FILM
WARRIOR PRINCESS RIDES AGAIN IN LIVE-ACTION MULAN By TREVOR HOGG
Director Niki Caro Images copyright © 2019 Disney Enterprises, Inc.
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Going from an independent film produced in New Zealand on a budget of $3.5 million to a Hollywood adaptation with a production cost of $200 million, director Niki Caro has kept things in perspective and has retained the same ethos for Mulan, the liveaction re-make of the 1998 Disney animated film, that she had when making her international breakthrough Whale Rider (2002). “I got to work with all of the best tools in the toolbox on this one,” says Caro. “I loved every second of it and being able to stretch my filmmaking to this genre and scale. But the storytelling is exactly the same.” Caro had previously worked with special and visual effects, but nothing at this massive scale before. “No, but, boy, was that latent within me. I was provided an opportunity by Disney to show them my vision, and was given a team of people and previs. The first thing that I did was previs the biggest sequence in the film.” In order to repel the invading Rourans, the Chinese Imperial Army conscripts one male per family, which causes Hua Mulan (Liu Yifei) to take the place of her father by posing as a man. “I was leery of visual effects,” admits Caro. “I’m an in-camera girl, and the film was built more like Lawrence of Arabia than Marvel. We were out in real landscapes, had real horses charging across real battlegrounds, and real actors and stunt people.” Recruited to be the Visual Effects Supervisor on the production was Sean Faden (Power Rangers). “The wonderful thing about Sean as a member of the team,” says Caro, “is that he’s an artist, as all of my heads of departments are. Sean appreciated and embraced
the need for visual effects to be subtle and integrated into the real world. In the visual effects realm, you can do so much, and it was up to me and Sean to get our vendors to pull it back in line with the real cinematic approach of the movie.” About 2,046 visual effects shots were produced by Weta Digital, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Image Engine, Framestore, Crafty Apes and an in-house team. “Grant Major [production designer] and Niki chose parts of New Zealand that could be seen as Chinese landscape, and then anything we wanted to look more [authentically] Chinese, especially all of the shooting in the Imperial City, we went to a backlot in China and shot there for three weeks with second unit,” states Visual Effects Producer Diana Giorgiutti. “This is the only time I’ve had a year in post,” she adds. “Having that extra time for the Phoenix [Mulan’s spiritual guide] was a blessing, because there are versions of the cut that are entirely different to where we landed in the end. The Phoenix is only in 19 shots versus close to 100 of them. The Phoenix now is a much more
OPPOSITE TOP: The rooftop chase was a combination of second unit footage captured at Xiangyang Tangcheng Film and Television Base in China, and the main unit shooting closeups of Mulan (Liu Yifei) against greenscreen at Kumeu Film Studios in New Zealand. TOP: Steam was an important element in depicting a bloodless but visceral battle sequence. MIDDLE LEFT TO RIGHT: Sean Faden, Visual Effects Supervisor Diana Giorgiutti, Visual Effects Producer Anders Langlands, Visual Effects Supervisor, Weta Digital Christian Irles, Visual Effects Supervisor, Image Engine Hubert Maston, Visual Effects Supervisor, Framestore Seth Maury, Visual Effects Supervisor, Sony Pictures Imageworks Rpin Suwannath, Previs Supervisor, Day for Nite Cody Hernandez, Postvis Supervisor, Day for Nite
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