VISUAL EFFECTS
Five decades after the original Planet of the Apes earned an honorary makeup Oscar for transforming humans into chimpanzees, War for the Planet of the Apes relied on far more sophisticated technology to transform star Andy Serkis into his chimpanzee character, Caesar. Senior visual-effects supervisor Joe Letteri and his team weatherproofed motion-capture equipment so that Serkis and his simian co-stars could film on location opposite their castmates, rather than having to re-create their performances in the isolation of a soundstage. “Everything that you see has the spontaneity and the drama that you get from real filmmaking,” explained Letteri. “We wanted this to be less a science project than just making a film.”
Star Wars: The Last Jedi visual-effects supervisor Ben Morris found himself using different tools to humanize the film’s villain Snoke (also played by Serkis), who had made a brief appearance as a zombie-like hologram in The Force Awakens.
“[Director] Rian [Johnson] wanted the audience to respond to him as human, not as an alien. Snoke is disfigured for reasons we don’t know. He has terrible paralysis and scoliosis in his body. So we went through a complete redesign,” said Morris, who layered his visual effects on Serkis’s motion-capture performance. To show his humanity, Morris leaned into Snoke’s mortal characteristics, such as the signs of aging—loosening skin, age spots, a dry scalp. “He’s got this nasty, scratchy stubble on his chin, horrible dry, cracking lips, and he spits when he gets very angry. He’s got these horrible, rotting old teeth.
“One of the highlights for me was when audiences thought Snoke had been created with practical makeup.”
PRODUCTION DESIGN
Water was the theme for Guillermo del Toro’s whimsical romance The Shape of Water. Though the film did not have a huge budget, the filmmaker was insistent on creating one underwater sequence, in which Elisa (Sally Hawkins) floods her bathroom and embraces her beloved amphibious creature (Doug Jones).
To execute del Toro’s vision, production designer Paul Austerberry created a section of Elisa’s bathroom out of waterproof materials—aluminum, auto-body Bondo, epoxy paints, and bathroom tiles—and created light fixtures that would work underwater. The production crew built a tiny (by studio standards) water tank, using leftover steel and plywood from an abandoned TV set, and put in a pool liner. The waterproof bathroom was submerged in the tank, where Hawkins and Jones filmed the scene. “There was something lovely about having the real hair floating around,” said Austerberry. “It was a really emotional moment, that sequence, because one of the earliest concept drawings that helped sell the movie was the two in embrace underwater in this bathroom. It’s something we wanted to do for real.”
COSTUME DESIGN
Beauty and the Beast costume designer Jacqueline Durran found herself combining New Age and old-school filmmaking techniques for Disney’s highly anticipated live-action adaptation. Durran and her team labored over the design and construction of the Prince’s costume for the ballroom sequence, handstitching 20,000 Swarovski crystals onto his custom-embroidered blue coat, which took five days to fit. It was only after the costume was completed that the production team decided to computer-animate the beast—meaning Durran had to hand over the meticulously crafted costumes, pattern pieces, and fabric swatches so that every millimeter of his clothing could be digitized.
Mark Bridges’s costume design for Phantom Thread was also bifurcated, though in different ways. The central character in the 1950s-set thriller is fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock, who creates high-end couture, so Bridges pulled double duty: designing period-appropriate costumes to telegraph the story and character trajectory and creating an entire spring collection for the designer to present inside the film.
“I had to develop another designer’s sensibility for a brief time, as well as do what I usually do—illustrate a story with clothes,” said Bridges, who based the house of Woodcock’s spring collection on research. “I thought, What do you do with a spring collection for a British designer who is a little dark? That’s why the florals are black florals with dark purple and deep-blue flowers. A spring collection in London means woolens and velvet, which is typically a winter fabric but is used on that gala gown. One of the looks has an accessory of an umbrella.”
CINEMATOGRAPHY
To give Dunkirk audiences the sensation that they were experiencing battle from the air, cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema enlisted aeronautical and lens engineers to create tools that would allow him to “utilize the Imax cameras as though they were GoPro cameras.” One especially helpful rig featured a long lens “that was put in front of the camera, almost like a snorkel, so that you could actually make pans and move around the cockpit”—mimicking the motions of a human neck, so that the audience, like the pilot, could see to the left and right of the plane. “You could follow other planes in a dogfight, through the gunfire. . . . The audience would understand the specifics and the difficulty of what was happening in battle.”
The Shape of Water’s director of photography, Dan Laustsen, relied on an old theater technique to create the opening and closing underwater sequences.
“We shot dry for wet, which means there’s no water at all,” he explained. “The way we did that is we filled a film studio with a crazy amount of smoke—so heavy it’s not pleasant to breathe in. And instead of having film lights, we had film projectors projecting a little bit of moving light [right] into the smoke so it looks like you’re actually below water. And then the actors were hanging on wires. You shoot at high speed, at 48 frames [per second], so the body and hair are moving a little slower than normal. We also had wind machines to blow the costumes and hair a bit.
