Directors Close Up 2: Interviews with Directors Nominated for Best Film by the Directors Guild of America: 2006 - 2012 by

Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2012-12-20T16:00:00+00:00

James Cameron with Zoë Saldana on the set of Avatar. AVATAR ©2009 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved.

When Neytiri is confronting Jake Sully is a really crucial scene and interestingly it was actually done in four takes and the best take was take three, but I used a little bit of take four editorially. The first two takes were basically the rehearsals and they were so in character by that point about halfway through the performance capture part of the shoot. They were just so in character with just a couple of small adjustments, but it was really just them being their characters and everybody was there. We were able to capture up to twelve people at the moment, so we had the mom and the dad and all the others and the Tsu’tey, the adversary warrior, they were all there you know so they had the eyes upon them and Sigourney [Weaver] was there. So you know that was actually a pretty amazing thing. I mean some scenes you struggle with. Some scenes just appear magically. The trick is to know when it is the magic and when the accidents are wonderful, if there are accidents, and Zoë just kind of went off and she stayed totally in character and totally in accent and everything.

There was a scene where we had Sam Worthington’s head in the matte box of the camera. It’s when he does the video logs and he’s just kind of talking to the lens because the camera has a beam splitter, it actually has a kind of large matte box and to get him feeling like he was talking right in the camera he was actually in the matte box of the camera and he couldn’t see anything, and he was in an interior space just kind of rambling anyway and I was like a foot and a half away operating the camera. He didn’t want to talk to the crew and he had these kind of long rambles and he literally wanted to do the whole thing that was bits of voice-over that would appear over a twenty-page sequence. He wanted to do it all together. We just wanted to go non-stop. We’d go for twenty minutes, you know, and he’d go up on the line [miss a line in the script] and I’d just talk to him while he was working and he’d get himself worked to a place that felt real to him and then I’d just give him the line and he’d say the line. Sometimes he was struggling with the accent because he was trying to be very real and not get hung up on the words. Then the accent would start to go Aussie and I’d say, “Okay, you just went Aussie,” and he’d say, “All right, give me the line” and I’d give him the line and it was a very intimate thing and I find that more thrilling than, you know, blowing up a building, although that’s fun too.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.