Hollywood’s Turn Against Digital Effects - The New Yorker
JANUARY 20, 2016
Hollywood’s Turn Against Digital Effects
BY BRYAN CURTIS
Thanks to films like “Mad Max: Fury Road” and “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” elaborate C.G.I. is out and old-fashioned practical effects are in. CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY JASIN BOLAND / WARNER BROS. PICTURES / EVERETT
Oscar nominations. Find the category for visual effects. There, you’ll see two colonic reboots: “Mad Max: Fury Road” and “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” They make for pretty interesting nominees. To hear it from their directors, the special effects of “Fury Road” and “The Force Awakens” are notable for being old-fashioned rather than innovative, earthbound rather than gravity-defying. Put another way: they’ve been rewarded for sticking a bunch of practical effects onto a canvas of computer-generated imagery, or C.G.I.
Critics and fanboys have grumbled about C.G.I.’s excesses—whole cities collapsing, superheroes zooming into the stratosphere—for years. Those grumbles are now as likely to come from the directors themselves. “2015 is the year of Hollywood’s practical effects comeback,” the Web site The Verge announced in August. I think you could push this a step further. It’s as if directors—especially the reboot generation—have finally become self-conscious about C.G.I.; 2015 was the year they got embarrassed by the digital miracles of the movies.
You could hear boasting about “real” sets and practical effects in the hype around nearly every one of last year’s non-Marvel blockbusters. As the Web site Jalopnik reported of “Fury Road,” “Nearly all the stunts in the movie were ‘practical,’ meaning everything you see was done in real life with real humans and real cars.… The desert doesn’t suffer mechanical fools lightly and CGI is bullshyt.”
Last April, at Star Wars Celebration, J. J. Abrams, the director of “The Force Awakens,” got his loudest ovation when he was asked about his “retro” approach. In a pre-release documentary, his colleagues showed a message discipline that the candidates trudging through Iowa would envy. “Real sets,” the actor Mark Hamill crowed. “Practical effects.” The movie’s production designer, Rick Carter, concurred: “J. J.’s trying to make sure these movies have a physicality to them. We truly are out in a desert. A real desert.”
“Jurassic World,” a sequel to “Jurassic Park,” had forty times as many C.G.I. shots as its 1993 predecessor. But the director Colin Trevorrow successfully lobbied Universal to build a single animatronic dinosaur—an apatosaurus. The dino was made with “old-fashioned foam rubber,” one designer said, “which has been around since ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ ”
And so it went: an apatosaurus craned its neck toward Munchkinland in a tribute to Hollywood’s analog past. The cinematographer of “Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation” bragged, “There’s no digital Tom [Cruise]” in the movie’s big, get-’em-in-the-theatre shot. The director Bryan Singer posted an Instagram photo of a practical set from his next “X-Men” movie; Singer’s hashtag was #notallgreenscreen. If you opened the October 24, 2014, issue of Entertainment Weekly, you could find this sentence: “[The director Christopher] Nolan, zealous about verisimilitude, loathes bluescreen the way the Amish loathe zippers.” Why are so many directors choosing the paleo diet?
For decades computer effects lurked at the periphery of movies. In 1973, Michael Crichton used a computer shot to let us look through the eyes of a killer-robot cowboy in “Westworld.” (Naturally, “Westworld” is being rebooted). A dozen years later, a C.G.I. knight leapt from a stained-glass window, sword in hand, in “Young Sherlock Holmes.” Industrial Light & Magic created a snake-like water column for “The Abyss” (1989) and the knife-handed T-1000 for “Terminator 2” (1991).
It wasn’t until 1993, with “Jurassic Park,” that practical effects and C.G.I. came into mortal conflict. Steven Spielberg dispatched two teams to figure out how to create realistic-looking dinosaurs. One team was to use go-motion animation—a technique that dates to the nineteen-twenties—and another was to use C.G.I. Some months later, the C.G.I. group presented Spielberg with footage of a tyrannosaur marauding across the screen. George Lucas wept. The effects man Phil Tippett, who was leading the go-motion team, said, “I think I’m extinct.”
Indeed, the war was over. (When I last visited Tippett at his Berkeley studio, he was making C.G.I. wolves for the “Twilight” movies.) A director trying to get bodies in the seats would tout his big, bold, computer-generated canvas. See: “Titanic,” “The Matrix,” “Star Wars: Episode I,” “Transformers” (well, see it once), and so forth, up through the opening salvos from Marvel and D.C. brain trusts. During these years, it would have been nuts for a director to brag that his movie had rubber suits. But here was Colin Trevorrow, in 2014—when interrogated about what he’d done to the iconic “Jurassic Park” gate—taking to Twitter to reply, “The gate will be practical. Real wood, concrete and steel.”
