To follow up on that, at the very end, we’re on NOMAD itself, which I think has a different feel than the rest of the film. Was there anything you did different there for creating those sequences?
Well, I think that the NOMAD sequences end up feeling a little different just by virtue of the location, and that is intentional. So there was an intentionality in the design to say like, “Okay, well in the last act of the film, we’re jettisoning our characters as well as our plot and our stakes up to this final, higher level.”
Funnily enough though, aesthetically, we still maintained the same approach. So lighting and camera lens-wise, those sequences are shot the same way as the rest of the movie. And I think it’s just there’s such an overwhelming amount of new imagery and new stimuli in that space that it ends up feeling a little bit different. But I think there’s also a little bit of the fact that most of our artificial set builds or traditional stage work was revolved around that final sequence, but not all of it. There was actually a lot of that sequence that was also shot on location that were enhanced real world locations.
Where?
In Bangkok.
Just factories or something?
It was mostly at a train station and a convention center. So it’s a mix of these two different spaces, but they’re heavily transformed by ILM. So you wouldn’t be able to necessarily recognize them when you look at it because of the set extensions and all the work that they did. But the hope is that there’s still a groundedness and a [tactility] to even the NOMAD sequence, because a lot of it was shot on location and the foreground and the ground and what the characters are interacting with.
Even a lot of the lighting was inspired by the available light in these real world locations that we would then match or recreate or have to make something completely different for the portions of that sequence that were shot on stage. And there’s a little bit of Volume work in there as well, but hopefully when you watch the whole sequence, nothing in particular stands out as being one method or the other. It should all maintain that same sense of reality and tactile and groundedness, which is what we were after for the whole movie.
“The Creator” is now playing in theaters.