Film guy at SXSW: Robert Rodriguez and Henry Selick: a conversation from the third dimension (a panel discussion)

by John P. Meyer

As mentioned, I attended a panel discussion yesterday (Monday, March 16) featuring maverick director Robert Rodriguez and animator extraordinaire Henry Selick.

What do these two filmmakers have in common, you may be wondering? As UT professor and AFS founding board member Charles Ramirez-Berg (moderating) explained, they both had experience working in 3D - and were here to tell us about it.

Rodriguez led off, describing how he'd had a dream in the early 90's (as documented in his journal), after which he scribbled something like "3D, yeah!" - though he doesn't now remember any of the details of the dream. Just the 3D reference. Before beginning production on From Dusk Till Dawn, he had this wild hair about doing the last half of the movie (inside the bar) in 3D - but he just didn't have the wherewithal at the time, and so gave up on the idea.

Part of the appeal to him, he said, would be that he'd get to hand out 3D glasses to moviegoers, and they'd have to keep track of them for the whole first half of the film and then be forced to don them at the necessary time in the movie. (Robert imagined sitting at the front of the theater and gazing on with amusement at that point.)

Rodriguez then presented a short film about his making of Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over. It offered an insider look at the production work done on that movie, and the innovative ways he got around the problem of having only a really small (Austin-based) green screen at his disposal. It was amusing to see the guys/gals in full-body green leotards shoving things around on the set, which made heavy use of skateboards (and cobbled-together skateboard platforms) to wheel characters around.

Ricardo Montalban was wheelchair-bound at the time of the shoot, but scenes required him to - for instance - get up out of his chair - which was accomplished by having him make a sort of head bob and simultaneously lowering the camera. (His legs were of course rendered digitally.)

Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over ended up costing less to make than the previous two Spy Kid movies; Rodriguez told the studio he didn't need $20 million of the funds they'd allocated for the film. He insists that working on a tight budget and timeline forces a filmmaker to innovate, which ends up making for a better film. (Hard to argue: Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over made more money at the box office than either of its predecessors.)

Henry Selick took over the presentation at this point to talk about how he made Coraline (from which he showed a series of clips - but only in 2D, given the limitations of our venue). One of the clips showed what the character models looked like attached to their movement armatures, prior to digital removal of those attachments in post-prod: the little figures are basically attached to a web of articulated steel fingers that the animators incrementally move as the action goes forward.

Selick got the 3D bug after studying the work of Lenny Lipton, inventor of a stereoscopic vision system and a prolific independent filmmaker. He (Selick) has long been a devotee of stop-motion animation as a filmmaking form, as his Pillsbury Doughboy ads clearly demonstrate. He also produced the iconic MTV station IDs before getting his big filmmaking break directing Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas ('93).

After that film and James and the Giant Peach ('96), Selick was pretty much fed up with the creative sacrifices he had to make to conform to big studio production demands (he refers to Hollywood studio execs as "vampires"), and now partners with Laika, an independent animation and production studio based in Portland.

When he decided to go 3D with Coraline, Selick placed a call to Rodriguez to ask how he was able to make a 3D film on such a small budget. Rodriguez was glad to share his secrets. But the big problem from Selick's standpoint was how he'd be able to get his big stop-motion camera lenses close enough together to approximate the distance between the human eyes (a requirement for a believable 3D effect). Answer: he couldn't.

The breakthrough came when Selick realized he didn't need two cameras: he could just shoot one frame, skew the camera the required distance and shoot another - then do the 3D frame matching in post production. As opposed to a shoot involving live actors, these characters weren't going to move until he "instructed" them to.

Selick thinks the current state of 3D projection is pretty good: "it doesn't give you a headache," as he puts it. (Having seen Coraline in 3D, I can report that this is a massive understatement.) Selick thinks it would be fun to re-edit a version of Coraline, leaving the model-posing armatures visible in the final print, and screen it for midnight crowds.

Rodriguez closed with an anecdote about how he actually sold a movie to a studio based on nothing but a title. He says he was talking to a Weinstein person on the phone, who asked him "what are you gonna make for us next?"

Robert said: "Are you ready? 'NERVERACKERS.'"

Silence on the line, and then: "Wow!"

Most of the post-presentation questions were directed at Rodriguez, with many of them falling into the category of "Mr. Rodriguez, I'm such a big fan" or "you're the reason I got into filmmaking." We found out that Machete will definitely be made, though Rodriguez refused to give a firm date on going forward with Sin City 2.