ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL
Robert Rodriguez. James Cameron. A Japanese manga. And the most photo-real CG-character ever created. Alita: Battle Angel looks to be the most ambitious sciencefiction film this year. Total Film heads to the Austin set to get cyber punk’d.
Robert Rodriguez reveals how he finally got the manga adap made.
roublemaker Studios, as you might expect, is a shrine to its founder, Robert Rodriguez. Once an airport, this filmmaking haven in Austin, Texas, is decorated with the coolest memorabilia you could wish to see. Guitars and motorbikes hang on walls alongside a clapperboard from Rodriguez’s Sin City, movie posters and a picture of the director with his Desperado star Antonio Banderas.
Yet in all its years, Troublemaker has never witnessed anything like this. Outside on the backlot is Iron City, the urban jungle at the heart of Alita: Battle Angel, a mouth-watering manga adaptation that sees Rodriguez team up with James Cameron. Based on the 1990-95 cyberpunk series by Japanese author Yukito Kishiro, this sci-fi extravaganza requires a stellar setting 700 years in the future.
Iron City is vast: a 90,000 squarefoot living, breathing metropolis. There are shops selling falafels, carpets and clothes. There are murals to ‘Motorball’, the violent on-skates sport played in the film (think Nascar meets MMA). There’s a huge square with a fountain. Doorways, windows, staircases and endless streets filled with rickshaws and extras speaking multiple languages – Arabic, Chinese and Spanish.
“When I did El Mariachi, I only had two streets!” laughs Rodriguez, referring to his 1992 lo-fi debut, made for just $7,000. “I never thought I would see something this detailed here in Texas; it’s the biggest set I’m sure we’ve had.” He’s never even had a permanent camera crane before. “That’s a real luxury gift!” he marvels. “We can get shots so much faster now. Before, I was always shaking it, baking it.”
It’s taken 240 people – carpenters, welders, painters, plasterers – some four months to build Iron City in almost 50°C heat. “That has to be very close to a record,” says Steve Joyner, the film’s production designer. “We didn’t know if we could do it.” Impressively, it’s not just on ground level either; the two-storey buildings are 24ft high. While this is the main outdoor set, there are four further stages being used at Troublemaker and another four across town.
As the scale suggests, this is a James Cameron movie in all but name. Cameron bought the rights to Kishiro’s nine-volume Battle Angel Alita back in 1999, intending to adapt it into his first movie after the Oscar-winning Titanic. “Like Quentin [Tarantino] doesn’t write a script that he just tosses aside and doesn’t direct, Jim’s the same way. These are guys that, when they write something, they’re going to go shoot it,” says Rodriguez.
Dressed in a baseball cap, leather jacket and jeans, Rodriguez has taken time out of the shoot to sit with Total Film on one of Alita’s impressive sets. We’re in a crusty-looking bar, decked out with a jukebox and a blue neon sign that reads “KANSAS”. In the background, the strains of a Radiohead song are playing (given we’re in a world where cyborgs and humans co-exist, ‘Paranoid Android’ might be apt).
It was Rodriguez’s own fanboy curiosity that got Alita off the ground. A friend of Cameron’s for 20 years, he’d also followed his output closely. “I’d heard he’d got the rights to Battle Angel years ago. I thought, ‘What’s he going to do with that?’” Then he went to visit him in 2015. “I hadn’t seen him
‘I trained every day for two-and-a-half hours.
I was able to harness my internal self, to do things
I never imagined I’d be capable of doing’ rosa salazar
in a couple of years, and we caught up and he was showing me his Avatar material and what he was going to be doing with the sequels.”
Cameron casually told Rodriguez “he was just going to be making Avatar movies probably for the rest of his career”; it was enough to encourage Rodriguez to ask about Battle Angel.
“He said, ‘Do you have 15 minutes?’” He started to show Rodriguez everything he had: animatics (sketched storyboards timed to music), art reels, reams of notes and even a 180-page script “he had never quite got to finish because Avatar was ready first”.
Then Cameron dropped the A-bomb. “He said, ‘If you can figure out the script, you can make it.’ So I said, ‘I’m taking it home! I’m making it my summer project.’” Rodriguez hot-footed it back to Troublemaker and started cutting it down, re-writing in Cameron’s style. “I took it in to him and he said, ‘It’s great! Let’s go make it! I don’t know how you sweated 60 pages out of this thing! I can’t even tell what you cut.’”
From there, “it moved very fast”, says Rodriguez, aided by the fact that Cameron had already done so much prep. A co-production between Troublemaker Studios and Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment, Rodriguez also inherited Cameron’s producer Jon Landau, who won an Oscar for Titanic and helped steer Avatar into cinemas. “Alita, we look at as our child,” says the garrulous, Hawaiian shirt-wearing Landau. “We wanted to find a director [with whom] we could parent her.”
Landau may be Cameron’s rep on set, but he’s all about protecting Rodriguez, notably when studio backers Twentieth Century Fox made overtures about shooting away from the director’s native Austin. “Robert said something to me. He said, ‘Jon, if you want a cook to make you a great meal, don’t take him out of his own kitchen!’ And that hit home with me. I said, ‘I am going to fight to do whatever we can to keep this movie in Robert’s kitchen.’”
This ‘kitchen’ is playing host to a dense plot taken from the first “two-and-a-half to three volumes” of the Kishiro manga. “It’s very faithful to the spirit of the book,” says Rodriguez. For those out the loop, the story is set years after war has decimated Earth; now floating cities hover above the planet. “The new world is built on the old world,” continues the director. “It’s more futuristic as it goes up.” Iron City, meanwhile, is a garbage dump, recycling waste from the sky-bound Zalem.
It’s on one city scrapyard that Alita, an unconscious cyborg, is discovered by the compassionate Dr. Dyson Ido. When he takes her back to his clinic, Alita has no memory of her past. Landau calls her journey one of self-discovery. “What I find about her character that is aspirational for people… she is not a superhero. She does not come into this world [with] abilities of teleportation or superhuman strength. She has to find that strength within her.”