Like Talking to a Wall

Note to up-and-coming actors: Forget the scene partners. Forget steeping yourself in the atmosphere of the set. Instead, try rehearsing the balcony scene from “Romeo and Juliet” opposite a tennis ball, because in today’s digital Hollywood, actors not only need to know how to relate to other actors, they need to know how to deliver an emotionally convincing performance against thin air, a void that months later will be filled-in by a computer.

Many of today’s films, particularly those that fall into the Big Summer Epic category, utilize computers as never before to seamlessly blend together what are in essence two different casts: one real and one imaginary. While the concept of acting with special effects is hardly new--it’s been nearly 70 years since Fay Wray was promised a role opposite “the tallest leading man in Hollywood,” King Kong--it has almost become de rigueur for modern film actors.

In one sense, acting against one’s own imagination is simply an extension of basic acting-school techniques. “The first acting exercise I ever did was having a cup of coffee in the morning, without the coffee, without the cup, without the morning,” says David Duchovny, who in DreamWorks’ alien comedy “Evolution” has to face down an army of ever-changing, ever-enlarging digital creatures devised by veteran special effects wizard Phil Tippett. “That’s really what this is getting back to, those first exercises in which you create the cup, create the coffee, create the smell, the heat, the taste, and go at it that way.”

Some actors find even simulated reality helpful in filling in the blanks. Sam Neill, star of Universal’s “Jurassic Park III,” feels that working with on-set animatronic dinosaurs provides an edge in imagining those that will be added later. “You’re often working with these colossal creatures that, because they’re three-dimensional, have an immediacy that has a real kick, so it’s not hard to place it in the next shot where there’s nothing,” says Neill, who also appeared in the 1993 Spielberg-helmed original (‘JP3” was directed by Joe Johnston, himself a former visual effects artist). “It’s not hard to make the imaginative leap into filling up the void, which is thin air, where there should be something big and scary.”

Neill admits to being less comfortable working on a green-screen stage, where not only the creatures have to be imagined but the entire set. (The green-or blue-screen system is the standard way of facilitating the compositing of an actor into separate background plates, for both film and video.) “I find it personally quite hard to work against the green screen, where you’re usually sitting on a wooden box and bathed in this strange, ethereal green light and you have to pretend you’re in Tibet or somewhere,” says Neill. “And that’s tricky.” The irony is that as digital systems become sophisticated to the point where virtually anything can be simulated, filmmakers increasingly strive for physical reality. Paramount’s “Tomb Raider,” which is based on the highly popular video game, might at first seem like the perfect CGI movie, given its roots. But the film (directed by Simon West) features surprisingly little digital trickery, relying instead on practical effects and stunts, and real locations, including a once-forbidden temple in Cambodia. Star Angelina Jolie, playing a kind of female Indiana Jones, had only one sequence in the film in which she had to perform against nothing: a sword-fight sequence with digitally created stone monkey idols.

“It was like doing a very strange dance with a sword, all by myself,” Jolie recalls. “It was only difficult in that you don’t have any kind of clue what to do next, it all has to be in your imagination and your memory. You have to remember that you’re looking at something and turn as if something’s behind you.”

Still, Jolie (who has yet to see the finished sequence and confesses, “I’ll probably be the first one to be shocked” by it) found the reality of the location shoot more unusual than miming a fight against stone monkeys. “It’s actually stranger to be standing amongst the ruins of these ancient temples in the middle of Cambodia, with this outfit on, and running and jumping from place to place, and really being in the center of 50 monks giving you a blessing,” she says. “That was much more shocking, and beautiful, and I couldn’t believe I was there.”

In addition to the technical challenge of acting in a void, it also requires a high level of trust between the performer, the director and the special effects supervisor, to make sure the live performance fits what will be added much later. “There’s nothing more embarrassing than under-reacting to something that’s hideous and terrifying, or overreacting to a little ant, which can happen sometimes,” Duchovny notes.

Even with a high level of trust, actors can still worry that their performances are out of sync, according to Brendan Fraser, who in Universal’s “The Mummy Returns,” the sequel to 1999’s “The Mummy,” shares the screen with a literal army of digital mummies and “The Scorpion King,” a creaturized version of pro wrestler the Rock (who also appears undigitized in the film). “In the first one [co-star] Rachel Weisz and I were constantly joking that we were going to have our union cards confiscated because we were so over the top, absolutely screaming, showing our tonsils,” Fraser recalls. “But when we saw the other end of it, with this fierce-looking creature, it made perfect sense that you would have that reaction.”

