fire. It was only two shots. We built a miniature black version of the set at New Deal Studios, lit each piece of fire by hand, and composited the elements into the plate.”
The rats, which Teddy hallucinates but we see, are real, as well. He is at the bottom of a cliff standing in crashing waves looking for his partner when rats crawl out of the rocks and surround him. On set in Massachusetts was a small water basin with practical rocks; two dump tanks custom-built for the task by special effects supervisor Bruce Steinheimer would alternately pour water into the basin to create a steady ebb and flow. While DiCaprio stood in what was, essentially, a bathtub, an animal trainer released 25 trained rats during a crack in the waves. DiCaprio could nudge the real rats with his foot and push them off the rock.
Later, the visual effects crew surrounded DiCaprio and the rats with crashing water shot in Maine, put rocks and ocean waves shot in California behind, added a sky photographed in Florida, and layered in additional rats shot on bluescreen in California. “The rats hop from a rock shot in Massachusetts to a rock shot in Maine,” Grossmann says.
In the same way that the crew used footage of real-world locations in the dome, they added footage of miniatures created at New Deal Studios to the environments. “When a shot was mostly about the miniature, New Deal created it, and when it needed a heavy amount of CG based on the models, we did that,” Grossmann says.
For some shots with a lighthouse, for example, which Grossmann describes as a miniature around 20 feet tall, the visual effects crew built a CG model from blueprints of the miniature, photographed the miniature, projection-mapped the photographs onto the CG model, and put it into a dome.
Rebuilding the Model
Grossmann believes the entire crew enjoyed being more a part of the production process than usual, as much as he did.
“Everyone always says that the visual effects production process is no longer just post, but it isn’t on par with production all that often,” Grossmann says. “With this film, we started with pre-production, and we were there all the way through. It was great. If Marty trusts you, you’re part of the team. It’s like the snake bites from the head. When the director sets a bar and demonstrates respect, everyone follows suit. The grip, gaffers, DP, everyone, says, ‘Visual effects needs this, let’s get on it,’ instead of ‘Oh, no, another stupid request.’ ”
Because that respect extended to the entire visual effects team, Grossmann felt comfortable bringing compositors on set to work on the sequence with the fire elements. “Instead of having compositors sitting at their desks, they were standing behind the camera,” Grossmann says. “It totally changed their level of enthusiasm.”
This way of working changed the business side of the picture, as well, for the postproduction house. “You can’t use the same business model as in a traditional pipeline where you get shots locked by the edit and you know what they’re supposed to be,” Grossmann says. “In that case, you can give a flat bid and start working. But in this case, you don’t know how many shots. You don’t know how long. You can’t bid by frame count. You can’t lock anything down because you’re part of the filmmaking process. You’re creating shots on an as-needed basis, so from the outset you have to change the way you budget and schedule the film. Our VFX producer Ron Ames really pushed this model and made it possible for all of us to work within it.”
As a result, the visual effects crew became a production service, not a vendor. “You have to keep a budget like any other department,” Grossmann says, “not a bid. If you found yourself about to go over budget, you adjust the budget just like any other department. You don’t bid and try to track a shot granularly. We were part of the production process, and that continued to the end of the film. With Ron [Ames] nurturing everything along and balancing the workload between teams, we got to focus on putting beautiful things on the screen, rather than numbers in a spreadsheet. It was tons of fun and I hope to do it again sometime.”
Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for Computer Graphics World. She can be reached at BarbaraRR@comcast.net.
Posted in Internet
‘Inception’ breaks into dreams
Posted By Taly on April 5th, 2010
Reporting from Cardington, England – July is the month when movies gets dizzy (or is it ditsy?) from the heat, and this year is no exception, with films featuring heartthrob vampires, evil aliens and the never-gets-old concept of talking dogs. But on July 16, in the middle of the usual popcorn parade, director Christopher Nolan and Warner Bros. will deliver “Inception,” a strange thriller that has been a Hollywood mystery for months thanks to its cryptic title and the fact that the studio has guarded the Nolan-penned script like a state secret.
