Exclusive Interview: GI Joe Visual Effects Guru Greg McMurry(Part 2)

Exclusive Interview: GI Joe Visual Effects Guru Greg McMurry
(Part 2)

Share on Facebook posted 08-06-09 by Julina Tatlock

In Part 2 of our interview with Greg McMurry, Greg talks about weapons that can flatten a car like a pancake, the line between believable and realistic in visual effects, and whether CGI represents the rise or decline of the action film.

Whammo Blasters That Flip Cars Like They Were Cardboard Boxes

30 NINJAS: What are two of the coolest weapons in GI Joe: Rise of the Cobra?

GREG McMURRY: There are two major weapons in the story. One is the nanomites that are based on some fact in science, the ability to generate tiny little robots that can be programmed to work in masses. The bad guys get a hold of a weapon that can put these nanomites on things, and they can literally be programmed to eat steel or do all kinds of things and multiply, and then they are also remote controlled and can just be turned off. Then our second interesting weapon, and only the bad guys have it in our movie, is a pulse weapon. This is a machine that fires a shockwave which is so intense that if you fired it at an automobile for instance, it would just flatten it like a pancake. There are all different sizes of them; there’s a big giant one that’s used in an underwater sequence and that takes huge amounts of power to operate. Then we have pulse weapons that are pistols that are along the lines of being hit by … remember those whammo air blasters they used to have? It’s kinda like that. But these are so strong that if you hit somebody with one, the pistol size, you would just send them sailing and flying into the side of a building. Those are pretty much the two major weapons in the movie.

30 NINJAS: You pretty much want to be wearing one of those suits if someone fires one of these weapons at you.

G.M.: I think you would, and it’s less about the pulse that hits you and more about what you hit after the pulse hits you. The bad guys have one of those pulse weapons on their flying craft as well, and one of the opening sequences, what we call the “Convoy sequence” — you know, it’s funny, every time I talk about a sequence in the movie I get so excited about it. We have this whole series of action sequences in this movie, and each time someone asks me what’s my favorite sequence, I say whatever one I’m thinking about at the time (laughs). They really are so much fun. This “Convoy” thing, our guys get attacked by the bad guys from the air, and they have these pulse weapons that they can fire and that will literally just flip these heavy duty armored vehicles, just flip them over just like they were made of a cardboard box. You know, like the wind hitting a cardboard box. To me the most interesting weapons are the pulse weapons and the nanomites themselves. Which are a key item in the whole story. It’s the ultimate weapon. the nanomites become the ultimate weapon, and the arms dealer comes from a long line of people that have been selling arms to both sides for a while.

30 NINJAS: Did you model the nanomites’ behavior after any swarms of ants or anything in nature in particular, or did you feel like you were inventing it? It looks almost like a swarm in the Eiffel Tower shot that I’ve seen.

G.M.: Yeah, but I don’t know if that was on purpose. I think that’s the nature of, if you wanted to have millions of microscopic little things that are attacking something, I think that was pretty obvious to all of us that that’s just the way they would look, so I could say that we did model them after that, but I think that’s an obvious design. I think the thing that makes them unique is that it’s a machine; it’s not an animal. I think we made it look a way that was believable.

The Line Between Believable and Realistic

30 NINJAS: It becomes that line between what’s believable and what’s realistic.

G.M.: I have a great philosophy about realistic and believable. I actually think all we need to do is make things believable, not realistic. Because people, when they go to the movies, they can easily suspend their desire for something to be realistic — but you want it to be slightly believable, you know? Believability depends on how deeply you prove the technology. My philosophy is that when we create technology in movies, particularly in action and science fiction movies that have lots of crazy gimmicks in them, you only have to prove that technology one or two layers deep, you don’t have to prove it five layers deep. We don’t have to prove what the atom does, but we don’t want to make it so that at first glance it seems completely unbelievable; you want to sort of believe it, and you want to explain the technology one or two layers deep, and then you leave it alone. And that’s usually adequate for letting an audience suspend their doubt, like, “Oh, that doesn’t look good, that doesn’t look real.” Because realism is what you believe to be real. If I’d told my grandmother when she was a 20-year-old that we’d go to the Moon, she would never have believed it. The audience is willing to suspend their desire for something to be realistic as long as it has some level of believability.

