Thanks to Scott Feinberg for pointing us to this Newsweek actors roundtable discussion of “Avatar,” which is certainly illuminating. Morgan Freeman says performance capture is “basically cartoons,” while a more diplomatic Bridges says, “What we do [as actors] is the ultimate special effect.”
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26 responses to “Actors’ beef with ‘Avatar’”
Sandra Bullock probably knows more about cartoon performances than any of them, since she co-starred with Jae Head (cue collective groan).
I remember watching the roundtable on Saturday and finding the comments from Bullock and Freeman kinda strange.
It’s laughable that an actor like Freeman who had built his career as of late using just his voice (The Love Guru, March of the Penguins, War of the Worlds, CBS Evening News) is suddenly so keen on wanting to see the face of actors. What then if the actor is under heavy prosthetic makeup?
As for Bullock, she owes her career to Speed which while a great film, isn’t exactly exactly Masterpiece Theatre. And let’s be frank, The Blind Side even without green dots, is pretty cartoony.
My favorite part of the roundtable BTW, is what transpires between Mulligan and Bridges. LOL.
I think there is probably a real art to performance capture acting, and some of these actors might feel different if they were ever put in a position where they had to lend their talents to this new, growing artform. The degree of difficulty for this type of performance is probably quite high.
What’s worrying for Avatar is this sentiment spreading throughout the Academy. After all the actors are the biggest group of voters. So unless it really gets the most nods wouldn’t it be all downwards from here?
it seems that they don’t really understand what motion capture is
Morgan Freeman is kind of awful, isn’t he?
I notice the younger crowd barely says a word. Bridges , Bullock and Freeman really bogarted the conversation here. I get they deserve the chance to speak–they’re elder statemen, but jeez.
Is the whole thing linked anywhere? They used to have it whole, and started splicing it up and it loses something for me.
Evan,
Have you seen the actors’ roundtable with Nicholas Cage? That one’s awful, but in a hilarious way….
He just usurps the entire conversation while the others look on like sad puppies.
Whether or not actors are the biggest voting branch in Academy, I just can’t realistically see THAT many people giving it a 1.
We’ll see.
I’m an actor who has mostly done theater under “no-budget” circumstances. Which often means you really need to use your imaginations and your body/face/voice and your craft to create the world and the relationships with your fellow actors. So go ahead, put a bunch of dots on me and make me act in an empty room. Seems to be more like acting in black sweatpants and t-shirt in a bare rehearsal room than any other acting working condition. I’d welcome it. They wouldn’t go through the expensive post-production process of rendering the actor’s every muscle twitch if they didn’t value the actor’s performance. Especially in Avatar we can see how deftly the animation captured the actor’s work (in Sigourney Weaver’s Avatar particularly, since we recognize her manner(isms) so well). To call it “cartoons” does come across as defensive and closed-minded. Every art form that involves actors has its own particular set of conditions that make the work exciting and difficult, plusses and drawbacks. A truly great or at least truly versatile actor learns how to be good and make his/her work shine in any medium. And truly good directors and tech people (editors/cinematographors/lighting designers/Make-up artists/anitmators etc.) support the actor and bring out their best work regardless of the medium and technical add-ons.
Hey, remember when Bridges buried Bullock alive in The Vanishing. Just bought the original’s Criterion disc. Great movie. And a solid remake too.
Megan:
Definitely saw the Cage trainwreck. What I object to about Freeman is the entitlement and pomposity that he often exudes. Props to Loyal for pointing this out: Freeman is one of the most ubiquitous voice actors around to the point now where you can’t listen to a tv commercial break without hearing him. So if mocap is “just cartoons,” where does commercial advertising fit in, Morgan?
Bridges really comes out of this one, as he has in everything this awards season, smelling like a rose. Class act.
Wow… Morgan Freeman really looks upset about the dots and green screen techniques used for “Avatar”.
In my opinion, if a filmmakers wants to make a film that requires those resources in order to portray his vision (a la “Avatar”, “The Lord of the Rings”), then he should.
Therefore, every film SHOULD NOT use these resources. Dramas like “Elephant” or “L’Enfant” would not have the same, naturalistic effect if they used this type of technology. It simply wouldn’t work.
To conclude, in the following years… there should be variety. May the fantasy films use the technology they need and may the more intimate, character studies rely on acting. It’s about variety. Simple as that.
Motion Capture is not new. It has been around for decades. Robert Zemeckis has made a career out of computerizing the performances of actors and making them into stiff and waxy reanimated corpses, just like “Avatar.” Only he was doing it twenty years ago. Snore. Snore. What a bore.
So was “Beowolf” a game changer? Would anybody have remotely suggested it should be a best picture winner? Hell no! Was it an interesting experiment? Sure. Entertainment. Pure and simple.
