Before we talk about Alita: Battle Angel, can you give us a sneaky update on how the Avatar sequels and the Terminator reboot are going?
Sure. Well, where we are with Avatar 2, 3, 4 and 5 is we've done all the performance capture on two and three and part of four and we'll do the live action starting in May in New Zealand for about four months. The live action is a relatively small part of the films overall, but there are several live action characters that go through a lot of the CG scenes so it's about integrating the live characters into the CG scenes. Kind of the opposite of Alita where we had a few CG characters mostly integrated into live action settings. We had the reverse issue on the Avatar films. I've got a couple of human characters integrated into the Na'vi rainforest, oceans, mountains, that sort of thing. We'll shoot that 3D, so everything is going to look spectacular. That sets the bar for the CG guys at WETA. I think the films are going to look amazing.
What is it about science fiction that grabs you?
I've loved science fiction since I was a kid and I don't know where that comes from. I read voraciously, and my taste was very specifically science fiction when I was in high school and college. I didn't read sorcery-type fantasy at all. To me, that was a big distinction and people tend to fall into one class or the other. I still love it, I might do the occasional film like True Lies or Titanic that's not science fiction, but I will always gravitate to it.
Now we've got the Avatar films and we've got the Terminator film, and we've got a cycle of three films in mind for that if we do well. There's always the big "if" in front of all of these and we've got Alita movies mapped out if we make some money. Technically speaking, all four of the sequels are greenlit, but clearly, in the real world, we would be taking some kind of an off-ramp I would think and won't be finishing four or five if they don't do well. Just to clarify because it's been said that four and five aren't greenlit, they are and we have been working on them.
Why did you decide to make Alita a computer-generated character? They don't always work...
In Avatar the characters were aliens so there was a bit of latitude there because they weren't human. We've improved it a lot. You can see from Alita that we're pretty much there in terms of being able to reproduce a human.
But she's never going to look completely human because she's not supposed to. The purpose of doing her CG is to preserve the look of the character the artist Yukito Kishiro, who created the whole Manga series, created. He created her with these enormous eyes, very tiny mouth and heart-shaped face. Setting aside the issue of her body, which is clearly a synthetic machine body which had to be done CG, we did her face CG to preserve the character as he imagined it. It's never really stated in the film, but why does she have such big, innocent appealing eyes? It's an expression of her character. But why? It turns out that she's an infiltrator sent to Earth on a mission to destroy. So you make her look innocent, like a little doll, so she doesn't seem threatening. That was the original rationale to find her appearance. She's still digging down into her past even as the film ends and that will continue across subsequent films, again if we continue and get that opportunity, we'll find out a lot more about her back story.