So it was no surprise last summer that, at a musty old dirigible hangar outside London, Nolan welcomed a rare visitor to his “Inception” set with a guarded smile. “So you’ve read the script — did you understand it?” Mazes and masked intentions are the specialties of Nolan, who burst on the scene 10 years ago with “Memento,” a noir riddle told in two alternating narratives presented in opposite chronological directions — a masterpiece of watchmaker cinema that earned Nolan and his brother, Jonathan, an Oscar nomination for their screenplay. In 2008, Nolan performed an even more impressive sleight of hand when he delivered a $1-billion success with the Batman movie called “The Dark Knight,” the most cerebral of superhero films and one that barely used any computer-generated effects.
“Inception,” the 39-year-old director’s seventh feature film and his first foray into science fiction, combines the perception riddles of “Memento” and the sheer scale of “Dark Knight” with its $160-million budget and location shoots in Morocco, France, Japan and three other countries. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a specialist in the new branch of corporate espionage — he’s a dream thief who plucks secrets from the minds of tycoons after pumping them full of drugs and hooking them up to a mysterious contraption. The problem, though, is the land of nod can be volatile — as can DiCaprio’s character, Dom Cobb, who is a wounded dreamer after the loss of his beloved wife.
The movie may be Hollywood’s first existential heist movie, and though that may not sound like typical fare for the air-conditioning months, Warners and Legendary Pictures are banking on the movie catching on as a brainy “Mission: Impossible” by way of “The Matrix”; the globe-trotting movie may have had its subconscious baggage packed by Sigmund Freud, in other words, but it also carries a passport stamped by Ian Fleming. DiCaprio says Nolan is the perfect director to turn that unlikely combination into a July hit.
“Complex and ambiguous are the perfect way to describe the story,” DiCaprio said in a recent phone interview. “And it’s going to be a challenge to ultimately pull it off. But that is what Chris Nolan specializes in. He has been able to convey really complex narratives that work on a multitude of different layers simultaneously to an audience and make it entertaining and engaging throughout. You look at ‘ Insomnia’ or ‘Memento,’ these movies are working on so many different levels. That’s his expertise; it’s what he does best, as a matter of fact.”
‘Inception’s’ conception
For Nolan, “Inception” was an elusive dream. “I wanted to do this for a very long time, it’s something I’ve thought about off and on since I was about 16,” Nolan said during a break in shooting last summer. “I wrote the first draft of this script seven or eight years ago, but it goes back much further, this idea of approaching dream and the dream life as another state of reality.”
Nolan split his youth between Chicago and London (he has dual citizenship) but, with his stately, professorial mien and Oxford dress code, he seems far more in touch with the banks of the Thames than the shore of Lake Michigan. Ever since he was a youngster, he says, he was intrigued by the way he would wake up and then, while he fell back into a lighter sleep, hold on to the awareness that he was in fact dreaming. Then there was the even more fascinating feeling that he could study the place and tilt the events of the dream.
“You can look around and examine the details and pick up a handful of sand on the beach,” Nolan said. “I never particularly found a limit to that; that is to say, that while in that state your brain can fill in all that reality. I tried to work that idea of manipulation and management of a conscious dream being a skill that these people have. Really the script is based on those common, very basic experiences and concepts, and where can those take you? And the only outlandish idea that the film presents, really, is the existence of a technology that allows you to enter and share the same dream as someone else.”
It was the success of “The Dark Knight” (which broke records as a home video release and now stands as the bestselling Blu-ray ever) that allowed Nolan to put his most ambitious idea on the screen. The presence of DiCaprio not only gave Nolan a major movie star, it led to changes in the film that may make it more accessible to moviegoers.
“I’ve incorporated a huge number of his ideas,” Nolan said. “Leo’s very analytical, particularly from character point of view but also how the entire story is going to function and relate to his character . . . It’s actually been an interesting set of conversations, and I think it’s improved the project enormously. I think the emotional life of the character now drives the story more than it did before.”
