The Jungle Book
Director Jon Favreau talks us through the bear necessities.
Igrew up with Disney’s The Jungle Book. It came out when I was a year old (1967), and there was no other contest for kids when I was little. The Jungle Book was one I remember meaning something to me. connected with it – both with the music and the emotion. It made an impression, back when I was very impressionable.
Doing a live-action The Jungle Book wasn’t something I was seeking out. I knew Disney was doing a lot of live-action films, and I was in business with them already through Marvel, but it wasn’t like I was pitching them this. But the first few things that I heard made it interesting. First and foremost was the passion of Alan Horn, who runs the studio. It was something he really connected with. He connected much more with the Rudyard Kipling version ( Jungle Book, directed by Zoltan Korda, 1942) – that’s the one he grew up with – but the idea of taking the tools that are available today, and using them to retell this story… What I like about the story, aside from my memories of the Disney version, is how simple and mythic the underlying property is; the idea of the feral boy raised in the wild by animals, and man’s relation with nature, and the longing, and feeling like in exile. These are very deep, old myths that are interesting to explore in storytelling.
CG, OR NOT CG?
I’ve always been a bit resistant to having too much CGI in a film. I feel it’s been a bit overused. It worked extremely well in Jurassic Park, and then it was used when it shouldn’t have been, in ways it felt like it was taking away from the storytelling. I’ve had experiences of using it, sometimes successful, sometimes not so, but I learned a great deal about using computer effects as a filmmaking tool, and seeing what the cutting edge of it was – which is always about a year ahead of what you’re seeing in theatres.
I understood that we’re hitting a bit of a tipping point. If you were to design and plan a movie well, and you were disciplined in your filmmaking, in the way you went into production and pre-production, as in Gravity, you could do tremendous things where you really fool the audience into not knowing how the effects were done, and not drawing attention to the effects. And that was interesting to me: telling this story in a way that it couldn’t be told before. The tools are now available. They were developed mostly for Avatar, but for other productions as well, such as Life Of Pi and Planet Of The Apes.
3D, OR NOT 3D?
I look very much to Avatar, which I feel was a high-water mark for native 3D capture – which has fallen out of favour, I think for budget and schedule reasons. Native 3D capture requires a tremendous amount of planning and discipline; people just prefer to take a 2D camera and have the freedom to shoot as much as they want, as quickly as they want, and then add the 3D. They can still charge the same price at the box office! But for me, as a consumer, I don’t enjoy all 3D equally. There are some films that I even prefer to see in 2D. But when films are designed around 3D and it’s done well, it really immerses you in the experience.
If you’re dealing with plants and faces and hair blowing in the wind and all those things, it’s very hard to convert that and make it look good. It’s one thing to have the geometric shapes, robots and things – that’s easier to convert. But when you’re dealing with the human face, especially a child’s face that has such specific geometry… I want to make sure we do something very special so that people understand how much care and thought has gone into it.
GETTING YOUR STORY STRAIGHT
Part of it was me looking at the way Pixar and Disney Animation handled story. They vet the story through having a Head of Story, a story department, animatics, and really making the story bulletproof before you ever commit to film. To me, that was a big deal, because you can’t be as efficient at using this technology as you would in a live-action film where you can cut it together, use some temp effects, and figure out what you want to do, and then go back and either reshoot or adjust the effects. I wanted this one to have the precision of an animated film. So that was a whole new thing for me, and it was a great experience.
The second leg was a motion capture movie, just like Avatar, where we would develop virtual sets. We used Virtual Camera to film the whole movie and cut it together like a lo-res videogame, with every angle camera-ed, and the performances from the voice actors. Only then, after we’d constructed this, did we film it. That’s where we used Simul-Cam, which was a technology that was developed by Jim Cameron. It was basically