The Way of Water’ Created an Alien Underwater World – The Hollywood Reporter- Armessa Movie News

Whether it was creating the Metkayina village or a sinking sea vessel on the Pandora moon, production designers Dylan Cole and Ben Procter say their approach to their work on James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water was, philosophically, not unlike that of any live-action movie. “We design sets,” Cole says, adding that the use of performance capture affected the execution of ideas, not the design work itself. “We have to build proxy sets for performance capture as well as full digital sets.”

New parts of Pandora are introduced in the sequel, including the reef-based Metkayina village. Cole says he referenced Indigenous cultures in the South Pacific for the design, but “the main thing was figuring out how this is engineered. And how are you reinforcing story? Something very important to the Na’vi is connectivity, and so it was very important to Jim and to us that this village is connected.” That’s why the walkways and dwellings resemble a neural network. “That worked thematically, [along with] showing that they live in harmony with the water.”

A large part of the movie takes place underwater, and that too was a unique, wondrous environment that needed to be designed. “You go on this amazing adventure in this alien world, but it’s to reflect back on how we exist here on Earth. In order to establish that metaphor and connection, it couldn’t look wildly different,” Cole explains. “We started going more exotic with the coral structures and trying to enforce the sort of Eywa [the deity of the Na’vi] intelligent design aspect of it.” That included looking at fractal references.

To populate the underwater world, Cole notes, Cameron “wanted a level of biomass density of life that we haven’t seen on this planet since the prehistoric era, when there was, it’s been estimated, at least 10 to 20 times the amount of sea life there is now.” To meet this directive, hundreds of aquatic species were designed.

The team’s approach to the SeaDragon ship — the setting for the climactic struggle when the humans arrive — Procter likens to creature design (a manta ray was one reference) in that it was a “vehicle that had personality, that seemed like a demon ship.”

The design also had to support all the story points — this ship rolls over and floods during the action. “Generally, we came up with a fixed angle of about a six-degree slope [for these sets],” says Procter, “which came out of the anecdotal knowledge that Jim had from Titanic. [Greater than] six degrees, actors and crew have trouble dealing with the slope.” That angle is made to appear varied at certain points in the movie by digital elements and set extensions. “The horizon line of the water and all the tells of gravity — such as chains that are hanging at a certain angle — are added digitally to tell you that the deck is at different angles than it really was,” he adds.

Procter says the team also engineered pieces to help drive the performances — notably, in the sequence during which Neytiri and daughter Tuk move through a rotating corridor as they race to escape the sinking vessel. “They go from basically being on the floor to being on the wall, and then they’re kind of on the ceiling. We built a giant box that was cantilevered to go off one of the sides of our underwater performance capture tanks.”

An abandoned farmhouse outside Prague was the starting point for the World War I field hospital, which showed the destruction in the hinterland beyond the battlefields. Production designer Christian M. Goldbeck explains, “Parts of the walls you see in the background were built and painted by our wonderful scenic painters.” (This is a set photo; in postproduction, the VFX team removed the background behind the structure and added further destruction to complete the look.)

In Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical film, aspiring filmmaker Sammy is invited to meet one of his idols, John Ford, in the director’s office on a studio backlot. For this set, writes production designer Rick Carter, his team “re-created Western paintings with low and high horizons to depict the axiom expressed in this final scene: High or low experiences are interesting to audiences because they create real drama that inspires an emotional response.”

Research for re-creating Graceland included visits to Elvis Presley’s famous Memphis home to take photographs, dig into the archives and even have the ground surveyed. “When we got back to Australia, we could mill the timber perfectly or make sure that our Graceland sat on the right topography,” says production designer Catherine Martin, adding that the production built one and a half stories of the mansion’s facade. The set evolved to reflect the progression of time over Presley’s career.

The fictional Kinoscope studio was critical for Damien Chazelle’s evocation of 1920s Hollywood, explains production designer Florencia Martin, and the vast studio setting was built on location and showed the sets and the desert simultaneously to give the viewers a full sense of that world. The bar set where Margot Robbie’s Nellie shoots her first film was based on Chazelle’s hand-drawn storyboards. “We picked a Western gold rush bar in Northern California and frosted the windows with snow,” says Martin.

This first appears in a February stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.