The first reason practical effects have become a calling card is as old as Hollywood. Movies are a faddish, self-quoting business. At one time, the stark lighting effects of the German Expressionists were the visual rage. Later, it was the helicopter shot or the zoom. Any new tool, once used promiscuously, becomes a cliché. As time goes by, a director rediscovers the tool, and what was once cliché becomes an homage to a distant and more cultured time. This is what has happened to the last, pre-digital wave of effects. They are now happily vintage. “Seeing the way the technology has evolved,” Hamill said of “The Force Awakens,” “and yet keeping one foot in the pre-digital world.”
praises Stanley Kubrick’s practical sets and his trust of the audience to absorb a single image without frenzied cutting. Abrams wants to be the young George Lucas, who tried to get R2-D2 to work in the (real) desert. Michael Bay’s film-school teacher, Jeanine Basinger, once told me she read his “Transformers” movies not as C.G.I. splatter paint but as a form of Abstract Expressionism. Scoff all you want. But it makes Bay sound like he’s engaging with movie history rather than ending it.
Touting your movie’s wood, concrete, and steel is an implicit promise of restraint. I didn’t go totally wild, the filmmaker is telling the audience, not like Peter Jackson did in the “Hobbit” trilogy. (“The special effects thing, the genie, was out of the bottle, and it has him,” Viggo Mortensen complained.) Or you could read the reëmbrace of practical tools as the freedom from restraint: the director dove headfirst into the computer and ultimately found it as limiting as the tools of the eighties.
Moreover, the new reboots have rebooted practical effects. When a director makes a new “Star Wars” or “Jurassic Park” movie, he is not only revivifying a brand. He is trying to recreate the sensations of a particular period—the sound of A.T.-A.T. walkers marching through the snow, or the feeling of wonder when a child reaches out to pet a dinosaur.
The rebooters would tell you those old feelings can’t be summoned with new tools. Trevorrow explained to Wired UK that his animatronic dinosaur “drew a beautiful performance out of the actors—we couldn’t have done it with a computer.” (The apatosaurus had been mortally wounded by a rampaging C.G.I. dino—a perfect metaphor for the state of the movies.) As the producer Patrick Crowley put it, “Colin said we needed to have a working animatronic in this movie because that’s how this series of movies was built.”
That’s the rub. We’ve reached a point where directors and audiences no longer derive authenticity from what looks “real” but from what looked real in seventies, eighties, and nineties blockbusters. And real is an awfully flexible word. George Miller, the director of “Fury Road,” was hailed for sending a hundred and fifty vehicles clattering through the Namibian desert—just like the old days! But as Andrew Jackson, the movie’s visual-effects supervisor, toldfxguide, “I’ve been joking recently about how the film has been promoted as being a live action stunt-driven film.… The reality is that there’s 2,000 VFX shots in the film”—out of about twenty-four hundred shots total.
The final reason practical effects are hip again is the grubbiest: they’re a piece of the swag we call “fan service.” You asked for an animatronic apatosaurus and—like the Marvel Civil War, or Yoda swinging a light sabre—you got it.
Like the carefully doled-out teasers and featurettes, the “reveal” of practical effects is now a piece of the marketing plan. In a video released last May, just as “Star Wars” fever was cresting, Abrams allowed fans a glimpse of a single creature from “The Force Awakens”—a real creature. It had the neck of a camel, the head of a turtle, and the flowing beard of an Eastern philosopher. Cages full of chicken-aliens teetered on its stooped back. Bobbajo—as the creature would later be known—was an alien emissary “to reassure fans that [the movie] won’t be a CGI-fest,” the Independent noted. And I cheered along with the message-board people: Yippee! A thing you could touch, just like in Jabba’s Palace!
As it turned out, Bobbajo was in all of about two shots in “The Force Awakens.” He didn’t have a line. Did he add to Abrams’s garbage-picker milieu? Well, maybe a little. Did he work as a sop to us fans who demand “reality” as it was delivered at multiplexes thirty years ago—who, as The Verge’s Kwame Opam put it, are like music snobs who prefer vinyl? Absolutely. To the tune of billions. They don’t call ’em “practical” effects for nothing.