If anyone could be considered the king of special effects acting, it is Fraser, who in addition to the “Mummy” films has co-starred with a stop-motion toy in “Monkeybone,” acted opposite digitally oversized Elizabeth Hurley in “Bedazzled” and romped with an array of computer-generated animals in 1997’s “George of the Jungle.” It is a designation that the actor welcomes. “I find [working in such films] quite liberating and freeing,” Fraser says, adding with a laugh: “If there’s no one there, call me, I’m you’re guy. I’ll do my half, you do yours.”

Vast improvements in computer tracking and match-up technologies, which have occurred only within the last three or four years, not only permit actors the full range of movement and interaction, but have also freed up the camera, which traditionally had to be locked down to ensure that special effects mattes or compositions would match.

The result of that freedom is an ongoing creative reciprocity between the actors, the director and the effects artists, to the point where trying to figure out which comes first, the photography or the pixel pushing, becomes a chicken-and-egg question.

“It goes back and forth,” says Industrial Light & Magic’s John Berton, who served as visual effects supervisor for “The Mummy Returns.” ’The storyboards start us off, and then we take those and develop them into an animatic [a moving storyboard outlining rough action], which will then inspire the photography, which will be what it is, but then we’ll have to do an animatic that’s reactive to what the actual background [the live action] turned out to be.”

Case in point: During the filming of a fight scene for “The Mummy Returns” in which Fraser was miming against air (behaving, in his words, like “Marcel Marceau on steroids”), the actor was required to give the imaginary mummy a Three Stooge-style poke in the eyes. But in the heat of the moment, Fraser ad-libbed a disgusted reaction from getting mummy goo on his fingers and tried to flick it off. That was all Berton and director Stephen Sommers needed to see.

“It brought the house down when he did that and we thought, that’s great!” Berton says. “That was something we didn’t have in mind, but Brendan was thinking about how to make the visual effects better. He did this incredible reaction to nothing, so we [digitally] added something on his fingers and a little stringy bit between his fingers and the mummy’s eyes.” (For the record, ILM technicians had to go back and write a new software package specifically to create the mummy goo.) Not all of the recent digital advancements are visible to audiences. Some are used behind the scenes as well, to aid the director and the actors.

For “Evolution,” director Ivan Reitman coached his cast on what they would ultimately be reacting to by showing them animatics, but then took it one step further by employing a computer-based playback system to instantly see how the live action and the digital would match up, while there was still time to make corrections.

“I use a much larger monitor than is normal on a set so I can catch eye lines in big, wide-angled shots,” Reitman says. “And because now we’ve got a hard drive instead of a traditional tape player [for playback], we would lay the animatics over the scene that I had just shot. Even though it was crude, you got a very good sense of whether the people were moving fast enough or looking fast enough, or if the eye lines roughly corresponded to what you might think you needed.” There are still instances, however, when directors must call upon tried and true methods for guiding actors that have been around since the days of D.W. Griffith. “We have a very elaborate sequence [in “Evolution’] where a flying pterodactyl-scale creature wreaks havoc in this very large mall, and we had literally hundreds of extras who had to be choreographed in moving and all seeing the same thing at the same time,” Reitman says. “I used a series of counts to do that, [saying] ‘When I say one, you’ve got to look here, when I say two, you’ve got to look there, and when I say three, you’ve got to look over there.’ ”

Technology went even further in Warner Bros.’ “A.I.” or “Artificial Intelligence,” written and directed by Steven Spielberg, and a film cloaked in the kind of secrecy one associates with the Manhattan Project. Not only did the production employ computer-generated sets, it pioneered a system that allows for real-time compositing of the CG sets with the actors on a green screen stage, even as they are performing. “That’s the direction we want to go in, where we can help the actors, the director, the cameraman and everybody by actually being able to see the effect live on the set,” says ILM’s Dennis Muren, who with Scott Farrar served as co-visual effects supervisor on “A.I.” ’That allows the director to be able to walk onto the stage and work out shots on a set that’s not there, and be inspired by essentially a virtual set when he’s there on the day with the actors.”

Whether an actor thrives on performing against his imagination or dreads it is almost immaterial in today’s Hollywood. Digital co-stars and virtual sets are not going to abate. If anything, they will become the norm. “It’s just part of the vocabulary of a contemporary screen actors,” says Neill, “so you’d better get used to it.”