WIRED spoke to Ridley Scott, during post-production on Prometheus. Here's what he revealed.
When you made the original Alien film there were no CGI effects available. You created full sets, and it was very claustrophobic. What was the balance between physical sets and CGI onPrometheus?
I got a bit of a learning curve on Kingdom of Heaven, when I started to get enthusiastic about what you could do digitally, and that kind of whetted my appetite. So while I may have a certain amount of substantial set building, I can always complete it. Like on Gladiator, where I only built 40 per cent of the Coliseum – the rest was put in digitally.
It's shocking what you can do, so I am a full enthusiast for digital and green screen and everything else, but I really hate having to have actors acting away in front of a green screen and have somebody saying: "The monsters are coming, what are you going to do?" and all that shit. I still believe in putting a proscenium around the actors to help them as much as possible.
How have you found shooting in 3D?
The 3D world allows you to engage even more with a film because you're somehow drawn into the landscape or the universe of that scene. Even when it's two people talking at a table, you feel like you're a third party. I've tried to analyse this and I think what we don't realise is that we see in 3D anyway. You've got two cameras, two eyes. Your brain has got so used to that, that it's no longer spectacular until you then see it and re-identify it on screen. You put on glasses and you go, "Oh my God, that's spectacular," but actually it's what you see anyway.
If the original Alien can be considered a B-movie, would you say Prometheus is more an epic?
It certainly is budget-wise. But I think Alien itself, although it had a low-budget, somehow it came out as epic, and this one is certainly epic. I mean, we went pretty big in terms of landscape. What you saw with the first Alien, it felt pretty big, and they were all just straightforward models of landscapes and what I call "The Big Croissant" – the alien spaceship.
Don't miss: Prometheus: the tech behind the scenes.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
