For more than 100 years, movies have been made in the same basic way: You put actors in front of a camera and photograph them.
Robert Zemeckis wants to change all that.
A Christmas Carol, which opens today, represents Zemeckis’ third excursion into the brave new world of performance capture, a radically transformative technique that he pioneered with The Polar Express (2004) and continued to explore with Beowulf (2007).
Starring in this latest adaptation of Charles Dickens’ frequently filmed 1843 novella is Jim Carrey, who joins a distinguished roster of movie Scrooges that includes Alastair Sim, Albert Finney, George C. Scott, Bill Murray and Mr Magoo. But while audiences will hear Carrey’s voice (he also plays the ghosts of Christmases past, present and yet to come) and see his distinctive body language, the figure before them will be a computerized amalgam of human and animated elements. And the Victorian London that Scrooge inhabits is not the usual blend of studio sets and matte paintings, but a fully realized 3D environment, built from the ground up in the digital dimension.
The film begins with a stunning demonstration of the effects made possible by this technique: The camera soars through the streets and byways of a vast, densely imagined city, dipping down to eye level to peer into the faces of individual passers-by, then flying up above the rooftops to capture a bird’s-eye view of the maze of elaborately executed buildings. The visual design stops just short of photo-realism, creating a world of convincing volume and substance that is still lightly dusted with fantasy.
“Because I can do shots like that — this is why I love the digital cinema so much,” said Zemeckis, whose credits include the Oscar-winning Forrest Gump (1994) as well as a wide range of films in styles both fantastic (Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit) and realistic (What Lies Beneath, Cast Away).
“The ability to move the camera anywhere, to take any angle on a scene without worrying about the physical thing getting in the way — how wonderful is that?” Zemeckis said. “I like to say that the beautiful thing about what I’m doing here in this form is that it frees me from the tyranny of technique, and yet I get the wonderful bonus of maintaining the magic of the performance. I get the best of both worlds.”
Essentially, what Zemeckis has attempted in his last three movies is the division of the complex process of filmmaking into two discrete stages, each more easily manageable in isolation. Rather than trying to deal with the elusive chemistry of performance on a live set increasingly crowded with technicians and technology, he has found a way of recording the actors first and creating the image that will contain them later.
In practice this means registering the performers not as images on film, but as moving data points in a three-dimensional digital environment. “A couple of technicians flew out to Shepperton Studios and started to take data on my face and body,” recalled Colin Firth, who plays Scrooge’s nephew Fred in the new film, “which meant standing in my underwear on a platform while something that looked like a laser beam scanned me up and down. I turned around and there was a kind of a gray, clay figure on a screen of me, with all of the shapes and contours. And then they did something similar with my face. They had me do a million different facial expressions while a camera took pictures of me.
“Then a couple of months later I was in Los Angeles having more stuff like this done,” Firth continued. “You go into rooms with lenses on every surface of every wall. They give you a heavy spandex suit covered in dots that are read by some sort of beam that shines across the room you are in. This room is not called the set, but ‘the volume.’”
With the performances in the can, Zemeckis and his team move on to what he calls the “cinema” component. “We’ve got it, it’s all there; it’s just like a live-action movie except that it’s a 3D recording of the virtual essence,” Zemeckis said. “The actors get to go home.” That “essence” is then digitally folded into the characters, costumes, props and settings that have been created by the production designer, Doug Chiang. Working with the director of photography, Robert Presley, Zemeckis chooses where to place his virtual camera within the scenes and how they are to be lighted. With his editor, Jeremiah O’Driscoll, Zemeckis chooses the length of the shots and the order in which they are to appear.
For Zemeckis, a filmmaker who loves to work with the long takes and elaborate camera movements associated with directors like Max Ophuls and Otto Preminger, this is probably the best part. “If you’ve been looking at my movies over the years,” he said, “you’ll see that I edit less and less and less. And now I don’t have to edit at all! This is the logical extension of where I’ve been going.”
Does this control come at the price of spontaneity? “There are directors who love to work in an atmosphere of chaos,” Zemeckis said. “They love working with actors who are miserable pains, because it keeps all this chaotic energy going. I personally don’t like that. I like a nice, calm, quiet, very controlled set.
“This has always been the most heartbreaking thing to me,” he continued, “working in this incredibly technical art form which I love: an actor does something magnificent that just comes out — they’re doing their job and suddenly here’s this brilliant moment that you never thought of. When that happens to me on the set, the first thing I get is this terrific sense of dread. We’ll cut the shot, and the camera operator will say we fuzzed the focus, or we didn’t hit our mark with the dolly, or there was a boom shadow on the actor, or there was an extra back there across the street who looked right into the lens. That’s always what happens, and you never get that moment back. When I’m working in this form, it’s all about performance. It’s always being recorded, and you never have to compromise performance because of the technique.”
For Zemeckis, the great drawback to the technique is that serendipity goes out the window. “Everything in cinema is a trade-off,” Zemeckis said. “When I made Forrest Gump, there just happened to be on the plantation where we were shooting a beautiful oak tree. I went, ‘Oh, my God, this is where we have to bury Jenny,’” the character played by Robin Wright Penn.
“But in this form, you have to remember to paint the oak tree,” Zemeckis continued. “You have to think of everything. You’re not going to have those kinds of happy accidents, so you’re basically writing images. You can get the happy accidents with your performances, but the images have to be written specifically. That’s the trade-off.”
True enough, but such roadblocks are not sufficient to diminish Zemeckis’ fascination with the technique he has helped to create. “What I’m doing here is taking 30 years of live-action filmmaking experience and trying my best to apply it to this new digital cinema,” he said. “As long as they let me keep doing it, I’m committed. It’s just so exhilarating right now to be working in this form.”
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