Doug Liman Blog: What I Learn From Sherlock Holmes, My Dear Ninjas

Share on Facebook posted 12-26-09 by Doug Liman

I just wrote about going to the after party of the Sherlock Holmes premiere but I wanted to talk a little about the film. I love the way Guy Ritchie moves the camera, I like a moving camera and it’s like his camera’s on wings and tonally for the movie it was spot on and in a way it really complimented Robert and Jude’s performance. I have an incredibly short attention span and in my movies I try to inject as much energy as I can so I really respond to other filmmakers, like Danny Boyle and Guy Ritchie, who also do that. It’s not subtle but it is full of energy and really quite fresh. The script for Sherlock was full of holes but Robert and Jude were so great that it just didn’t matter. When I watch a movie, I tend to lose myself in the movie. I’m not analyzing it as I watch (for the most part).

When the film ends and the lights come up, then the filmmaker and critic in me come out. Suddenly I’m asking questions about the plot holes – and more importantly – I’m asking myself do they matter, did they hurt the enjoyment of the movie. And if they didn’t, what can I learn from that. The critic in me dwelled on the visual effects, which were easy to pick out. I don’t think it mattered for the story but it matters to me as a filmmaker because I would like to know why the effects didn’t feel more real.

When it comes to visual effects, there are certain tones in movies where it’s ok that you can tell it’s fake but in my Moon project, (now called Argonauts) I need everything to look 100% real and it’s got to look way more real than Guy Ritchie’s London looked so I come out of that movie thinking, what is it? It could be a stylistic choice, because the tone of the film is cartoonish so it could be that you stylistically choose to reinforce that it’s not real. I shot things in Mr. & Mrs. Smith to make it not feel real so that you would feel comfortable laughing at a husband and wife beating the crap out of each other. That’s a legitimate filmmaking tool. For Sherlock, it could also be that they didn’t have enough money or time for the visual effects.

Visual effects is a constantly evolving world — the players change, the technology changes. And not just when revolutionary films like Avatar come along. So as I get ready for my next film, I will immerse myself in specifically what happened in their process, and how can I apply that learning to my film. Some shots looked 100% real but some were not and I need to understand what was the technical difference.

You can’t always answer why one visual effects shot looks more real than another. We had a sequence in Mr. & Mrs. Smith that I ended up throwing out because we could not make the effects look real and we had these debates because I, like Guy Ritchie, like a very active camera. I’m usually carrying my camera on my fast moving body but he seems to have it strapped to motorcycles or airplanes or whatever. On the sequence that we threw out in Mr. & Mrs. Smith it took place in the mountains but we shot it on a soundstage and I used a camera crane that could only be used on a sound stage and is fundamentally and physically different than how you would shoot if you were on the side of a mountain and it could just be that the audience somehow knows that a camera couldn’t move that way if they were really on the side of a mountain, so the filmmakers and actors must not be in the mountains and it must be fake. You can look at any given frame and think it looks real but there’s something about the lighting or some other subtle cue that the audience picks up on that’s not technical — there’s nothing technically flawed — but emotionally, they know there’s something fake.

There’s a sequence in Holmes involving an under construction Tower Bridge and it is obvious that the bridge is computer generated. It could be that no matter what they do, it’s going to look computer generated because we know the bridge is not under construction, it already exists, it’s already been built. In I Am Legend, for instance, they destroy The Brooklyn Bridge very realistically so what is it that makes one sequence look more real than the other? You could put those two sequences side by side and even if they use the same technician using the same techniques, the difference between it looking real or not could be completely psychological. Could it be that we’ve all seen enough destruction of buildings, like the Twin Towers, to easily believe that they could destroy The Brooklyn Bridge but we can never forget that London Bridge is not being built by Warner Bros? Somehow I buy one more than the other and the reason I’m obsessing is because I’m about to embark on a movie in which the vast majority of the shots will have a visual effect in them (probably two-thirds of the shots) and I want them to look real. There are over a hundred visual effects shots in The Bourne Identity, which no one can pick out, so it’s not as if I don’t have experience of making visual effects look real. But with Argonauts (my Moon movie) the audience is clearly going to know that I didn’t really shoot this film on the moon but I still want to make them believe that I did.