Critics of Nolan say that he makes frosty films with no detectable human heartbeat, just the clicks and whirls of his intricate story gears. It’s interesting, then, to consider that contributions by DiCaprio (who is coming off another dark fever dream of a movie, Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island”) and how they meshed with Nolan’s own revised view of his original “Inception” story.
“I originally wrote it as a heist movie, and heist movies traditionally are very deliberately superficial in emotional terms,” Nolan said. “They’re frivolous and glamorous, and there’s a sort of gloss and fun to it. I originally tried to write it that way, but when I came back to it I realized that — to me — that didn’t work for a film that relies so heavily on the idea of the interior state, the idea of dream and memory. I realized I needed to raise the emotional stakes. What we found in working on ‘Batman’ is that it’s the emotionalism that best connects the audience with the material. The character issues, those are the things that pull the audience through it and amplify the experience no matter how strange things get.”
Altered states and untrusted perception are recurring themes in Nolan’s films: “Memento” is about an amnesia victim; “Insomnia” (2002) presents a corrupt cop addled by lack of sleep; “The Prestige” (2006) is about rival illusionists; and in the two Gotham City films (the first was “Batman Begins” in 2005) there are no truly super-powered citizens, but the senses are blurred by fear toxins and ninja mind tricks. In all of them, Nolan put a premium on achieving the unreal on camera as opposed to in computer, which runs counter to Hollywood’s obsession with the pixel possibilities of green screen and 3-D. With cinematographer Wally Pfister (Nolan’s director of photography since “Memento”) and special effects guru Chris Corbould (the man who built the Batmobile and has worked on a dozen James Bond films), the director put a premium on an old-school approach to movie magic.
Corbould’s teams, for instance, built giant rotating hallways and a massive tilting nightclub set to film the startling “Inception” scenes when dream-sector physics take a sharp turn into chaos. One of the film’s stars, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, spent long, bruising weeks learning to fight in a corridor that spun like a giant hamster wheel.
“It was like some incredible torture device; we thrashed Joseph for weeks,” Nolan said. “But in the end we looked at the footage, and it looks unlike anything any of us has seen before. The rhythm of it is unique, and when you watch it, even if you know how it was done, it confuses your perceptions. It’s unsettling in a wonderful way . . . we want an extraordinary thing that happens in an ordinary way. That’s always been the goal.”
“Inception” does have major computer effects: Several vivid sequences show a dream metropolis in churning calamity, a city skyline seems to fold in on itself as a dream begins to lose its shape and, unlike many Hollywood versions of dream surrealism, the scene has the look of a massive mechanical failure, not a morphing, liquid calamity. Nolan’s dreams have the sharp edges of Escher, not the syrup drips of Dalí. Architecture is a major influence on the culture of the film too with dreams that are more like blueprints than poems. That speaks to Nolan’s longtime interest in architecture. A key scene in “Inception” was filmed at the architecture school at University College London, where Nolan was an English major and also met his future wife and producing partner, Emma Thomas.
There’s a temptation to frame the film as a comment on the “otherness” of modern life. These are the days, after all, of second-life movies such as “Avatar,” “Surrogates,” “Gamer” and the upcoming “Tron: Legacy,” all of which place a human consciousness into a separate being.
Nolan, though, shook his head when asked if his “Inception” is part of that cinematic conversation.
“I think ours is of an older school, ours is more of ‘The Matrix’ variety and the concepts of different levels of reality,” Nolan said. “The whole concept of avatars and living life as someone else, there’s a relationship to what we’re doing, but I think when I first started trying to make this film happen it was very much pulled from that era of movies where you had ‘The Matrix,’ you had ‘Dark City,’ you had ‘The Thirteenth Floor’ and, to a certain extent, you had ‘Memento’ too. They were based in the principles that the world around you might not be real.”
