Exclusive Interview: Ninjas Claw at the Truth With Wolfman and Captain America Director Joe Johnston

Share on Facebook posted 02-17-10 by Julina Tatlock

One main reason I’m such a fan of Joe Johnston is that he makes visually fantastical films while never losing sight of a clear, entertaining story line with characters that ring true. In Part 2 of my exclusive interview with Joe, I talked to him about the combination of VFX and practical effects, the overuse of CG in filmmaking, and his dealings with Universal during production of The Wolfman. Read Part 1 here.

Wild Fantasy

30 NINJAS: You’ve spent your career bringing wild fantasy to life for movie fans, but recently in interviews, and actually during this conversation today, you’ve talked about the importance of the “practical effects” and not letting the CGI get out of hand or leave the grounded reality of the story. Do you have the same concerns for Captain America?

JOE JOHNSTON: I always want to ground it in reality, no matter what the film is, but I’m sworn to secrecy on Captain America, and I can’t really talk about it beyond saying that we’re in preproduction, moving forward, and we got a great draft of the script. The second draft of the script, from Chris Markus and Stephen McFeely, is fantastic. But, you know, it’s always important to ground it in reality. I think the film that points out the thing we didn’t want to do is Van Helsing. It was so full of CG characters, and you knew they were all CG characters. Even when they are interesting characters, with cool plot twists and relationships, it just becomes eyewash after a while. It’s too much of the CG thing. What I really didn’t want was to have a CG werewolf running around killing people. I just feel like, whether the audience recognizes it or not, they subconsciously [disconnect]; it lessens the attention a little bit, and the stakes are not as important. I wanted the Wolfman to feel like he weighed 240 pounds and he stood six foot eight, and he could pick someone up and throw them or he could rip somebody’s head off — but he can’t jump 60 feet through the air and land on a rooftop; he has physical limitations. You aren’t going to kill him unless it’s with a silver bullet, but he is vulnerable and he doesn’t step outside the laws of physics. That was really important to me; to keep the CG nature of it confined to the transformations, which is probably one of your next questions.

When I came on this picture three weeks from photography I recognized that there were things that I was going to be able to do from the beginning to the end, things I was going to be able to control, and things that I had to rely on postproduction for. I decided that since Rick Baker was doing the makeup — you know, nobody does this stuff better than Rick. He shows in American Werewolf in London how effectively he can do a transformation using foam rubber and mechanical devices, stretching skin and all that kind of stuff. But in order to make that happen you [need time]. I had to sit down with Rick and just say, “OK, in this transformation, here’s what I want to have happen, I want the snout start to grow and the fangs to come out here.” We had to determine that stuff up front so he had time to go off and build it so it’s ready for production. There was just no way that I could devote that kind of time [to it] and [I didn’t want] to give Rick the kind of restrictions that he would [face in order] to be ready. So I decided to basically shoot just Benicio, in the sequence where he’s strapped in to a wheelchair and he transforms, and I chose to shoot him with markers on his face and on his hands (which is just little pieces of tape) and decide in postproduction what I wanted the transformation to be. That was really my main reason [for using CG]; it gave me so much more flexibility to determine later, when I had the luxury of post, exactly, “OK here’s what happens in this shot, then it evolves into this.” I wanted the transformation to go beyond just the physical outer structure of the skin. I wanted colors to change, and I wanted textures to change. I wanted it to get wet like he was sweating, and I wanted hair to grow. I wanted all the ingredients and all the different the aspects of what a transformation can be to be combined in the shots, and I just felt like the best way to do it was CG.

The Luxury and the Risks of Post

30 NINJAS: You talk about the luxury of post. I’ve talked to a number of directors who have opened up about how a director can lose control of the film because visual effects take so long that it can test the patience of the studio. There are stories of whole parts of movies that have been essentially thrown out because of a lack of faith that things will come together since you don’t see all the elements all together until the very end. It’s an expensive and time-intensive process. Did you come to a point with Universal where you thought they were losing faith? I’m trying to think of a way to phrase this question so you actually give me an answer …

JJ: (laughs) Maybe I’ll give you an answer that you don’t understand either.

30 NINJAS: (laughing) Well, there you go. I guess every creative process is only really good if there is a certain amount of back and forth. Chris Weitz actually blogged on 30 NINJAS very openly about New Line cutting part of the Golden Compass, which was (as you know) ultimately incredibly successful, but he is still disappointed and I get the sense almost heartbroken that they weren’t more patient and didn’t let him continue the visual effects and allow him to attain his vision. Did you reach that point where you were nervous that they were going to ask you to pull back on your vision or the visual effects?

