“Then Weta essentially had to make new tools to add CGI characters and make it look like it was a NASCAR race or a sporting event. “We had extras, real sets, props,” he says. And for a massive set piece involving a competitive sport known as Motorball, the production took over a nearby high school stadium a few towns over. Rather than use the standard green screen for most of digi-FX heavy shoot, Rodriguez opted to shoot as much as humanly possible on actual sets built on the backlot of his Austin, Texas-based Troublemaker Studios. Our FX supervisor Eric Saindon told me that in Alita’s eyes alone, they had more detail there than in all of Gollum from Lord of the Rings.“ There’s a scene where she picks up a dog, and licks her face - Alita is not in that frame. There are scenes where Rosa is kissing and hand-holding … and she is not there. Technology did not get in the sway here - technology enabled. They were able to create a much more user-director, actor-centric process on the set.
Instead of one standard-def head rig to record her face, they used two high-definition cameras. “The idea was to challenge them to go beyond what they’d done for facial and performance capture. “They could do a digital scan of Rosa, but it’s like nine months before you get back results that give you the character - so it kind of is like a birthing process,” Landau says. It’s a lot like the human birthing process.” “No! The character is completely computer-generated. “A lot of people go, oh, that’s Rosa…and they just augmented her eyes,” Rodriguez adds. Once we knew we could do that, we started working with them on the whole digitial process of creating what Alita would look like.” We learned from doing Avatar that when you’re scanning someone’s facial structure that it was important to get the lower part of someone’s face right - it’s harder than you think. “We wanted all of the little idiosyncrasies that she brought in her audition to be there. “We didn’t turn over any of the designs to Weta until we cast Rosa,” Landau says.
Rordriguez Landau run down how they pushed the digital-FX envelope to make it happen.Īfter actress Rosa Salazar was cast to play the title character, New Zealand’s Weta studios digitally scanned her face and began constructing a completely computer-generated version of Alita based on Salazar’s performance. “The tech finally caught up with us!” he says.
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Now, his movie Alita: Battle Angel - about an amnesiac cyborg caught in a machine-vs.-humanity war - will make the manga’s futuristic landscape of teeming cities, killer robots and anime-eyed heroines seem impossibly, stunningly realistic. So when I had the chance to sort of grab the reins of this as a director, I wanted him to look at the finished film and go, ‘That’s the script I wrote! That’s exactly the picture I had in my head.’ Or, at least not say, ‘Ah, I knew I shoulda directed this myself!’” “But the point is, I was lucky enough to see behind the curtain about what Jim would have done if he’d directed it. “Well, Jon, then a little something called Avatar started taking up all of his time and got in the way,” the filmmaker answers, as both of them laugh in unison. “And then what happened, Robert?” asks the producer Jon Landau, who’s also on the line. Which, considering this was going to be the next picture he was going to direct …” When the light went back up, I said to him, ‘That’s fantastic! I don’t know how the hell you’re going to pull that off, Jim, but - best of luck!’ You looked at what he was aiming for and you just thought, Man … hopefully you’ll be able to actually do some of this by the time you’re ready to shoot.
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It wasn’t just the character design - I mean, it was the whole Alita world! I was working on Sin City at the time, trying to figure out how to bring that comic book aesthetic to a live-action movie. “And suddenly,” Rodriguez continues, “he unveils this 15-minute presentation with this insane artwork, voiceover narration, story concepts … all this stuff from the manga. But I’d stopped by his studio, and he says to me, ‘Oh, I gotta show you what I’m working on.’ So we go way back, and I’ve seen him do a lot of crazy, innovative things.
“I remember visiting him on the set of when he was shooting that Terminator 2 ride, trading all these ideas about how to use 3-D. “I’ve known Jim since before Desperado,” the director says over the phone, referencing his 1995 postmodern-Western/action movie. When Robert Rodriguez first saw James Cameron’s “art reel” for a live-action version of Yukito Kishiro’s comic Battle Angel Alita in 2005, he recalls his jaw hitting the floor.
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