Cillian Murphy, the Irish actor who played the Scarecrow in the two Batman movies and is one of Cobb’s targets in “Inception,” said that Nolan is creating a body of work that feels somehow more mature than some of his bright- fantasy peers. “It’s the fantasy world, but it’s the one that the mind itself can create or fall into, so the audience can access it in a different way than these other movies where you go to another planet or something,” Murphy said. “It’s the place the mind goes, and it’s often very dark and always interesting.”
Cast into a strange world
The cast for “Inception” is peppered with Nolan favorites, such as Murphy, Ken Watanabe (who was in “Batman Begins”) and Michael Caine (who appeared in the director’s last three films), as well as veteran actors such as Tom Berenger whose face fits the filmmaker’s universe of grim choices and gun-metal hues. The film gives much of its prime screen time, however, to a pair of younger actors: 29-year-old Gordon-Levitt, who grew up on screen in the television comedy “3rd Rock from the Sun” and solidified his film profile with “(500) Days of Summer,” and 23-year-old Ellen Page, who was nominated for an Oscar for “Juno.” Those two play junior partners in DiCaprio’s dream team.
Sipping tea in her trailer during a break in shooting last year, Page seemed a bit overwhelmed by the set, which was housed inside the converted old zeppelin hangar. “I’ve never really seen anything like this,” she said. “It’s humbling.” It’s the same place that Nolan used for his Batman films; Arkham Asylum, the Narrows and other Gotham City landmarks are still standing, waiting for the inevitable third Batman film that will almost certainly be Nolan’s next project. That topic, though, is verboten on the “Inception” set, as is the Superman franchise that Nolan and Thomas will be trying to get off the ground in the next few years. (“I would never ask, and you shouldn’t either,” Murphy said with an expression of alarm. “He’s got enough on his plate without us getting all fanboy on him.”)
“Inception” plays to Nolan’s two proven strengths — massive scale and psychological puzzles — but Page said what makes him a singular filmmaker is that he would attempt a summer film that evokes literature and architecture in an era when other directors seem to be tilting toward a video-game aesthetic.
“There’s a tangible realism even when it gets crazy, and somehow that makes the jeopardy feel more real,” Page said. “It’s like reading a Haruki Murakami novel — it’s fantasy, but instead of feeling like some strange surreal world it feels very honest. The emotional spine of the story is there too, which is the key to his movies. There’s the big scale, but the sincerity isn’t left behind. The story is complicated but never confusing.”
Time will tell if Nolan can build a major commercial success out of his mysterious blueprints, but he has already proved to be the rare blockbuster director willing to wander the dream world of challenging cinema.
“I always find myself gravitating to the analogy of a maze,” he said. “Think of film noir and if you picture the story as a maze, you don’t want to be hanging above the maze watching the characters make the wrong choices because it’s frustrating. You actually want to be in the maze with them, making the turns at their side, that keeps it more exciting . . . I quite like to be in that maze.”
Christopher Nolan Pulls Back The Curtain On New Movie “Inception”
Posted By Taly on April 5th, 2010
At WonderCon today we got an exclusive look at footage from Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan’s mysterious new film Inception. It was basically James Bond in cyberspace, where heists involve stealing people’s dreams – literally.
We saw an extended teaser trailer for the film, which introduced us to Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, an “extractor,” or dream hacker, whose job is “subconscious security.” This is science fiction ala Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – we’re in the present-day, but a new piece of technology has changed the rules of the game. In Inception, that technology allows people to climb inside each other’s dreams.
Leonardo DiCaprio is a superagent who uses new dream-reading technology to prevent bad guy extractors from stealing ideas out of the dreams of entrepreneurs, creators, and inventors. The dreamworld corporate espionage idea works perfectly, especially because Nolan filmed the dream sequences to be as gritty and documentary-realistic as possible.