John Woo vs. Stephen Sommers vs. Peter Hyams

30 NINJAS: Can you talk about the different styles and use of visual effects of directors you’ve worked with? For example, you worked on Paycheck with John Woo, and on G.I. Joe with Stephen Sommers, who must be so comfortable with visual effects given his films like The Mummy.

G.M.: I could add one more director to that and tell three distinct, different stories. Some of the early action pictures I did were pictures like Timecop, with Jean-Claude Van Damme and [the director] Peter Hyams. [Hyams] always knew what he wanted ahead of time; you know, he had a clear picture in his mind, and he was excellent at relating it to me, and I might do a few storyboards to get it down; in those days, previsualization wasn’t so easy to do. Peter and I had this sort of clear vision before we started every piece. It was almost — you know the story they always tell about Alfred Hitchcock, about how once he realized the movie, he didn’t need to shoot it [himself] if you did exactly what he told you to do? There was a little bit of that with Peter Hyams. He always knew exactly what he wanted long in advance and could describe it to the nth degree, and all you needed to do was execute it and look for those little opportunities to add a little something to liven something up. And then there’s people that discover — I think John Woo is more of a director who — well, all directors have the picture in their minds — but John Woo’s more affected by what he sees, the performance and the set, and he’s very visual and stylistic. You have to get into his mindset, and as you see where he’s sort of moving the camera around, you evolve the shot around the photography. Stephen Sommers is a guy who likes to collect lots of really fun pieces. You know, when we go to do a segment he’ll say, “It could be done like this or it could be done like that,” and a good deal of it gets put together in postproduction. We look at things several different ways, and then in post we make the final decision and a final little capper, but he’s all about collecting lots fun pieces to have and options to have during shooting.

30 NINJAS: I hear from a lot of people about how visual effects are changing films, and how they have already changed films, action films in particular in the past ten years. And not just how they’re made with fewer stunts done practically, on camera, with the actors more removed from the action, but the overall look of the final film as well. What are your thoughts on this, as a visual effects supervisor? Are you part of the rise or the decline of the action film?

G.M.: Personally, I’m a little sensitive to this topic because I think that, even in these action films, no matter how big the action gets, it’s all about the actors. I still believe that, and no matter what kind of visual effects sequence I do, I always think it’s about actors. I came to a point in my career when I worked with the director Jon Amiel … you know, we had great actors in The Core — Hillary Swank, Aaron Eckhart, Stanley Tucci — great characters, great actors that could do anything, in contrast to some other people in the movie that were “trying to act.” I learned on that picture what acting is about. John was constantly saying to the less experienced actors in that picture, “Just stop acting.” And I realized over the course of that, the importance of what actors bring to movies. We can have all the visual effects in the world — huge sequences, CGI galore — but if the actors haven’t brought something that allows the audience to identify with what’s going on, if they don’t bring that to the audience, I think you have no movie. And I’ve seen this in one of our pivotal movies that I wish I’d been involved with, last year’s Academy Award winner with Brad Pitt, Benjamin Button. I think there was a pivotal visual effects connection between actors and visual effects because the actor played the part no matter what visual effect was used. To create Benjamin Button throughout his lifespan, we made him — and when I say we, I mean the industry, because I didn’t work on the film — but I thought it was amazing when they made Benjamin Button at any age. It was always played by the same actor; visual effects were used to transform the body along with the performance into the other characters. I think it was one of the greatest achievements of visual effects in decades. Why? It maintained a performance and the continuity of a movie. Even in an action movie, the action movies that we love the most, they have the great action stars, they have movie stars, and it’s got to be about them, and we just help. We can help make them do something that they don’t normally do, do something more safely than they can normally do, but to me it’s just always about the actors.

30 NINJAS: I agree. You certainly would never believe it when the lava is coming through the geode in The Core, if the actors weren’t good. If you didn’t believe that Aaron Eckhart was about to die when he gave up his oxygen, it would have looked so dumb. The whole situation would have been entirely absurd if you didn’t buy that the actors believed what they were doing.

G.M.: The whole environment of going through rock is so extreme a concept — talk about what’s realistic and believable. It’s a really excellent point; if you put real acting in those extreme environments, then it starts making sense, how people react to it. If you just recklessly create bizarre environments and sequences, and you don’t have great story and actors involved in them, you have nothing. All the money in the world and you still have nothing.