Being finished production now for a month, what have you learnt about film making by taking on such a difficult project?
The film really just drives home how important your preparation is, because this film was so technically complex – the water, no light, and in 3D, you had to be triply prepared for your days work. There’s a balance, and the really tricky part about filmmaking is; on the one hand you can be very prepared, and you do that through storyboards, your shot lists, and your preparations, through rehearsals, through stunt training, and all of these things you work very closely with your management team and getting your schedule right, milking the maximum opportunity to get as much as you can from the days shoot. But at the same time, the really tricky part is, you have to throw it all away as well. You have to be prepared to on the day to improvise and to discover things. As, if you’re too locked down in what you think you’re doing, you can really screw your film. You have to be really open to ideas; to what the actors are going to bring; to what the operators are going to bring, to what the stunt people are going to bring, and let it flow through you. A part of your job as director is about saying ‘no’, but it is also about saying ‘yes’, it’s also about being prepared to throw away all the prep and run in the moment with what you’ve got and what’s in front of you. It’s a bit of a sporting analogy, Robbie Deans, the coach of the Wallabies, always talks about playing what’s in front of you, and you’ve got to try and apply that philosophy to film making as well.
I read you had a visit to the Avatar set? In coming from low-budget Australian shorts/films, can you tell me what sort of experience that was like?
It was pretty mind blowing! Just the sheer scale of their operation was mind-blowing. The thing about Avatar that people kind of forget in a way because they think about the 3D; that really the break through in that film was really Jim’s motion capture and virtual real time photography. That’s what was most astonishing when you’re there on-set. It was a very complex kind of array, and very different to a normal film set. Quite often in the sound stage there actually weren’t any cameras, or the cameras that were there, were being used to capture the actors performance as a reference for the CGI animators later on. You had the very interesting chain, Jim would be working in the area were they called ‘the volume’, and he’s actually stand in the volume with the actors who were wearing the motion capture suits, whilst he’d be working the virtual camera, whilst again plugged into this world was a virtual real time CG world. So you had a huge array of computers transferring information. Jim could actually photograph the event in real time, in a CG environment, that you could actually look at in a monitor. Everything is captured virtually so the animators later on can then move the camera around, and have a whole lot of choices they can make – this was the mind-blowing thing, AND then on top of that you’d have the live action element. What I saw him doing was; A day’s work in the volume – capture a scene virtually, and then come back the next day and capture the real elements of it… i.e. if you had a human talking to the Nabie**** CGI. You’d be shooting that bit the next day using 3D motion control cameras, replicating what Jim had done with the virtual camera the day before. It was really strange, fascinating, and mind-blowing!
What would you say about Cameron’s character, what have you taken away from him personally?
Very much so, I cannot tell you how much I’ve learnt making the picture, his guiding hand, he’d been very much an arms length mentor. Almost every creative decision I’d run through Jim. He was obviously very, very busy making Avatar, but all of my decisions through casting, previews, I’d all sent to Jim for feed back and 99% of the time he’d do a one line feed back saying ‘great, love it’. But quite he’d say; ‘have you thought about this, or have you though about this world in this particular way’ or ‘this particular scene could be about the character and the landscape, let’s try and open it up a little’. He was also great in post-production as well, just in terms of, he just has such a grip on story telling, he really is a master story teller, a master at understanding an audiences needs in a way, how they will read a films, and how they’re going to respond to things. Having said that the big thing he said with this picture was say to me; ‘look, it’s your movie, we have trust/faith in you, tell the story the way that you want and we’ll support you’. So what he was able to do was see what my vision for the picture was and help me deliver ‘my vision’, it was never; ‘you need to do this James Cameron trick’. He was very, very supportive.
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