Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1097515
28 DGA QUARTERLY PHOTO: KEVIN SCANLON F: The first time we really talked was when I interviewed you on stage at the DGA (a Guild 75th anniversary event in 2011). I studied up on all of your work and watched it all back-to-back. It was very insightful for me, not just the technology, but how a career evolves. And that you can't really look at individual films, but you really have to look at the whole body of work to see how things start in one movie and then maybe two movies later, they come to fruition. C: I've actually never done that—watched a person's entire body of work, like a binge watch. But that could be really instructional. F: In your work, especially. Because there are archetypes and themes and story points that you keep being drawn to, and even characters, and certainly technologies. You have to look at The Abyss to understand T2. And you have to look at The Abyss to under- stand Titanic and then you have to look at Aliens to understand Avatar. C: I have often said I couldn't have made Titanic a good film if I hadn't done The Abyss and I hadn't made the mistake of losing sight of where the human drama was eclipsed by the necessity for spectacle. I don't think you get spanked by an audience not liking a movie. I think you get spanked by you not liking a movie—the feeling of frustration that you didn't communicate what you wanted to. It's getting the tech in balance with the drama and the emotion. I think I was a little more in love with the visuals on The Abyss, and by the time we got to Titanic, I thought I can't do that. I've got to pick my battles. F: Well, you had so much to do on top of trying to break through in the CG space. Just the tank work and the diving work—I don't know how that can't take energy away from other aspects of filmmaking when you're dealing with so many logistical chal- lenges. C: Water almost psychologically does what it does to the body, which is to suck the heat out of the body, the energy out of your brain. You're just numb after a while. F: I try to keep as much energy focused on the task at hand. So I find I get a lot of energy and recharge from being in my en- vironment, being around my family, living at home, having reasonable hours—because these movies take so many years. The Lion King now has taken me three years. And that one starts off as an animated movie with storyboards and every way you break that out. Then, in sort of an extension of what I learned in looking at your work in Avatar, I understood through making The Jungle Book, we're working with those technologies. In [The Lion King's] case, VR as opposed to motion capture. But essentially the same thing, virtual camera… C: So you're standing all the creatures up with key frame? F: Yes. C: And then are you going in and doing all your cameras using the VR interface? F: Yes. Because I kind of see each movie as a puzzle, and I try to apply whatever technol- ogy's relevant at the time to that puzzle. In Jungle Book, we had a real kid and parts of real sets, and so it was grounded through that. The characters that were CG and the set extended upon something organic. [On Lion King], there was nothing organic at all. There were no sets, there were no characters, there's no motion capture. There's no photography at all. So we eliminated lights and cameras and sets, and we created a volume, which was not unlike when I visited you as you were doing capture for Avatar. So in Lion King, we set up the animation using the game engine Unity. We built all the sets first, and then we would go in VR to the environment. So we could actually walk around and would do scouts together, all in VR, in the real environment. C: Using headsets? F: Yeah. HMDs [head-mounted displays]. C: And how are you creating shots? F: First we would go in there with (DP) Caleb Deschanel and (VFX supervisor) Rob Legato and (production designer) James Chinlund and just scout. It's like six people, in headsets, together, and we created basi- cally a multi-player filmmaking game. And instead of just using a handheld on splines, with a screen, we used the hand controllers so we could scout within it. And then when it actually came time to film, we had a full crew in the volume. So we had a dolly grip, a camera with wheels and cranes. And so the human touch and the analog feeling of the camera movements gave the key frame animation more of an organic look. And so by creating a really robust interface that mimicked the set, even with an AD [and] a full crew. So if you walked on our set, it would look like a movie set except you were in the middle of a black box. C: There's no lights. F: Right. And then when you popped on the headset, you would see the lights. Or the skydome. And we would move that. And so craft, and the endless curiosity characteristic of the medium's pioneers past, present and future. They have visited each other's sets and learned a thing or two in the process. And Favreau has benefited from the proprietary technology that Cameron and his Digital Domain company have honed to help bring the characters and the world of Avatar's Pandora to vivid life, while wielding a few tricks of his own. Recently, the two sat down to talk tech, directorial process and the primacy of storytelling, character and emotion when paired with eye-popping VFX. The format was freewheeling, while the intent was to simply be a fly on the wall and not get in the way. The follow- ing is an edited version of their conversation.