It's been widely regarded as the book that could not be filmed...but director Ang Lee's visually sumptous adaptation of Yann Martel's Life of Pi has been acclaimed as a cinematic triumph. We speak to one of the film-makers that made it happen - Paris-born Guillaume Rocheron, a VFX Supervisor at MPC, the world-leading post production company.
Sky Movies: What were the films that first caught your imagination?
Guillaume Rocheron: Of course the first three Star Wars films. Jurassic Park. The James Bond films hold fond memories for me. You sit at home and realise maybe one day I could work in films as well.
SM: What was the first major film you worked on?
GR: My first was Panic Room for David Fincher. He had me modelling props and just helping out on a couple of shots – nothing really major but for me it was like 'wow'. After that we were doing tests for The Matrix Reloaded. I became part of the team that devised the Matrix codes' look. In France, things were done differently and I was a bit of a generalist as the industry was quite big enough to be very specialised. You would have to do everything - the animation, the lighting. It taught me a lot.
After that I worked on Alexander The Great for Oliver Stone. I got involved early, working on pre-production which was fantastic. Then it was Batman Begins where I worked on a couple of shots and then I got asked to supervise tests for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I got the opportunity to move to England and work for MPC. As well as Harry Potter I worked on Sunshine for Danny Boyle and moved onto X-Men: The Last Stand. After GI Joe and a movie called Shanghai I moved to Vancouver as visual effects supervisor on Percy Jackson & the Lightning Thief. Then I was involved on Sucker Punch with Zach Snyder.
SM: What sort of qualities do you need to succeed is sfx?
Projects are at their most interesting at the time you start but you don't know how you're going to achieve everything. That's the challenge. They come to you because they know they will find solutions to their problems. Very often - like on a project like Life of Pi - you're required to do those giant storm simulations. Now they've been done before…but not to the standard they were demanding here. Ang Lee embraced the stereo (3D) format with very, very long shots taking in a lot of detail. On The Perfect Storm - which was fantastic - there were lots of fast cuts and lightning flashes so things never featured very clearly. That was the breakthrough with Life of Pi. It had to be photo-real and very, very detailed.
Before the CGI effects are added...
And after...
SM: You've worked with the likes of Zack Snyder and Christopher Nolan who are very technically savvy. Ang Lee is a far more traditional director - how did it work out with him?
GR: For Life of Pi, he embraced visual effects as part of the film-making process. The overall visual effects supervisor for the film - Bill Westenhofer [Life of Pi Overall VFX Supervisor] - was constantly with him, presenting the work. Ang is a real storyteller – he would look at each shot and ask how it worked for the story. Everything had to have a meaning, everything had to have a reason. He's a very, very detail-orientated director. That meant we had to log oceans like real oceans so everything was grounded in reality.
SM: It was commonly said that making a film of this book was impossible…so how did you set about it?
Before and after shots of ship in a storm...
GR: I read the book and then I read the script and thought 'Yeah, it's a pretty daunting project.' Everything that could be a problem - from water to animals - was present and Ang was the first to say that. But you cannot shoot in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in the middle of a storm. And you can't put the tiger on the lifeboat with the kid. But it gave us a real chance to integrate visual effects into the storyteling. The whole of the storm scene was shot in a water tank in Thailand.
SM: How do you start filming something like that?
GR: Well, the first thing you do is ask yourself how do we make an ocean? The thing was that Ang really treated the ocean as a character - waves would have to look a certain way to make them scary, inspiring or mesmerising. That's how he would describe the shot sometimes. What we needed to have was total control over how an ocean moves. We need to understand what makes it move and look absolutely real. The only was to make them look real was on a computer, breaking down the individual elements. In a hurricane, there is a lot of wind which hits the top of the waves making spray, which becomes mist.
We worked on the project for two and a half years with 200 people. So we have specialists in everything. My role was to find out what the director wanted and then set the bar for the team.
SM: Did you get involved in any live action shooting?
GR: I wasn't there for the whole shoot but I was there to ensure I had all the material I needed for the storm sequences, just take references and be there for advice if need be. I had to be there to know that I could actually deliver the shots.
SM: Did you ever feel that it couldn't be done?
GR: There was a moment very early on in the project when I was very worried. I was slowly realising the scale of what we had to do and I wasn't 100% sure how we were going to deliver.
SM: How good a job do you think you have done?
GR: I'm very proud of the work we achieved. For me the great achievement of this film was going beyond the technical barriers of computer graphics.
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