Joe Letteri remembers the day, almost exactly 20 years ago, when he first glimpsed the wondrous world of “Avatar.”
Letteri, the pioneering senior visual-effects supervisor at Wētā FX in New Zealand, was in the final days of postproduction on Peter Jackson’s ‘King Kong’ when he received a call from producer Jon Landau.
“He wanted to know if I had time to read a treatment by Jim Cameron for a new film,” Letteri said of the late producer. “Of course, I made the time and it was so enthralling. I called Jon back and I said, ‘We have to make this movie, because I really want to see it.’”
That enthusiasm has driven Letteri for his whole career, which began with the explosion of a Klingon moon in 1991’s “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country” and has included work on “Jurassic Park,” Mission: Impossible,” the “Planet of the Apes” franchise and five “Lord of the Rings” and “Hobbit” movies.
The winner of five Oscars in 11 nominations, Letteri has long been fascinated by the science behind the creation of realistic creatures. He was instrumental in the development of Gollum (performed by Andy Serkis) from the “Lord of the Rings” films. And the influence of that motion-capture performance can be traced through “Kong,” the “Apes” franchise and the three “Avatar” pictures.
“Avatar: Fire and Ash” was filmed in tandem with the series’ second film, 2022’s “The Way of Water.” Novel technology was used for a new character from the third entry: Varang (played by Oona Chaplin), the antagonistic Na’vi head of the red-tinged Ash People clan. “On ‘The Way of Water,’ we developed a new way of facial capture, a neural network-based facial system,” Letteri said. “And that got rolled out primarily for Oona’s character.”
The technology enhances character realism with a deeper understanding of how the face and body move.
“It speeds up the whole process of figuring out how the muscles work in concert,” he said. “Prior to this, we would isolate each of the pieces of the face – what the mouth does, what the eyes do – and the animators would have to puzzle them out based on what the performer was doing. But under the skin, the muscles in our face are all connected. This technique allows us to follow what one muscle is doing through all the other muscles.”
Chaplin (“Game of Thrones”) filmed much of her performance as Varang five years ago, and Letteri said that “Fire and Ash” will showcase a closer representation of her human acting than was possible in past films.
“We really tried to focus on what the key performance pieces were so that we could look at the footage of her performance and lock it in much more accurately. We can take all that data and work on better ways to extract her performance and transfer that to her character.”
Letteri said that Varang is only one member of the film’s immense ensemble of 6,800 individual characters. “Not 6,800 unique characters,” he clarified. “Sometimes you’ll see 14 characters in one shot, but it all adds up to 6,800 performances.”
In the new epic, one Na’vi teen seems poised to warm the hearts of audiences as she did in “The Way of Water”: Sigourney Weaver’s Kiri, the winsome, nature-obsessed adopted daughter of Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and Jake (Sam Worthington).
“We were all just stunned (by Weaver),” he said. “The design of a character always changes once you see the performance, and it tries to incorporate aspects of the actor. We had a much harder time envisioning what her character would look like than Sigourney did. She didn’t miss a beat. She just dropped into it and became a 14-year-old girl. It really helped us, because her performance instantly made us think visually about what her character needed to be.”
This story first ran in the Below-the-Line issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
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