Robert Rodriguez: How We Made ‘Alita: Battle Angel’
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. “I’ve known Jim since before Desperado,” the director says over the phone, referencing his 1995 postmodern-Western/action movie. “I remember visiting him on the set of when […]
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. “I’ve known Jim since before Desperado,” the director says over the phone, referencing his 1995 postmodern-Western/action movie. “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. So, we go way back, and I’ve seen him do a lot of crazy, innovative things. But I’d stopped by his studio, and he says to me, ‘Oh, I gotta show you what I’m working on.’
“And suddenly,” Rodriguez continues, “he unveils this 15-minute presentation with this insane artwork, voiceover narration, story concepts … all this stuff from the manga. 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. But this was just next-level. 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. Which, considering this was going to be the next picture he was going to direct …”
“And then what happened, Robert?” asks the producer Jon Landau, who’s also on the line. He’s kidding, of course. He knows exactly what happens next.
“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. “But the point is, I was lucky enough to see behind the curtain about what Jim would have done if he’d directed it. 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!’”
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. “The tech finally caught up with us!” he says. Rordriguez Landau run down how they pushed the digital-FX envelope to make it happen.
All-Pixel Alita
After 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. “We didn’t turn over any of the designs to Weta until we cast Rosa,” Landau says. “We wanted all of the little idiosyncrasies that she brought in her audition to be there. 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. Once we knew we could do that, we started working with them on the whole digital process of creating what Alita would look like.”
“A lot of people go, oh, that’s Rosa…and they just augmented her eyes,” Rodriguez adds. “No! The character is completely computer-generated. It’s a lot like the human birthing process.”
“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. “The idea was to challenge them to go beyond what they’d done for facial and performance capture. Instead of one standard-def head rig to record her face, they used two high-definition cameras. They were able to create a much more user-director, actor-centric process on the set. Technology did not get in the sway here – technology enabled. There are scenes where Rosa is kissing and hand-holding … and she is not there. There’s a scene where she picks up a dog, and licks her face – Alita is not in that frame. 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.”
Source: RollingStone.com