Featuring Michael Caine, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard (who is apparently “very twisted”), and Ellen Page (among others), the movie plunges us into Nolan’s richly-textured world where, as DiCaprio says, “ideas can take on lives of their own.” Because the heists and shootouts and chase scenes all take place in dreams, they feel like James Bond on just a little bit of acid – people ski across impossibly vast snowscapes, clamor down breathtaking rock faces, and (in one incredible scene) fight suspended in a space where gravity has been warped. It’s great to see DiCaprio in a psychological thriller that is about the nature of psychology itself.
During the question and answer session, Nolan talked about his struggle to get the film made. He’d been working on it for years, and only after the success of his two Batman movies was he able to convince funders to back his original story about hackers in dreamland. He explained that the movie is heavily influenced by the look of 2001, especially in a few key scenes where the laws of gravity are suspended.
He also said it was very important to him to make the dreams feel as realistic as possible – this is no Lovely Bones, with giant, candy-colored fantasies. He used 35mm film to give those dream sequences their documentary feel, and relied on his knowledge of “lucid dreaming,” a near-waking state where you control your own dreams. In fact, it sounded like Nolan had based a lot of the dream sequences on his own experiences with dreaming.
Producer Emma Thomas, who was also at WonderCon, called the film “personal,” and Nolan confirmed that he’d tried to pull back from the typical “superficial heist plot.” Though it is a heist, it has to be personal because it’s all about what’s inside people’s subconscious minds. The more we heard about how he’d conceived the film, the more intriguing it sounded to me. A heist with depth? A James Bond character who uses tech to engage in “subconscious security”? This is a summer movie that will deliver a hell of a lot more than chase scenes (though the clips we saw made the chase scenes look fantastic).
One thing that Nolan was really emphatic about was his skepticism about 3D. He said:
I have a rigorous approach to image quality. We’re thinking about 3D, but nothing today competes with large format film. I think there’s a lot of misinformation about where cinema is heading.
He remains committed to traditional film, which he rightly pointed out can create an intensely immersive experience.
So there will be no 3D Batman movies in the near future. But there will be an awesome, original science fiction film for you to enjoy this July when Inception hits theaters.
Leonardo DiCaprio Eyes J. Edgar Hoover Role In Biopic For Eastwood and Grazer
Posted By Taly on April 2nd, 2010
EXCLUSIVE: Leonardo DiCaprio is in early talks to play FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in Hoover, an epic drama that Clint Eastwood will direct and that he and Brian Grazer will produce with Rob Lorenz through Imagine and Malpaso. Talks with Leo are just getting underway, but I’m told that DiCaprio will play the lead role in the film written by Dustin Lance Black, with production to begin later this year. The project began at Universal, where Imagine is based, but is mobilizing at Warners, where Eastwood’s Malpaso has long called home, and where Eastwood is in post production on Hereafter, the film that stars Matt Damon.
Sources tell me that Imagine had been developing “the story of the beginning of the FBI” for a year when it finally showed the script to Universal, where the reaction was negative. “This is exactly what we don’t want to make,” Uni execs reacted. “It’s period, and we have lost enough money with these things.” But then Grazer got the screenplay to pal Clint (they did The Changeling and have had a personal relationship ever since), the two men met about it in mid-February, and suddenly Universal has a tough decision to make since. As a Uni exec admits, “Clint is an amazing director with an extraordinary trach record, and you can’t possibly dismiss anything he gets excited about. The first question now to ask is how much will it cost to make?” Universal’s reticence is understandable, as the studio has endured a rough run with adult-themed dramas. The film will prove a better fit at Warner Bros.
This will be DiCaprio’s first film with Eastwood. This role sounds as ambitious as his Oscar-nominated portrayal of Howard Hughes in the Scorsese-directed The Aviator. In Hoover, he takes on one of the other formative figures in 20th Century America. Hoover formed the country’s federal jurisdiction law enforcement system with the establishment of the FBI and, while he might have come in with high ideals as a public servant, he increasingly became a manipulative power broker with a closet full of his own secrets. When Hoover is depicted in films, it is usually in unflattering fashion. But I’ve heard this script described as “peeling back the curtain on the life of Hoover” with no cross-dressing claims.
