The production designer and then a visual effects supervisor and the core group of people just expands. And then gradually once you build the concepts, then that extends. It really starts off with just conversations with a director. And that’s the danger without having, I think, the cinematographer and the director involved all the way through, so they can keep a kind of continuity to the look.ī&a: What’s your process early on a film in terms of your relationship with the VFX supe? Do you get a chance to sit down and have long conversations with them, just like you might do with other HODs? And it did look beautiful, but it wasn’t right for the film. You can’t blame the person for doing it and making it look really beautiful. The sun is not out, it’s completely gloomy. And we said, ‘But there is no sun in this world. And it was quite beautiful, but there was a sun in the sky.
Somebody came back with a wonderful wide shot of this abandoned upturned radio mast. Also, an effects artist working on a shot in isolation might, I mean, we had this on Blade Runner, this issue about working in isolation. But I think you would say, why shouldn’t it be an extension of the main photography or main production? The VFX people then could take that as a reference and reproduce exactly the lighting and the way the light falls in the space.Ī visual journey inside the miniatures of ‘The Hudsucker Proxy’ī&a: Sometimes in the history of visual effects filmmaking, it feels like VFX has always been a very separate process. It was just a basic shape model that I could light with a moving light. But we did things like, we built a little model of a wide shot of the records library. I mean, Blade Runner 2049 is obviously one where we had the most complex visual effects work. So it was actually totally in-camera.Įven where you can’t do everything in-camera, you try and do as much as possible. But because we had built the model for the opening, I said to Joel and Ethan, ‘Why can’t we do that in-camera? We could just basically fill the stage with an inch of water and use the of models to create the city.’ Which is what we did. And it was in the budget to be an effects shot. Then there’s that shot, going over the Hudson towards the cityscape at night, which I remember was intended to be an effects shot. Roger Deakins: Yes, there were effects extensions to buildings, and the whole opening was a built model that we shot in a very old-fashioned way. I was also thinking, going back to something like Hudsucker Proxy, which in many ways is more of the old school kind of visual effects filmmaking with miniatures and then some early digital augmentation. So you have those conversations with the effects artists, and then you find a way to do both, to make it work for both teams really.ī&a: Yes. Because you put a bluescreen there, it’s like, okay, how are you going to light it? Because basically the interior plane is being lit by what’s reflecting in from the sky. There you get the whole discussion about, ‘Okay, what’s outside?’ I mean, I’ve got a real revulsion of bluescreen, especially a situation like that. And then you get specific challenges, like on Unbroken with Angelina Jolie, filming in the bomber on stage because obviously we couldn’t be flying. Roger Deakins: Well, most films I’ve worked on really have been as much as possible in-camera. I was going back through your filmography thinking, what for you was the first film where you really came up against a lot of visual effects challenges? Deakins on the set of ‘Blade Runner 2049’ with director Denis Villeneuve.ī&a: I did want to ask you about your interaction with visual effects. Like, obviously, other people’s challenges that you might not have fully appreciated. When you’re on a film you’re so intensely into your own world and there’s a lot of things that are incidental that you miss. Wonderful.ī&a: I also like that even when you interview people you’ve actually worked with on a film, you seem to learn new things from them about the actual production. For us, it was a wonderful way to keep in touch with people we knew, but also to meet people we’d never met. Then the pandemic came along and it just expanded. We thought we were going to talk to people that we knew and work with, and they would talk about different aspects of filmmaking. It started off as an extension of that in a way. We do a little website where people can ask questions. Roger Deakins: No, it’s my wife James’ idea.
B&a: Why did you start the podcast? Was it related to the lockdown?
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