After 1988’s “Roger Rabit” were actors in danger of having to share the screen with bugs bunny all the time or Jessica, the animated screen siren with lips and bust bigger than a plastic surgeons fantasy? Hardly. That’s fine. That’s good for some movies to do animation and to try different things. However, it hardly replaces the emotional performances of real actors playing real people. That’s what movies are all about. That’s what wins Oscars. Not computer software, dots and green screens.
People crave the truth because for the last two decaddes they can’t trust their own eyes — its all CGI lies. Authenticity is the new thing. A return to nuts and bolts filmmaking with real performances, real dialogue and real stories, stripped of the phoniness. That’s why real actors like Renner, Harrelson,Bridges, Streep and Mulligan have it so much up on their stiff and unoriginal Navi nemesies. There’s more to performance than just vector points.
@Danny: As an actor myself, this is the most convincing pro-mo-cap argument I’ve heard from an actor’s perspective. Bravo, sir.
Poor Gabourey, Carey and Woody.
“Robert Zemeckis has made a career out of computerizing the performances of actors and making them into stiff and waxy reanimated corpses, just like “Avatar.” ”
Well, come on, you gotta hand it to Cameron-his azure creations are far better-looking than the creeptacular shit Zemeckis has been putting out there, latey. I still have waking nightmares and ‘Nam flashbacks about Polar Express.
And if that weren’t bad enough, Zemeckis has enough gall to shit around with Yellow Submarine.
I don’t want to sound like a bona fide opponent of motion-capture, CGI, and the like. I’m not. If it weren’t for mo-cap, we wouldn’t have great creations like Gollum. But I think it gets grossly overused, and after Avatar, I have no doubt that the overuse will increase ten-fold.
I get the feeling Sandra Bullock and other actors have no idea what Zoe Saldana went through filming Avatar. They make it sound like performance capture is not real acting and does not require the same effort as “live” acting.
Yes Zemeckis has done it, but Cameron has brought the level a whole new level, but because it is Cameron, that is why there is all the Oscar talk. Sure Avatar was a game-changer, but more on the filming side (behind the camera) and maybe the 3D (which was great). But regardless of those things, there should be no talk to best picture for the film, IMO.
Beowolf was meant to be a cartoon I thought (maybe Zemeckis wanted us to think it was real, but there was no way), Christmas Carol looked awesome and did great stuff with the camera, but it was still a cartoon. While Cameron wanted everything to look real, it was close (with most scenery and especially the opening in space), but he didn’t do humans (close-up) yet.
Benjamin Button was the real game-changer in this field (both in-front of the camera and in the computer labs) it showed digital faces/heads that looked 100% real. Cameron had something that looked real but it wasn’t humans, so it means nothing to us since we aren’t sure what a real Navii looks like.
This is what actors have to look foward to. Like “Avatar”, it is stiffly provocative… (and funny!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzqbCB3rgkE
Laurence Olivier.
Dude, if I were a guy and I watched that, I would actually never get an erection again.
[violent shudder]
Yeah, Sidibe and Mulligan look a little shy, even a bit bewildered, on that sofa. I wish the others would invite them into the conversation a bit more.
How interesting that Sandra and Jeff are sitting beside each other. I get the feeling they’ll be getting cozy again come March.
I’ll repeat what I said on another page: If you want to see a real performance, attend some live theatre.
In the movies, directors have all kinds of tricks to get actors to achieve certain effects for only moments at a time, which can be assembled in post-production to create something coherent, moving, and meaningful, just like all of the other pieces in a movie. These tricks are most often used with child actors and non-professional actors, who wouldn’t be able to a give a real performance without them.
The performance that you see on screen is very rarely the performance that an actor gave all at once. Performances are shaped by editing, typically pieced together from multiple takes. A “great” performance could be made “mediocre” by bad editing, and a “mediocre” performance could be made “great” by good editing. I remember that once in my editing class, my professor said that savvy actors know to make friends with the editors of their movies.
So then we have to ask: What exactly about a screen performance deserves awards? Is it what the actor really did, or is it the effect that the performance had on the audience? I contend that it’s the latter, which people mistake to be the former. In a movie, the effect that a screen performance has on the audience is shaped by a number of post-production factors. How is that different from motion capture?
If the enhancement of a performance by good editing and clever directing tricks does not disqualify the performance from awards, then why should CGI enhancement (i.e. “performance capture”) be disqualified? After all, even with CGI enhancement, the performance wasn’t made from scratch on computers. The animators needed to have something from which to “add or subtract,” just like editors do with multiple takes.
The link above doesn’t work so I’m not sure if that shows the other segments, but I’ve seen the whole roundtable of them. And Sidibe was actually very talkative. Mulligan was shy and even when she had a chance, she didn’t say much, which isn’t the others’ fault because except for Bridges, who often jumped in and started talking, they just talked when they were asked the questions.
As for Morgan’s Avatar comment, maybe he hasn’t seen it. And since he’s a well-respected senior actor, the others may have opted not to oppose to him even if they had their own opinions about it. That’s how I felt when I was watching it. They would’t want to upset Mr. Morgan.