Movie of the Year

BLADE RUNNER 2049

THE SETTING

The film’s grim, boxy cities drew from Brutalist architecture, a 20th-century movement that preferred austerity to beauty. Plus: a winter-glum Montreal. “Director Denis Villeneuve is from Montreal,” visual effects supervisor John Nelson says. “He wanted the cities to feel like Montreal on a bad day in February. I’m from Detroit, so I knew exactly what he meant.”

For the future Los Angeles, Villeneuve figured it would be even smoggier, and a lot less sunlit. More like Mexico City. The crew shot aerial plates of that city and supplemented them with digital buildings. The police station is a four-metretall miniature (A) adorned with holograms, fake weather and other digital embellishments.

To keep the city plausible, Nelson’s team spoke to futurists to speculate on how it might have evolved. “Cities are the product of billions of decisions made by millions of people over thousands of years,” Nelson says. “One architect might have built a building 100 years later than the architect who built the one next to it.”

THE HOLOGRAMS

For the hologram character of Joi, played by Ana de Armas, “We didn’t want her to look like what a hologram is now,” Nelson says. “We wanted to make a leap to what a hologram might be in 2049.” Nelson’s team thought up the idea of a digital backface-like looking through the backside of a bottle, and you can see the writing on the label in reverse. “We photographed Ana and projected her onto a digital model of Joi,” Nelson says. “You see through the front to the back. She feels real because she’s photographed, and like a shell, because you can see through her.”

THE UNAGEING PROCESS

Harrison Ford’s character is reunited with his long-dead love, Rachael (played by Sean Young), who returns as a clone and looks exactly the same age she did in the first film, 35 years ago. They couldn’t go fully digital. “Digital humans are really hard to do,” Nelson says. “Not only do they need to look real, they need to act and perform real.” Instead, they started by casting an actress, Loren Peta, as Young’s stand-in. “Sean was onstage as we shot Loren in full hair and makeup, with dots on her face. We had a facial-motion capture rig that captured both Sean and Loren. We even captured Sean’s 19-year-old son, who was working as a PA. He looks a lot like his mother, and I wanted to see how 19-year-old skin really moved, since Rachael was 19 and Loren was actually 27.” So now Nelson had Sean’s mannerisms and Loren’s general movement. He supplemented that with images from the original movie and built a digital model of Young (B). And then he tested the fake. “I took several scenes from the original and replaced one shot with the digital double. Then I showed it to Denis and the producers, and they said, ‘Why are we looking at this? This isn’t our movie. This is the original.’ That’s when we knew that the model was right.”

B

A