JANUARY 20, 2016
Hollywood’s Turn Against Digital Effects
BY BRYAN CURTIS
Thanks to films like “Mad Max: Fury Road” and “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” elaborate C.G.I. is out and old-fashioned practical effects are in. CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY JASIN BOLAND / WARNER BROS. PICTURES / EVERETT
Oscar nominations. Find the category for visual effects. There, you’ll see two colonic reboots: “Mad Max: Fury Road” and “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” They make for pretty interesting nominees. To hear it from their directors, the special effects of “Fury Road” and “The Force Awakens” are notable for being old-fashioned rather than innovative, earthbound rather than gravity-defying. Put another way: they’ve been rewarded for sticking a bunch of practical effects onto a canvas of computer-generated imagery, or C.G.I.
Critics and fanboys have grumbled about C.G.I.’s excesses—whole cities collapsing, superheroes zooming into the stratosphere—for years. Those grumbles are now as likely to come from the directors themselves. “2015 is the year of Hollywood’s practical effects comeback,” the Web site The Verge announced in August. I think you could push this a step further. It’s as if directors—especially the reboot generation—have finally become self-conscious about C.G.I.; 2015 was the year they got embarrassed by the digital miracles of the movies.
You could hear boasting about “real” sets and practical effects in the hype around nearly every one of last year’s non-Marvel blockbusters. As the Web site Jalopnik reported of “Fury Road,” “Nearly all the stunts in the movie were ‘practical,’ meaning everything you see was done in real life with real humans and real cars.… The desert doesn’t suffer mechanical fools lightly and CGI is bullshyt.”
Last April, at Star Wars Celebration, J. J. Abrams, the director of “The Force Awakens,” got his loudest ovation when he was asked about his “retro” approach. In a pre-release documentary, his colleagues showed a message discipline that the candidates trudging through Iowa would envy. “Real sets,” the actor Mark Hamill crowed. “Practical effects.” The movie’s production designer, Rick Carter, concurred: “J. J.’s trying to make sure these movies have a physicality to them. We truly are out in a desert. A real desert.”
“Jurassic World,” a sequel to “Jurassic Park,” had forty times as many C.G.I. shots as its 1993 predecessor. But the director Colin Trevorrow successfully lobbied Universal to build a single animatronic dinosaur—an apatosaurus. The dino was made with “old-fashioned foam rubber,” one designer said, “which has been around since ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ ”
And so it went: an apatosaurus craned its neck toward Munchkinland in a tribute to Hollywood’s analog past. The cinematographer of “Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation” bragged, “There’s no digital Tom [Cruise]” in the movie’s big, get-’em-in-the-theatre shot. The director Bryan Singer posted an Instagram photo of a practical set from his next “X-Men” movie; Singer’s hashtag was #notallgreenscreen. If you opened the October 24, 2014, issue of Entertainment Weekly, you could find this sentence: “[The director Christopher] Nolan, zealous about verisimilitude, loathes bluescreen the way the Amish loathe zippers.” Why are so many directors choosing the paleo diet?
For decades computer effects lurked at the periphery of movies. In 1973, Michael Crichton used a computer shot to let us look through the eyes of a killer-robot cowboy in “Westworld.” (Naturally, “Westworld” is being rebooted). A dozen years later, a C.G.I. knight leapt from a stained-glass window, sword in hand, in “Young Sherlock Holmes.” Industrial Light & Magic created a snake-like water column for “The Abyss” (1989) and the knife-handed T-1000 for “Terminator 2” (1991).
It wasn’t until 1993, with “Jurassic Park,” that practical effects and C.G.I. came into mortal conflict. Steven Spielberg dispatched two teams to figure out how to create realistic-looking dinosaurs. One team was to use go-motion animation—a technique that dates to the nineteen-twenties—and another was to use C.G.I. Some months later, the C.G.I. group presented Spielberg with footage of a tyrannosaur marauding across the screen. George Lucas wept. The effects man Phil Tippett, who was leading the go-motion team, said, “I think I’m extinct.”
Indeed, the war was over. (When I last visited Tippett at his Berkeley studio, he was making C.G.I. wolves for the “Twilight” movies.) A director trying to get bodies in the seats would tout his big, bold, computer-generated canvas. See: “Titanic,” “The Matrix,” “Star Wars: Episode I,” “Transformers” (well, see it once), and so forth, up through the opening salvos from Marvel and D.C. brain trusts. During these years, it would have been nuts for a director to brag that his movie had rubber suits. But here was Colin Trevorrow, in 2014—when interrogated about what he’d done to the iconic “Jurassic Park” gate—taking to Twitter to reply, “The gate will be practical. Real wood, concrete and steel.”
