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The Visual Design
Director Tarsem Singh arrived for his first meeting with the producers of Immortals armed with a portfolio packed with reproductions of museum-quality paintings to illustrate his unusual vision for the film. Relativity Media's Tucker Tooley, an executive producer of Immortals, recalls that this first meeting wasn't quite what he expected. "He brought in this big canvas and it looked like something you'd see in a museum," says Tooley. "At first blush, the painting looked very different from how we had imagined the movie, but when Tarsem started to explain, it really made a lot of sense to us."
He proposed basing Immortals' visual profile on the work of Caravaggio, the bad-boy painter of the Italian Baroque period. A rule breaker who pioneered the use of live models for religious and mythological subjects, Caravaggio's paintings are characterized by a saturated color palette, dramatic lighting, and a feeling of dynamic movement and overt emotion. His style broke from the more static work of the Renaissance and earned him both praise and criticism in his lifetime. Singh's ambitious concept impressed the producers as perfect for the subject matter.
The director worked closely with both the production designers and crew to recreate the luminosity typical of Caravaggio's work for the overall look of the film. "We call it 'finger-of-God lighting,'" says Singh. "It's very focused and seems to come from a far-away source."
Supervising art director Michael Manson says Singh's vision and creative courage make Immortals a new and different kind of epic. "We in the art department have a long history with Tarsem, which we cherish," he says. "I've worked with him for close to 15 years, so communication comes fairly easy. It always starts with Tarsem's interpretation of the script. We take that initial information to research libraries, the Internet and museums. We'll pull from our collective files for wardrobe, makeup, prosthetics and special effects. Everybody brings something to the table."
Rather than setting their story in an actual historical epoch, Singh and his designers created an original world for Immortals. "It's not the Minoan Age or the Bronze Age," says Charley Parlapanides. "This is the Tarsem Age. It uses the Olympian gods and the Titans, but it has a unique point of view. It's not a world you will necessarily recognize. For the most part, it is straight out of Tarsem's mind. He's made something new and breathtaking, and yet dark and brutal at the same time."
Costume designer Eiko Ishioka, who earned an Oscar for the spectacular costumes in Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula, is well known for her designs for film, theater, television and commercials. Ishioka is also a respected visual artist whose work is the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Her iconoclastic worldview falls into the same imaginative territory as Singh's.
"As far costumes were concerned, we decided early on not to go 'Classic Greek,'" says Singh. "It would have been counterproductive to hire somebody like Eiko and then tie her hands. There's no point in telling her, 'Think outside the box.' She has no idea what a box is. She comes from a parallel universe.
"At the same time," the director adds, "this is an action film. I had to make sure that she didn't make wardrobe that looked great but couldn't be moved in."
The Japanese costume designer, who studied design and art before she started working in film, says she approached the costume design for Immortals as a creative collaboration set in a fantasy world. But she realized that her flights of fancy needed to be based in physical reality and enjoyed collaborating with the actors to make her ideas work in a practical sense. "During the fitting process, my ideas are pretty crazy," she says. "To make sure the costumes are functional, I ask actors for help. I feel the actor and designer should collaborate."
Freida Pinto found the process exhilarating and ultimately essential to the creation of her character. "Eiko designed these beautiful costumes for everybody," says Pinto. "But it took some effort to make them your second skin. You had to maintain a certain posture in order to make them look that beautiful at all times, but they were essential to taking the film into that larger-than-life realm. I wear this amazing red corset with a sheer red skirt and a black veil. When I put it on, I felt it against my skin and I was very confident about it. There was nothing vulgar about it. It was revealing in the right spots and just the way it needed to be. Her idea of female sexuality and sensuality is so beautiful."
Kellan Lutz found Poseidon's ornate costume challenging, especially during the film's battle sequences. "I wore a big Pisces helmet that was very tedious to fight in," he says. "It was actually difficult just to act in. I couldn't really hear because I had these seashells on my head. It sounded like the ocean. I also kept hitting myself with Poseidon's trident."
For Ishioka, the most difficult task in creating the costumes was achieving realistic armor. "I wanted to use shiny materials for a mask or helmet," she says. "But the reflective surfaces would have interfered with shooting on a green screen. I didn't want it to look fake, like a breast of armor made of wood or that kind of thing. It had to be not too shiny but I also want the audience to believe this armor made of metal."
Ishioka's original designs are complemented by the work of makeup designer Nikoletta Skarlatos. "Tom Foden, the production designer, sent me a visual tour of the sets so I could start to visualize the people," she says. "I did a massive amount of research before presenting ideas, because I'm a huge fan of both Tarsem and Eiko. They both inspire me and I knew this would be a chance to do something really extraordinary. In terms of references, I looked at mythology, but I also wanted to create something that had not been seen before.
