jon favreau
on the groundbreaking tech
How did directing this compare to traditional live action?
I tried to make it as similar a process as I could. I’m extremely collaborative, so it was incumbent upon me to create an environment and a platform – this multiplayer VR filmmaking game – where we can all jump in there, and it feels like we’re on a real set. We create it as photo-real as possible. It’s lo-res compared to what is in the film. But it’s videogame quality. So it’s like the first Halo.[laughs]
Did you want to go all-digital from the start?
That was the pitch. “What would happen with The Jungle Book if you pulled Mowgli out of the equation?” Everything could be done digitally, and you could really double down on what that part of the process would be. But really, we’re telling human stories, and these are just tools. And although it’s seen as a technological breakthrough, it’s the most labour- and artist-intensive project I’ve ever worked on.
Where do you start on a film like this?
The very first stage is – whether it’s this or Snow White – you get a head of story and a pencil team to start to explore very quickly and iteratively what the sequences could feel like. In the meantime, Jeff Nathanson was working on versions of the script with me. And then you had these teams of wonderful artists that were creating digital paintings depicting moments from the film as points of inspiration. That’s something we do even on the Marvel movies. In the case of Iron Man, sometimes we didn’t even have script pages for a scene, and we just had a really wonderful painting to inspire us.
Is this the beginning of the end for actors?
No! Because we incorporated the actors to inspire the way the animation was presented. To make it appear to be live action, we have all the actors perform in this black-box theatre, [like] a theatre rehearsal. And we would mic everybody, so we would get usable sound, but I would encourage them to overlap and improvise. And I would cut it together, as I would with an independent film.
Has this VR gaming system changed how pre-vis is used in live action?
I used it for The Mandalorian, which is interesting, because it’s more of a television structure. I’m a writer and an executive producer, but you have multiple directors, and some have never directed in this genre before. So using virtual production in lieu of pre-vis, you can pop on the HMD [head-mounted display] and you can see the spaceship [and] the environment. And then we can start setting cameras and cut together the shots we think we’re going to get.
Could you see yourself doing another film in this world?
I don’t know. If you look at this and The Jungle Book as two productions I’ve done back to back, it’s been a long run. It’s been six years. And I love the tools we were able to create, and I love the people I’ve been able to learn from and have collaborated with. And so what I’m inspired to do, right now, is in a different area. Now I’m pretty deep into Star Wars, and what [Disney+] will allow, and the opportunities that that would open up to me as a storyteller. I feel like there’s a lot of room for innovation and storytelling with these media that don’t limit you to the two-hour format.