Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/798465
46 DGA QUARTERLY PHOTOS: WALT DISNEY PICTURES/PHOTOFEST; (OPPOSITE) JONATHAN OLLEY/DISNEY ENTERPRISES INC. "When you're aware of those iconic moments, you deliver in the way that is expected or change in a way to surprise the audience." — B I L L C O N D O N family element, essentially the backgrounds of the characters, more present." So what adjustments does live action allow and what does it de- mand? Like Branagh, for many of the filmmakers it has been a drive to dig deeper and reveal things previously left open to the audience's curiosity. "What is essential when you don't express characters through paint or drawing, but with live actors," says Condon, "is a type of psy- chological nuance; more knowledge when we first meet them about how they got there, and behavior that's recognizably human. You couldn't just take the original performances or a number like 'Be Our Guest' and make them work in a live-action context. I think what we did feels like the same number but it's actually very, very different." H E F I L M M A K E R S S E E M T O con- cur that when an audience encoun- ters what at least appear to be flesh- and-blood characters (even if they're actually photo-real CG), its need to more deeply understand situations increases. All worked to fill in the gaps of backstory and relationships. In Beauty and the Beast's first num- ber, "Belle," Condon worked to estab- lish the way Belle's town functions; that the boys go to school while the girls wash their clothes. He also felt it was imperative to share what the Prince/Beast had done to deserve his curse, and how Belle and her father Maurice wound up in the town where they were such outsiders. Stephen Herek's 101 Dalmatians built a boss/employee relation- ship between Cruella De Vil and Anita, and presented Cruella's ob- session over fur more fully. So, too, did Branagh seize the opportunity to fill in the blanks. "Everything that's to do with how Cinderella's character was formed had an opportunity in this live-action version," he says. "Live-action human beings could convey a presence of familial love and devotion that was going to pay off emotionally many times throughout the mov- ie. We just care differently than we do in even the most glorious of ani- mated films when they absolutely look, talk, walk and speak like us." The divide between the human element, which reads as "real" to an audience subconsciously, and the computer-generated features and augmentations has thus been a tension to manage. The essence of humanity is imperfection while the nature of computers, espe- cially when coupled with the diligent efforts of designers, is quite the opposite. To better service the live-action effort, therefore, directors have attempted to maintain the feeling of natural imperfections in a variety of their films' aesthetic components. Favreau used living scene partners, puppeteers and even jumped in himself to bolster the performance of his child actor in the green screen studio, rather than forcing him to act opposite tennis balls on sticks. The trick to visual effects, he claims, is its interactivity with the live elements, be it emotional interaction or the way light hits the subject in the plate. Favreau also contrived lens aberrations—water splashing the virtual lens and imperfect framings. "When you have a digital camera, you can capture everything per- fectly, and that's one of the tip-offs to a lot of CGI work," he says. "We would often miss the important part of the shot because that's what would really happen if you were filming this thing in the actual envi- ronment. If you're shooting for a beautiful sky, you're probably sac- rificing the foreground to silhouette. We looked at a lot of beautiful old pre-DI cinematography, like from The Black Stallion or Never Cry Wolf. So much of my input was to ugly-up the shot." Branagh approached the same idea by shooting on film instead of digital for the "under-the-skin quality" he feels it imparts, and by allowing production designer Dante Ferretti to deliberately build asymmetries into the architectural fabric of his sets, like on a door frame or underneath a balcony. But the effort also impacted his approach to performance. Branagh preferred not to rehearse much and would often use takes where he found himself caught off-guard. Inside his elegant settings, he liked to capture a human dimension that was more unguarded than expected, so often first takes were used, and sometimes even rehearsals. With Glenn Close as Cruella De Vil in 101 Dalmatians, Herek says, "It was trying to find that line between being way over the top but also keeping it somewhat rooted in reality. But Glenn is so good. She had just come off Sunset Boulevard on Broadway; she gave it a theatrical quality. I think she brought a lot of Norma Desmond and we brought in the same designer to do her costumes, Anthony Powell. So every time she made an entrance, before she even said anything—her hair, the lighting, the long ferile snout of her iconic car coming around a corner—she had a bigger-than-life quality." But while the technology could in ways be something to combat, there's no question a live-action fantasy film was dependent on it for its verisimilitude. Toward that end, Condon guided his legend- ary lighting designers Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer to utterly obsessive ends, for example, challenging them to light a lavish din- ing room as the Beast's household staff would have in an era with no electricity. "They said that most of the light would have to come from the re- flective surfaces of the dishes and the utensils and the glassware," re- calls Condon. T