Reviews of Netflix’s rigid, global heist film Red notice were all over the map, but one thing seems objectively true: the fact that they exist is a miracle.
“One of the first challenges we encountered was having to split our production schedule in half while we were filming,” said Hiram Garcia, Dwayne Johnson’s Seven Bucks Productions’s president of production and producer Red note, told Polygon around the time the film was released. The plan was for Johnson, Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot to shoot a series of interior scenes in studio rooms in Atlanta and then jump around the globe – Italy, Sardinia, France – to stage the key set pieces that would define screenwriter and director Rawson Marshall Thurbers spy-like adventure. but Red notice reached half of its 70 days of filming, the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak and production freeze.
“We were closed for six months, and then nobody knew whether we would be back,” Thurber recently said in a conversation with Jungle cruise Director Jaume Collet-Serra at the Director’s Guild. “And then, in her honor, Netflix said, ‘No, no, we’re coming back.’ I thought we could be like a boogeyman story that studio managers tell directors before they go to bed. “Do you remember the movie you almost made? The same could happen to you. ‘”
A new visual effects film from Industrial Light & Magic sheds light on how much digital boost it took to bring Thurber’s film this close to the original grand scale of the original pre-pandemic plans on site. Similar to David Fincher’s Story of the Hidden VFX, so much of Red notice‘s naturalistic world was built up or supplemented with CGI. Even to the skilled movie-goer, it can be overlooked how much effort artists went into creating the simplest of sequences in the film.
“We couldn’t go to Rome, we couldn’t go to Sardinia, we couldn’t go to Paris, but we had all these plans,” said Thurber. “I didn’t really want to shoot it in my back yard. I wanted to go to these places. But we couldn’t. So we had to shoot everything on the Atlanta stage or in the Atlanta Metro Studios parking lot. “
Red notice originally opened with a massive car chase in Italy, but the action sequence was scaled down to a more low-key chase between Johnson and Reynolds through a museum following COVID. Garcia said conditions forced Thurber to innovate within those boundaries, and eventually the creative team ended up using confined space drone photography. As Reynolds circles the museum’s obstacle course and finally the scaffolding, the camera follows and sometimes plunges into the POV. “We hired one of the best drone pilots in the world,” said Garcia.
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Photo: Frank Masi / Netflix
While some action scenes were already in the can when the pandemic shut down, including the explosive scene from the prison break, others were canceled. Garcia recalled that filming on the cop scene was the last day they had before the crew took a break, and it ended up being filmed on-site with the help of records (not to mention a digital cop that was being built to defeat Johnson). .
Visual effects artists also stepped in to complement what might be simpler footage in a pre-pandemic world. According to Thurber, all dancers at the masked ball (which was always written as masked ball) could slip N95s under their masks. But because they couldn’t have too many extras in the room at the same time, moments with Reynolds, Gadot and Johnson were filmed in an empty dance hall and superimposed on other shots of random background actions by visual effects. “They dance in an empty room,” says Thurber, “like something from … The glow
Red notice did not make it onto the 2022 Oscar shortlist for VFX – Black Widow, Dune, Eternals, Free Guy, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Godzilla vs. Kong, Matrix Resurrections, No Time to Die, Shang-Chi, or Spider-Man: No way home will eventually take home the Oscar – but strangely enough, the work of ILM and the other houses involved on the film feels like evidence of what is possible with visual effects now. Not to mention, it’s the 2021 movie of all the 2021 movies. Thurber admits that he’s unsure of the final budget for the film, but that it was extremely expensive just because of the circumstances surrounding the COVID. The need to gush with a crew and then hand broken pieces of filmmaking to visual effects artists, simply to pray that it all comes together, is an especially poignant experience for Garcia and Johnson.
“We worked closely with CDC and Netflix and really provided everything we needed to get the film done,” said Garcia. “They were phenomenal partners, they developed enormously. They sure lead and they support them and they made sure we had the financial support to do what we did. And so we were able to complete the film successfully and protect everyone. It wasn’t an easy process, but Dwayne and I always talk about it: we will never forget this crew. “