“Money was an issue, but we also did it this way for artistic reasons—it’s very difficult for actors to perform in water; it isn’t good sound for mikes. Actors have to close their eyes and come up for air. We didn’t want too much realism. . . . We wanted to start the movie with a little bit of romance.”
Even though Hollywood has the capabilities to turn back the time machine from climate-controlled soundstages, the cast and crew of the World War II drama Mudbound opted to film in the Deep South—in authentic sharecropper and tenant houses from the late 1800s, and on an active sugarcane farm—during the peak of summer.
“So much of Mudbound is about man’s relationship to the land and the elements—how we seek to control nature but are powerless against it,” said Rachel Morrison, the film’s director of photography, who became the first female cinematographer to receive an Oscar nomination. “This movie is about the sun beating down and what that does to one’s spirit, so we embraced the harsh lighting conditions when it was called for. But we contrasted that with the beauty of magic hour and dusk over the fields to underscore the endless battle for something greater, or bigger than us, that’s fueled by moments of hope and inspiration.”
SOUND DESIGN
Ren Klyce, sound designer for Star Wars: The Last Jedi, had been looking to the sky for audible inspiration while thinking of what the franchise’s new bird creature, the porg, would sound like. “I experimented with different bird sounds, but those fell flat,” he said, “so we ended up going down to the chicken coop at Skywalker Ranch, of all places, and we recorded one chicken for about three minutes.” While listening to the recording, he found a moment that he liked, slowed it down, and layered it onto a human birdcall and a track of doves cooing to create the porgs’ signature sound.
EDITING
Baby Driver director Edgar Wright looped longtime editor Paul Machliss into the making of the film early, meeting with him a full four years before filming to compile a playlist together that would inspire the script and drive the plot. The soundtrack was so integral to the story that Machliss worked on set during filming, to cut in real time and ensure that everything from the camera movements to the car hits was precisely synched to the beat of the music.
“With the exception of one song, we were working with popular music that we could not alter or speed up or slow down,” said Machliss of the soundtrack, which spans everything from the Beach Boys to Young MC. “We were challenged to make sure each sequence fit in the time frame of the song, as well as went to the cadence of each beat.”
Dunkirk editor Lee Smith traveled alongside director Christopher Nolan during filming of the sweeping World War II epic. Each Friday, he assembled a different edit to screen, after which he would make hundreds of changes, major and minor, to the war drama, which interweaves time sequences, battle perspectives, and practical effects in a nonlinear narrative.
“It could have very easily been a conventional tale that played out in linear fashion, but I think it would have felt like a war movie you had seen before,” said Smith. “The soldiers experience it over a week, the boat over a day, and the planes over an hour, basically. They are all fighting the same war, just on different machinery.”
All told, Smith estimates that he edited together 10 to 15 full-length variants. Shooting on location was a perk for Smith, even when stuck in the editing bay. “It makes my job more fun because I’m looking at real photography, and the actors are responding because it’s real.”
MAKEUP
Gary Oldman has said he would not have taken on the role of Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour had he not had makeup maestro Kazuhiro Tsuji by his side. Tsuji spent about four months conceiving of how he would transform Oldman, all chiseled lines and angles, into Winston Churchill, all circles and curves.
“It’s about playing with the proportions, because Winston Churchill had a round head and bug eyes, with eyes placed on the head farther apart,” said Tsuji. “Gary has a more oval head and eyes closer and deep-set. The first thing that we did was take a life cast of Gary. On that life cast, I started to sculpt the likeness of Churchill. If I simply made Gary’s head wider, even proportionally, Gary’s eyes will look closer. I had to figure out what will be the good things to add to make Gary look like Churchill without making it look like someone wearing a mask.
“I sculpted partial pieces—for example, a nose tip, and chin, and the cheeks,” said Tsuji. “I tried to make them thin enough so he can move with it.”
SCORE
For Phantom Thread, director Paul Thomas Anderson and Jonny Greenwood reversed the order of their usual collaboration, with Greenwood composing music while the film was still in pre-production. Inspired by the 1950s setting, Greenwood used an upright rehearsal piano and strings, rather than rely on computer demos and click tracks, which weren’t available in that time period. Anderson suggested Nelson Riddle and Oscar Peterson as references, and told Greenwood that the music should sound “very British”—which Greenwood took to mean “buttoned-up emotion, sincerely romantic, but not too demonstrative. Some of the music is influenced by bell ringing too, which I guess is quite an English thing.”
Time was of the essence for Dunkirk, so much so that Christopher Nolan included a recording of a windup pocket watch with the script he sent to composer Hans Zimmer.
“We declare ourselves right away,” said Zimmer, who had the watch’s ticking turned into a synthesizer sound and made it the pulse of his score. “This is a movie about time running out. That is the first thing we tell you. That was constantly keeping up the idea of making the audience feel that time is running away.”
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Julie MillerJulie Miller is a Senior Hollywood writer for Vanity Fair’s website.
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