PULP & POPCORN

Page 11
Look at the reaction to the use of a CG version of Peter Cushing as Grand
Moff Tarkin in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. It’s been interesting to see how many
people didn’t realize they were looking at something other than a real human being.
There are plenty of people who say that they were taken out of the movie by it.
There are people who think it was make-up. And there are people who knew full well
it wasn’t real but enjoyed it anyway. Right now, though, that is as cutting edge as
cutting edge gets, and I can’t imagine he would have stood up to scrutiny if we were
looking at that image in 120 fps. When I was looking at scenes in Bi!y Lynn where it
looked like the screen was a window and you could just climb over it and step into
the film, the effect of the depth of frame was to create a very real physical space. I
remember the first time I ever saw a demo version of 3D post-conversion. One of the
films they used was The Two Towers, and they took some of the main Gollum scenes
from that film as the challenge. When I saw Gollum rendered in 3D and it was clear
that he was holding a space that was between Sean Astin and Elijah Wood, who were
both obviously real people in a real environment. It sold the effect as real in a way
that altered my understanding of what could be done and what impact that might
have on making the impossible feel real. To pull that off in 120 fps, there can’t be any
flaws. There can’t be anything that breaks the illusion that these are real physical
beings. Looking at the moments where Ang Lee points the camera directly into the
faces of his actors, there would be no place to hide any imperfections. There’s no way
you can create something that would hold up to that scrutiny.
More than anything, watching Bi!y Lynn’s Long Hal"ime Walk convinced me
that whatever this is, it’s something new. And that’s exciting. Whatever 120 fps, it’s
not simply another way to shoot movies as we know them now. If it is going to be a
valid tool for filmmakers, it’s going to have to be in service of something that we
really don’t have right now. In one sequence in the film, Billy Lynn and his platoon
step out on stage at the Super Bowl, and Destiny’s Child is right there performing
and they’re surrounded by dancers and explosions and fireworks overhead and a
stadium of people and as Ang Lee takes it all in, everything is in focus, and you can
look at any of it, at all of it, and you can examine the smallest detail, and when I
think of it, it’s like a memory of a real event, not a movie on a screen. That is an
awesome power, and whoever harnesses it the right way first stands to win on a scale
we’ve never seen.