Jude Law Talks 'Sky Captain' Blue Screens

[Friday, September 3rd, 2004]
Jude LawJude Law, who plays the lead role in the upcoming Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, says that shooting for the movie using blue screen presented many difficulties. "I think that every film you make, there's always something new, always something to challenge you and something you've got to make a slight leap of the imagination to pull off," he told Sci-Fi Wire. "It's true that early on it felt, not awkward, but just sort of clunky that we were playing very much for real in this very sparse environment."

"But it reminded me at times of doing theater in empty spaces, which I've done a lot of, or playing make-believe, which we've all done as kids, especially when you're talking about robots coming to get you. It's that kind of atmosphere, that kind of energy in playmaking."

Law added that the more he worked with the blue screens, the easier it got. "It got easier to slip into it and harder to concentrate, because the blue did have an effect," he said. "But equally we really tried hard, with [writer-director] Kerry Conran and [producer] Jon Avnet, to always make it about having the freedom as actors to do what we felt necessary and what we needed to get from it before they ... do what they do so brilliantly in post-production. So it was always a case of trying to marry the two worlds."

"Kerry, at times, thought the process would be 'OK, Jude, you look right over there, you turn, you say your line, and then you go back.' We did that on occasion when it was necessary, pickups and moments where we'd missed a shot, when I didn't look up. But on the whole we really tried to work the whole thing from our point of view. 'OK, let's play the scene out,' and we'd block out the whole set. Everything would be there, but it would be blue, and we'd play the whole scene dramatically. Then he would work around us. That way he came away with more footage than he needed, but [also] better performances and more about the performance. So he could paint and get around us rather than the other way around."

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