Guillermo del Toro reveals that he had a question for Christopher Nolan after watching The Odyssey. Guillermo del Toro has been on the promotional trail this past week, ahead of the re-release of his masterpiece, Pan’s Labyrinth. The film is 20 years old, and honestly, if you’ve never seen it, I don’t quite have the ... The Odyssey | Christopher Nolan reveals his visual effects secret to Guillermo del Toro
Guillermo del Toro reveals that he had a question for Christopher Nolan after watching The Odyssey.
Guillermo del Toro has been on the promotional trail this past week, ahead of the re-release of his masterpiece, Pan’s Labyrinth. The film is 20 years old, and honestly, if you’ve never seen it, I don’t quite have the words to explain why you should. It’s an extraordinary piece of work, using practical effects to realise an entirely believable fantasy world.
As part of the promotion, del Toro did a Reddit Ask Me Anything question session, and pretty much the first question he was asked was to do with his views on AI in filmmaking.
His answers, that you can read here, are typically nuanced and interesting. But one thing really stood out: that he, like many of us over the summer, watched Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and wondered how Nolan and his team had achieved much of their look without resorting to computer.
“When he showed me The Odyssey, there’s a scene when Matt Damon is floating in the stormy ocean and I asked him – because we were talking about practical effects, and how great it is and that we both always use a maquette or a model – and I asked him, How did you do it?”, del Toro wrote.
“He said, ‘we put him in a storm in the ocean.’”
Sometimes the most obvious answer is the right one, but it’s telling that in a world of digital effects, even del Toro wasn’t sure just how Nolan had achieved what he’d achieved.
“AI is like a super-fast engine that makes semi-sentient permutations of things that are already done. Creation is things that have never been done. Coming to exist”, del Toro also noted. Amen to that.
You can read the full AMA discussion here. It’s well worth your time.
