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MillimeterPaul Verhoeven, Director
Jul 1, 2000 12:00 PM, Ron Magid
Just when Paul Verhoeven thought he knew everything about working with digital effects, along came Hollow Man.
Verhoeven's films-including RoboCop, Total Recall, and Starship Troopers-have consistently pushed the state of visual effects. Now with Hollow Man, a riff on H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man that stars Kevin Bacon as a scientist who discovers the secret to invisibility-the director has found himself once again in uncharted waters, this time attempting to create the most advanced CG human yet seen on film.
In the process, Verhoeven says, he was once again reminded of the sometimes irresistible influence of his effects collaborators. In this case, those collaborators were the artists at Sony Pictures Imageworks, Los Angeles, and the Oscar-nominated team behind Starship Troopers' effects, Berkeley, California-based Tippett Studios. Verhoeven went into Hollow Man with one idea of how a digital human might be conceived and born, but his team steered him onto a more difficult, but ultimately more rewarding path.
But why build a digital human when the point of Hollow Man is to make Bacon's character invisible? Imageworks' visual effects supervisor, Scott Anderson, who won an Academy Award for Babe, was convinced that an invisible character would benefit from having a physical history that was rooted in reality. He also wanted to retain as much of Bacon's performance and body language as possible, so that the gradually disappearing character would have the actor's moves. So Anderson persuaded Verhoeven to shoot Bacon's character, Sebastian Caine, in almost every scene, rather than shooting empty plates and creating a digital performance later.
"When Sebastian goes from visibility to invisibility, we wanted to see the layers of skin disappear, revealing the muscles, then the muscles disappear and you see the organs, which disappear, then you see the skeleton, and then he's gone," Verhoeven explains. "We wanted to show everything disappearing in a gradual way while he's still moving, so really, we had to have Kevin in the computer so we could artificially pull his skin off! Of course, once we revealed the muscular structure underneath, it was not Kevin anymore. But we could still use Kevin's performance."
Wearing blue, green, or black costumes and matching makeup so he could be removed from the plates, Bacon didn't just create a physical foundation for his invisible character. His performance also drove the creation of the elaborate invisibility gags around him, Verhoeven says. The gags that developed in performance might not have taken shape the same way had they been done exclusively through the animation process.
"You can see what an influence a special-effects man can have on a director," Verhoeven says. "Scott's way of shooting was much more complicated than what I had in mind. Although I was very resistant and I really hated doing it that way, ultimately it was much better. But it was quite an ordeal, I can tell you that."
It was also an eye-opener for Verhoeven, who had gone into production convinced that he had the digital routine licked. "I thought, 'This is easy, we'll get it all done in a year'-and of course, it's two years. Because the reasonable way of doing it was different than I imagined."
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