JJ: Well, you know, it did happen, but it actually happened in preproduction and in production. There was this longer sequence after his second transformation where he goes and all kinds of things happen and it looked expensive, read expensive on the page, and we determined we couldn’t afford it. So we scaled it back and then that was some of the stuff that, when we went back for our reshoots, we added to. I’ve seen this happen again and again; almost on every project that I’ve done. Something looks expensive in prep and you scale it back [before you shoot the movie], but then you cut the movie together and you realize, “you know, gee we needed that.” It’s always cheaper to do it the first time rather than remount the production, go back and do it a second time. It always costs you so much more. But I am really a firm believer in having someone on the other side of the fence who is responsible for the corporate investment in the film. The people in the studio who are putting up the 100 or so million dollars should be the ones who control the final cut. I think that when you give a filmmaker, in the studio system where you’re talking about these kinds of movies and these big tentpoles, when you give a director final cut, I think it can be a recipe for disaster. I think that a director will find things that are sacred to him that mean nothing to an audience. Sometimes it works both ways; sometimes a director, because there’s a certain amount of pain or dissatisfaction with getting the scene, will be willing to throw it out. I am one of those directors who would gladly throw anything out that does not improve the story or improve the filmgoing experience. It sometimes takes me a while to come to that point, and it’s painful, but ultimately you have to come to understand that as brilliant as you think a scene is, if it means nothing to the audience, if it’s bringing the movie down, if it’s confusing to people, you have to be willing to dump it.

The great thing that happened on The Wolfman is that we hired Walter Murch to come in and recut the picture after a year of postproduction. Dennis Virkler had done a great job of laying the foundation of the cut, but we had reached a plateau where we weren’t making any changes, and the studio wanted us to do this and do that and we were sort of reluctant to cut very deeply. We brought Walter Murch in — you know Walter is one of the three greatest living editors today if not, in my opinion, the best. But he came in, and you know, he’s walking into a situation where he wasn’t there when we shot anything, nothing is sacred to him, and he took a completely fresh look at it and said, “Gee, I think you need to lose this, this, and this, and chop this out, and I would switch these scenes around so this one comes first, this makes more sense when you put this over here.” And it’s like, “Oh my god, how can you do this, you know this is not going to work,” because we’ve been living with it for so long; we had it our minds that this movie needed to be structured the way it went together. Walter is coming in basically with a filmmaker’s eye and no baggage whatsoever, and says this is what I would do, and ultimately it made the picture a lot better. We threw out some stuff that I had thought was great material but that the movie didn’t need, and the end results in a more entertaining product. Walter has this theory that if there’s a scene in the movie that you think is the hinge, the linchpin of the whole plot and the movie can’t live without it, then take it out. You may put it back in, but when you stitch the pieces back together it will tell you what works and what doesn’t work.

30 NINJAS: You see the weaknesses of the rest of everything else.

JJ: Absolutely, and the strengths as well.

30 NINJAS: Yeah, right.

J.J.: You may find out that a scene that you thought is not very important, suddenly, with that main scene gone, gains importance and meaning, and it encourages you to try surgery that you wouldn’t normally do, that you wouldn’t normally attack.

And you know, I didn’t go looking for Walter, because I assumed he had other things to do, but when he said he was available and looking for a job, I said, “Hell, if Walter Murch wants to work on your movie you hire him.” I’ve known Walter for 20 years or so, but I’ve never worked with him, we’re both Lucas film people/northern California people. It was good, we had a lot of fun, and the movie was the beneficiary of that relationship.

Now It’s: Honey, I Disemboweled The Gypsies

30 NINJAS: Most of your films don’t portray this level of violence or gore. Can you talk a bit about your experience working on your first R-rated movie?

JJ: I had read an older draft of The Wolfman, from probably five years ago — way, way back. It was much more violent than this one, much gorier, and the violence seemed gratuitous to me. It seemed like it was violence for the sake of violence, and while there was a very similar story underneath all that violence, it’s almost like you couldn’t get to it. You couldn’t dig the interesting story out because there was just so much blood and gore on top of it. I passed on that even though I really wanted to do The Wolfman, because it was my favorite of the Universal monster classics from 1941. But I just said, this is not the same version of The Wolfman I want to do. Before I came along in 2008, David Self had been hired, and David took the original script by Andrew Kevin Walker and completely reworked it. He made the violence and the blood much more organic to the story, and gave it much more meaning, and he really pumped up the character story and brought the relationships much more to the surface, making them more interesting. So when the studio called me in February of 2008, actually my agent called me, and said, “Hey, Universal is changing directors, would you be interested in doing The Wolfman?,” I said, “I read that years ago and I don’t think it’s the one I want to do.” He said, “Well read this,” and I read it and I said, “You know, my god this guy addressed every issue I had with the script!” So I went in to meet with the producers and the studio.

I have a theory about doing this kind of [meeting] and that is: Do not tell them what they want to hear. You don’t go in and say, “Oh yeah, I can do the movie, I can do it on schedule, I can stay on budget, I can deliver a blockbuster film,” because they’re primed to hear that and there are probably other candidates who came in and told them exactly that. I said, “I don’t know, guys; this is tough, you know. I don’t think you can do it in 80 days. This budget seems a little light,” and I basically tried to let the air of their balloon a little bit. I think that they recognized that I was being realistic about it, in the same way they were. And I might have given them the impression I knew what I was talking about, so they hired me.

30 NINJAS: Good for them.

JJ: (laughs) Hey, what the hell, good for me too.