Doug Liman Blog: Mountains, Cliffs, and CGI — Envisioning the Moon » 30ninjas

Doug Liman Blog: Mountains, Cliffs, and CGI — Envisioning the Moon

Share on Facebook posted 09-10-09 by Doug Liman

Simon Kinberg was back last week. I actually got him all the way to the east coast, but then I couldn’t get him the last 140 miles to Martha’s Vineyard. So I came into the city and we basically finished the draft of the Moon project. We’ve come up with set pieces on the Moon that I have no idea how I’m going to film but, if we can pull off what’s on the page, will probably be the most dynamic film I’ve ever made. So before we even turn in the script,I’m having meetings about special effects and trying to assemble a visual effects team.

There’s two different ways visual effects are handled for movies of this scale. The first is that you hire a visual effects supervisor, who’s your own person and he’s on your payroll, and he sends the shots out to various houses based on his sense of who can do the best job and who can do it for the best price. That’s what I’ve done on all of my movies up until now. But there’s also a methodology where you hire one of the big houses and they assign to your movie a visual effects supervisor who’s on their payroll. And he then funnels all the work to that house. Kevin Elem, who was my visual effects producer on Mr. & Mrs. Smith and Jumper, coordinated meetings about Moon in the spring with Digital Domain, ILM, and Sony Imageworks. Producers like Ken are more managerial than a supervisor, who you’re hiring more for their creativity than their ability to actually get it done for a price. And so I’m exploring a couple of different options for visual effects on Moon, picking up the conversations with ILM and DD, in case we go that route, while also starting meetings with supervisors we might hire directly instead.

The reason I’ve triggered this visual effects exploration is that I’m really excited about the progress we’ve made on the script. It’s not one of those movies where we travel to the Moon, we land, and we stay in one place. It’s more like Eiger Sanction or Into Thin Air. It’s a journey across the surface of the Moon to the mining site, and then there … I don’t wanna ruin the story, but there’s another aspect of the journey that they are compelled to go through. When we were meeting in the spring, the whole topography of the moon and how we designed the sequences was a little like chicken and the egg: Which comes first? Do we get the topography of the Moon and make like a 3-D model of it and figure out what action and drama takes place on that topography? Or do I make up certain action that requires a sort of topography and then create that topography on the Moon? Once I sat down with Simon, it was clear that the action in the script all takes place to further character, so we therefore need certain topography for each of the sequences to make the action relevant from a character point of view. And so I actually know exactly what I need now. I know what kind of mountains I need, what kind of cliffs.

When you start a film, there are so many unanswered questions that it’s almost like staring at a Sudoku with not enough information to even start. And then at some point you fill in a few boxes and then suddently you can fill in all the other boxes. And with Simon, I feel now we’ve crossed that threshold and filled in enough of the Sudoku boxes that when we had a meeting last week with the two line producers on the film, Mari Jo Winkler (who did Fair Game) and Jeffrey Chernov (who did Star Trek), we suddenly went from abstractly talking about the film to saying very specifically, here’s how we can actually accomplish the insane sequences that are in this movie. It really was like a Sudoku — there are things in this film that are otherworldly, because they do take place in another world, but the tone of this film is as gritty and real as The Bourne Identity. It’s not fantasy, so how do we make the experience on the Moon seem real to audiences — as real as Matt Damon’s going to France felt to audiences? Well, for that we just went to Paris, but the decision we made last week is that, because what we’re doing on Moon is so extreme, we have to embrace computer-generated scenery, computer-generated scenes, à la Avatar. And basically we’re banking on the belief that the technology is just going to improve over the course of the film so that it will look as realistic as it would if we went up there and shot it on location.

I’ll post more later this week on what is probably our most important script decision yet.