Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1097515
78 DGA QUARTERLY have a political point of view. We thought, it'd be really interesting to put a character called Captain America in confl ict with his country. He has to tear down the system in order to move forward. A: Marvel and Kevin, specifically, never get more excited than when you come in and tell them something they haven't thought of. They do a lot of thinking about what these movies can be. J: I think we probably are the directors who skewed the most away from the for- mula. I collected comics in the '80s, when the original mythology started to get de- constructed. That was compelling to me, tearing down characters from the golden age, making them human, putting them in the real world, the world I understood. The artwork and lighting started to get edgier, the stories were getting grittier. So everything we've done is a deconstruc- tion. Every story tears apart the last story, until you get to where we kill half the char- acters. Q: Certainly that was a big reveal in In- fi nity War. How do you handle the secrecy element of these movies? J: Keep the amount of people who know what you're doing, and what the actual script is, exceedingly limited. Most peo- ple have scripts that are redacted or fake. When people don't have information, they don't have to misdirect. They simply don't have it. With actors who have to do hours and hours of interviews, that's especially true. A: Some actually found out [their charac- ters died] the day we were shooting it. J: Because it never existed in script form. We had one iPad that had the full script from start to finish, and it was secure, locked, and could be wiped remotely if we ever lost it. A : A l s o, b e c a u s e i t w a s s u c h a l a r g e ensemble, many of the characters were only involved in a specifi c portion, so they CONTINUED FROM PAGE 43 F: That's right. C: But if you're starting with something extraordinary, you actually try to do the opposite, which is to have the mundane artifacts of photography come in and remind you that this is supposed to have been shot by a camera. With Avatar, I wanted people to feel like we went to Pandora. And we ran around in the jungle, using handheld cameras and we actually shot the stu that we saw. And so lens fl ares or little pop zooms, almost border- line documentary. F: The problem is most people notice bad CG. The best CG is CG you don't even know you saw. And that's happening more and more with fi lmmakers who are becoming more and more sophisticated. So as I go out to the theater now, I no longer have the aversion to CG in its execution. The DGA's Support of New Technology F: I like to see what people are coming up with because it's fascinating to me and for the aesthetic of the innovation. But to be relevant to a wider audience, you've got to pair it with fi lmmakers. And I think for new fi lmmakers, the sooner you can fi nd a way to have an understanding of things that others might not, you give yourself some market position by familiarizing yourself with technology. The DGA does Digital Day, which I think is great to introduce new fi lmmakers to new technologies. And the tech innovators are looking for people to take what they've innovated and pair it up with storytellers. Because unless you see somebody use it to tell a story, it's not going to be relevant to everybody. And the Guild's been really helpful also for us because a lot of the workfl ow of these new productions means that, like, when I'm working on Mandalorian, I want to make those fi lmmakers partners with me early on. So as I'm trying to teach them about the technology, I'm also trying to fi nd out what their vision is for each episode. And I want to partner with them early on and then have them come back later after we've built all the resources around their vision, and then make that available to them later. It's nice that the Guild is open to evolving and understanding that so they can accommodate the new techniques and still remain relevant going into the next phase of our industry. C: First of all, the DGA does a great job. Digital Day is just one example of helping with this kind of knowledge dissemination and mentoring. We talk about passing on knowledge, but what's happening is the early adopters, the young directors coming in, they're cutting their teeth on stu that we had to learn after we already knew how to direct a movie. F: I was a native to AVID in my fi rst time directing. C: I still have the scars from the guillotine splicer. [laughter] People who come from photo chemistry and come from the physi- cal world of cameras and lighting need to teach people who've never done that, and what the constraints are. Because those constraints, those kind of real-world artifacts [need to be created artifi cially]— because there's no lens and no lens fl are unless you want to put one there; there's no camera vibration unless you decide to put it there; there's no raindrops on the lens; there's no air-water interface that you get from a splash housing if there's no splash housing. If you've never been out in the world physically shooting and you're coming up in a CG environment as an animator or a shot developer or virtual lighter, I think we need to not just teach directors the e ects. You need to teach the e ects people real- world photography and those motifs so they can do their job better. F: And the director is the one who has the opportunity to create that culture. And I think also, as technologies arise, it's always easier to try to create a new model. And I think it's important for us as directors, not only for the Guild, to fi gure out how to be relevant in that world. But we also have to impress upon the people that we're work- ing with how important the Guild is. Things like creative rights have to evolve over time. Just because the nature of fi lmmaking has changed—[and] the nature of our relationship creatively to that end product—the spirit of that has to remain. And we have to make sure that those we work with understand that cre- ative rights are important. ¿