Entertainment Weekly’s “The Visionaries” panel in Hall H was a true meeting of the minds: directors Marc Webb (The Amazing Spider-Man 2, 500 Days of Summer), Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity, Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban, Children of Men), and Edgar Wright (Spaced, The World’s End, Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead) sat down and just talked about filmmaking.
While other panels have exclusive video footage or superstars up on the screen, these three can tell stories for an hour and have the audience completely entranced.
Edgar Wright said that in each of the movies he’s made with Simon Pegg, their process is to start with events that actually happened in their lives and then add “maximum devastation.”
Mark Webb agreed with the idea, saying that he loves taking on really simple relateable personal relationships and putting them in the context of something that’s massive and extreme. “The little 12-year-old in me gets really excited to get up in the morning and blow shit up” and then in the middle of the carnage “to do something small and intimate, where somebody’s head turning means something.”
Alfonso Cuarón talked about working with George Clooney and Sandra Bullock in Gravity. “It’s easier when they’re separated,” he said, laughing. “When they’re together they team against you. The one thing they had all the time, it was like a competition of impersonating my accent.” When asked who was better he said “They sucked. They’re funny though. They play me as a Cuban, not as a Mexican.”
When discussing the making of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Webb said Peter Parker, more than any other superhero, is “so relatable, so grounded, so basic in his problems. He has to pay his bills, he has to do his laundry, he doesn’t know how to do his laundry…and then he has to fight gods.”
A long discussion started with Wright mentioning the fight scenes in The World’s End. He feels it’s important to make the fight scenes clearly show that it’s really the actors doing the stunts. He felt all the actors he was working with (Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine, Eddie Marsan and Rosamund Pike) were up to the challenge, and trained with a stunt team. He also enjoyed torturing them a little: at one point he set all the the thirty- and forty-something main characters to fight against teenage stunt-men. “And the 15-year-olds completely kicked their asses.”
Moderator Anthony Breznican pointed out that in order to show that a fight scene is really being done by the actor and not a double, it often has to be one long unbroken shot, which is always exciting. Wright agreed, adding that when you do one of those unbroken takes, “you get a buzz from the crew. Everybody gets really invested in the shot because they can see it happening, and if you do a sequence that’s in one take, you’ll notice everybody gathers around the monitors going ‘Did we get it? Does it work?'”
Cuarón added that the reason why those unbroken scenes work is because “people have a sense of real time. Whenever you cut, even if you’re not conscious of the cut, in the back of your mind you know that time has been manipulated. And when you do a single shot, you’re observing everything in real time, and your engagement with it changes because of that.”
Webb mentioned that the long unbroken shot has to be done as a part of the story, not as a way of showing off. He felt that when it was done in Cuarón’s Children of Men, the unbroken shots flowed very naturally, “the entire attitude of the film visually was based on that sense of real time and that grounding in temporal space, which was pretty extraordinary.”
In closing, Wright said when people ask him why it’s taking so long to make Ant Man “my new answer is I wanted to do it with 2015 effects and not 2005 effects, it’ll be better for the wait.”
When asked what his dream project is, Mark Webb said very wearily “I want to finish The Amazing Spider-Man 2.” He also said in all seriousness he’d like to do some musicals.
Alfonso Cuarón said, to enthusiastic applause, that he’d like to do a horror movie.
Photography by Hillary Papirio