The first reason practical effects have become a calling card is as old as Hollywood. Movies are a faddish, self-quoting business. At one time, the stark lighting effects of the German Expressionists were the visual rage. Later, it was the helicopter shot or the zoom. Any new tool, once used promiscuously, becomes a cliché. As time goes by, a director rediscovers the tool, and what was once cliché becomes an homage to a distant and more cultured time. This is what has happened to the last, pre-digital wave of effects. They are now happily vintage. “Seeing the way the technology has evolved,” Hamill said of “The Force Awakens,” “and yet keeping one foot in the pre-digital world.”
praises Stanley Kubrick’s practical sets and his trust of the audience to absorb a single image without frenzied cutting. Abrams wants to be the young George Lucas, who tried to get R2-D2 to work in the (real) desert. Michael Bay’s film-school teacher, Jeanine Basinger, once told me she read his “Transformers” movies not as C.G.I. splatter paint but as a form of Abstract Expressionism. Scoff all you want. But it makes Bay sound like he’s engaging with movie history rather than ending it.
Touting your movie’s wood, concrete, and steel is an implicit promise of restraint. I didn’t go totally wild, the filmmaker is telling the audience, not like Peter Jackson did in the “Hobbit” trilogy. (“The special effects thing, the genie, was out of the bottle, and it has him,” Viggo Mortensen complained.) Or you could read the reëmbrace of practical tools as the freedom from restraint: the director dove headfirst into the computer and ultimately found it as limiting as the tools of the eighties.
Moreover, the new reboots have rebooted practical effects. When a director makes a new “Star Wars” or “Jurassic Park” movie, he is not only revivifying a brand. He is trying to recreate the sensations of a particular period—the sound of A.T.-A.T. walkers marching through the snow, or the feeling of wonder when a child reaches out to pet a dinosaur.
The rebooters would tell you those old feelings can’t be summoned with new tools. Trevorrow explained to Wired UK that his animatronic dinosaur “drew a beautiful performance out of the actors—we couldn’t have done it with a computer.” (The apatosaurus had been mortally wounded by a rampaging C.G.I. dino—a perfect metaphor for the state of the movies.) As the producer Patrick Crowley put it, “Colin said we needed to have a working animatronic in this movie because that’s how this series of movies was built.”
That’s the rub. We’ve reached a point where directors and audiences no longer derive authenticity from what looks “real” but from what looked real in seventies, eighties, and nineties blockbusters. And real is an awfully flexible word. George Miller, the director of “Fury Road,” was hailed for sending a hundred and fifty vehicles clattering through the Namibian desert—just like the old days! But as Andrew Jackson, the movie’s visual-effects supervisor, toldfxguide, “I’ve been joking recently about how the film has been promoted as being a live action stunt-driven film.… The reality is that there’s 2,000 VFX shots in the film”—out of about twenty-four hundred shots total.
The final reason practical effects are hip again is the grubbiest: they’re a piece of the swag we call “fan service.” You asked for an animatronic apatosaurus and—like the Marvel Civil War, or Yoda swinging a light sabre—you got it.
Like the carefully doled-out teasers and featurettes, the “reveal” of practical effects is now a piece of the marketing plan. In a video released last May, just as “Star Wars” fever was cresting, Abrams allowed fans a glimpse of a single creature from “The Force Awakens”—a real creature. It had the neck of a camel, the head of a turtle, and the flowing beard of an Eastern philosopher. Cages full of chicken-aliens teetered on its stooped back. Bobbajo—as the creature would later be known—was an alien emissary “to reassure fans that [the movie] won’t be a CGI-fest,” the Independent noted. And I cheered along with the message-board people: Yippee! A thing you could touch, just like in Jabba’s Palace!
As it turned out, Bobbajo was in all of about two shots in “The Force Awakens.” He didn’t have a line. Did he add to Abrams’s garbage-picker milieu? Well, maybe a little. Did he work as a sop to us fans who demand “reality” as it was delivered at multiplexes thirty years ago—who, as The Verge’s Kwame Opam put it, are like music snobs who prefer vinyl? Absolutely. To the tune of billions. They don’t call ’em “practical” effects for nothing.
