Steven Spielberg on the making of Tintin

Posted on February 25, 2010
Filed Under Actors, Adaptation, Directors

Los Angeles Times had a little chat with director Steven Spielberg about the upcoming film “The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn.” Spielberg says there was only one reason to make “Tintin” with the cutting-edge performance-capture technology that James Cameron used on “Avatar.”

“It was based on my respect for the art of Hergé and wanting to get as close to that art as I could,” says the director. Hergé wrote about fictional people in a real world, not in a fantasy universe,” Spielberg said. “It was the real universe he was working with, and he used National Geographic to research his adventure stories. It just seemed that live action would be too stylized for an audience to relate to. You’d have to have costumes that are a little outrageous when you see actors wearing them. The costumes seem to fit better when the medium chosen is a digital one.”

Like Cameron, Spielberg shot the actors on a special performance-capture stage. The performers donned lycra suits, covered in reflective markers, and their every movement was tracked by more than 100 cameras. They also wore a head-rigging with a camera near their jawline that recorded intensely detailed data of their faces — enough detail to avoid the “dead eye” faces that had an unsettling lack of movement or emotion in many previous motion-capture films. Ultimately, all the camera data was fed into a computer to create a 3-D replica of the actor. The digital document of the actor and the performance is so all-enveloping that the director, in this case Spielberg, can go back and change the “camera” movement and orientation long after the actor has left the set.

“I just adored it,“ he says. “It made me more like a painter than ever before. I got a chance to do so many jobs that I don’t often do as a director. You get to paint with this device that puts you into a virtual world, and allows you to make your shots and block all the actors with a small hand-held device only three times as large as an Xbox game controller.”

The film is produced by Peter Jackson and stars Jamie Bell as the title character, Andy Serkis (Gollum in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy) as his buddy Captain Haddock, and Daniel Craig (James Bond) as the evil Red Rackham.
“The Secret of the Unicorn” is due in theaters in 2011.

It sound like Spielberg really has embraced the possibilities of this new technology. But you can’t help felling a tiny bit worried that in the long run, flesh and blood actors will be… superfluous?