Making Adventure the Old Fashion Way
Great story up at Wired on Nolan shunning digital effects for doing it for real. The Dark Knight is sounding better and better each week. Especially after having to deal with Lucas (yet again). (Although truth be told there were only a few places where the CGI bugged me in The Hulk and Iron Man)
A few select quotes.
“They spent weeks in preproduction working out a way to hang the stuntman from one helicopter and have a second helicopter following him with the camera,” says Wally Pfister, the movie’s director of photography. Two choppers and a stuntman on a string — all to make a comic- book hero seem as credible on film as Frank Serpico or The French Connection’s Popeye Doyle. All to make a comic-book movie speak the cinematic language of crime thrillers.
To be fair The French Connection had its share of tricks and silliness. (The car chase under the train car was sped up artificially - and looked it - plus there was no way in hell a car could catch the train in real life) Still going for more of a gritty 70’s feel is to be praised.
I loved what Nolan did in Batman Begins up to the third act where silliness and CGI ruled. It sounds like this movie is much more like the first two acts of that film rather than its third act.
Still, gritty naturalism is no small leap for the spandex genre. It’s a mood more identified with art noir and the prestige pic, the kind of cinema built to attract Oscars, not mass audiences
I think that sadly many Oscar hopefuls are going the CGI route at times as well. It’s not bad when done sparingly or in a way you can’t tell it happened. (I think many people would be surprised how much CGI work is done on most films now)
“Anything you notice as technology reminds you that you’re in a movie theater,” Nolan explains. “Even if you’re trying to portray something fantastical and otherworldly, it’s always about trying to achieve invisible manipulation.” Especially, he adds, with Batman, “the most real of all the superheroes, who has no superpowers.”
This is 100% true. It pulls you immediately out of the film and makes you involved in a kind of meta-discussion. That is you recognize the film as a film and are thinking more about how it was made and less about just being immersed in the film.
One of the reasons I like Iron man and disliked Hulk was the CGI. Both had it, but Iron Man seemed to hid it much better than the Hulk did. Still a good movie, but not a great one.
After Iron Man and Wall-E, Dark Knight is my most anticipated movie this summer.
Comment by jjohnsen — June 24, 2008 @ 3:54 pm
I think one big benefit Iron Man had was that the CGI was all about mechanical devices which is typically more believable. There are still often lighting issues (and those were present in Iron Man). But throw in human beings and our brains just have a hard time believing things because the CGI doesn’t map up to how we process other humans. And obviously we’re very evolved to process human behavior.
Comment by Clark — June 24, 2008 @ 3:57 pm
I get pulled out of a film for just about anything these days. I think that’s why I like reality programming & documentaries so much now. Although even then I’m thinking about the camera crew and editing choices and stuff.
Comment by Susan M — June 24, 2008 @ 4:02 pm
Sorry, but when I read your headline, my thought was:
You “Choose Your Own …”
We now return you to your regularly-scheduled programming.
Comment by Bull Moose — June 24, 2008 @ 4:40 pm
I love that Nolan is doing this. CGI was the biggest reason Indy sucked. If you force Lucas to do everything with stuntmen, wires and real animals then all of a sudden that film isn’t that bad. He either chooses not to do it or figures out a way to make it work so that it’s not a cartoon.
Comment by Rusty — June 24, 2008 @ 4:51 pm
Well Lucas did a lot with muppets in RotJ that wasn’t an ideal set of choices…
But in principle I agree. CGI almost makes it too easy. So that you don’t need to be creative. It thus leads to paint by number creations.
I honestly don’t know how Pixar year in and year out avoids that problem.
Comment by Clark — June 24, 2008 @ 4:58 pm
The difference is that in a Pixar film the entire world is CGI, so you don’t feel like you’re watching a cartoon on top of live action, and you don’t have actors staring off into space pretending there’s a space creature, or what have you sitting there.
Plus, for the most part Pixar characters aren’t human. There’s a documented effect—they even have a name for it—that shows the more realistic an artifical human creation attempts to be, the more humans are repulsed by it.
Comment by Brian G — June 24, 2008 @ 5:08 pm
Good point. I’d forgotten about that.
Comment by clark — June 24, 2008 @ 9:38 pm
The uncanny valley. Also known in my household as “that creepy Polar Express thing.”
Comment by William Morris — June 25, 2008 @ 8:24 am
I’m sorry, but Polar Express is creepy for reasons other than the uncanny valley.
Comment by a random John — June 26, 2008 @ 12:03 am
Polar Express definitely does have some simmering creepiness just from the plot.
BTW - Check out the Rolling Stone Review of Dark Knight.
Comment by Clark — June 27, 2008 @ 10:39 am
And the AICN reviews pour in. Please, please, please live up to the hype. I really enjoyed both Iron Man and surprisingly The Hulk. But they both were really popcorn movies. Nolan is trying something deeper. It sounds like he pulls it off. I want to believe…
Comment by Clark — June 27, 2008 @ 3:14 pm
What about this?
Comment by Fluffy — July 4, 2008 @ 8:25 am