"It's a very makeup-intensive movie," says Skarlatos, explaining that advances in technology have raised the bar for her craft. "3-D is very specific and you see things more obviously. High-def and digital shooting magnify that effect. We tried to be very precise."
Skarlatos worked closely with Pinto to create Phaedra's look. "The eye make-up is not a traditional Indian look, nor is it a contemporary look. It's a very different and mysterious look, with certain little nuances that allude to the fact that she is an Oracle, a very special being."
Hair and make-up helped Pinto slip into the skin of the mystical Phaedra. "They tried these colors in my hair that I'd never had done before," she says. "We added some extensions and a braid. It made me feel like I was from that period. I would come in with my jeans and t-shirt, get into my robe, and there would be a completely different person there: Phaedra."
Skarlatos, whose previous credits include Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End and Thor, was also involved in creating the blood and special effects makeup. "It can be darkened, but what you see is what you get, so we had to work with the DP to create the right blood for night and the right blood for day."
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Building a spectacular World
Immortals is loaded with visual effects, action, adventure--and nearly everything else under the sun. The filmmakers used the latest 3-D and VFX technology to seamlessly join layers of digitally created worlds and physical reality. "We kept seeing surprises on the set," says Canton. "The technology is an exciting part of the audience ride."
To make the creation of Singh's imaginary world easier technically and logistically, the producers decided to house everything at Cité du Cinéma Studios in Montreal. Production offices, special effects, art department and visual effects were all under one roof.
On the technical side, Singh worked with his long-time colleagues, director of photography Brendan Galvin and production designer Tom Foden. "I move at breakneck speed," the director says. "The learning curve can be a bit steep. This gang moves very fast with me. So while the look of this film is completely different from what we've done before, the practical support they're able to provide is critical."
Jack Geist, VFX producer, and Raymond Gieringer, VFX supervising producer, were added to the team to oversee Immortals' spectacular visual effects. "Just taking the environments into account, we had a large-scale effects show," says Gieringer. "Then within the environments we had a lot of effects: enormous battle scenes, mountains collapsing, gods and Titans battling. There are over 100 shots that involve special effects."
There was also a large physical component that supported the effects. About 20 sets were built, each containing a different virtual world, some with 360-degree views. Gieringer says the departments worked hand in hand to make sure that things ran smoothly. "Their world is practical and they're going to build these sets. We need to take these sets and build the environments around them. Tom Foden and art director Michael Manson worked with us to make the process seamless."
Geist and Gieringer became involved early in the development process to help Singh conceptualize his film. The director was very precise about what he wanted, according to Gieringer. "Tarsem is very specific in terms of his framing, and his composition is amazing, unlike that of any director I've ever seen before. We made a very beautiful, somewhat stylized film, with plenty of bang for the buck in terms of the virtual."
Immortals utilized several cutting-edge systems to achieve its unparalleled visual style. During pre-production, the filmmakers implemented a system called Inter Sense, previously used on the movie Avatar. "It allowed Tarsem to see exactly what would be green screen and what would be set," says Jeff Waxman, who served as both line producer and executive producer. "We were then able to build our sets to exactly the size that we would need. We designed everything months in advance. We had matte painters design all the environments on computers. Across the hall, the art department was designing the physical sets that would fit into those environments. Having it all under one roof, Tarsem could bounce between them and make changes on the spot."
Because the technology is developing so fast, Kavanaugh says they were able to go one step beyond what was possible for James Cameron when he was making Avatar. "Tarsem could sit in front of a computer before he shot the scene, with it all mapped to scale," says the producer. "He could actually see the shot before he shot it and make decisions about how to shoot and what lenses to use. It also allowed him to create the perfect 3-D reality and understand what parts of what scene were going to be popping out."
During filming, the director used another high-tech system, called Moses, which gave him even more control of the shoot. "Moses is one of several systems that enable you to pre-visualize, so you can see beforehand what it will look like within the CG extension or a CG world," Galvin explains. "Tarsem could see a person's head come over a mountain that doesn't exist. We used it in the monastery shoot, looking down from the monastery onto the encampment with the Heraklions, so you can see where all the stuff that's not actually there will be."
Singh says the Moses System, along with his attention to detail in pre-production, allowed him to create shots that are perfectly composed. "I was able to construct a tableau," he explains. "If some films are like comic strips, this is a painting strip. The system sees past the green screen, so I could control the composition."
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