Vincenzo Natali's sci-fi flick Splice, out June 4, is intense, enthralling and shocking. When scientists Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) take their genetic tinkering to the next level by adding human DNA to a veritable cocktail of animal genes, the resulting creature is a hybrid with triple-jointed legs, three fingers on each hand and retractable wings. Director Natali and VFX supervisor Bob Monroe spoke with Popular Mechanics at the Sundance Film Festival—where the film premiered—about genetic jargon, on-set science advisors and the difficulties of creating wings.
Popular Mechanics: Where did you get the idea for Splice?
Vincenzo Natali: Splice, weirdly enough, was inspired by a mouse. It was a mouse that, by all appearances, had a human ear on its back. Remember that? I found the image so arresting and shocking and intriguing that I instantly felt I wanted to make a movie about genetic engineering. I must point out that the experiment that produced the mouse was not a product of genetic engineering, but it sure looked like it!
PM: You were developing Splice for a really long time—almost a decade. Were you aware as you were trying to get this to screen that science was changing and that what you had imagined was coming to pass in some ways?
VN: Yes. I was very sensitive to it because my co-writer Antoinette Terry and I worked with a real geneticist while we were writing the script. We kept coming to him and saying, "Can we do this? Is this realistic? Is this possible?" To my shock he would almost always say yes and then top it off with something even more incredible. What I gradually realized was within bioengineering there is a pretty wide bandwidth to what can be done. Sometimes it's hard to say, "No, that could never, ever happen."
As much as I could, I felt it was important to adhere to the real science. At least give a flavor of the reality and the real science. I avoided, as much as I could, making a Hollywood version of a genetics lab. Real genetics labs look like high school labs.
PM: You had someone helping you with the script, but did you send Adrien and Sarah to any labs to do research?
VN: Totally. They both spent substantial time in a real genetics lab. We had a guy on set named George Charames, who was our technical consultant. He`s a geneticist who I have to say, in the best possible way, is very similar to Adrien Brody's character in the film. In fact, when I first met George, he was wearing a shirt that said `born to clone' and I put that in the movie.
George actually contributed a lot of technical dialogue. We took liberties with some of the banter because we felt, frankly, that it is a movie and the reality is that when geneticists talk about genetics it's a little boring. And not in a way that I think would have given us any more of a sense of reality. We tried to make it in our own kind of obtuse way. There is some poetic license taken.
PM: There are some similarities between Dren and Fred and Ginger, the first spliced creatures that Clive and Elsa create. Did you ask George what animals scientists usually use when they are splicing things together?
VN: Yes. I was shocked that human beings share a lot of DNA with fruit flies, for example. When it comes to life on this planet, it's surprising how little difference there is when you get down to the actual genetic makeup of each species.
With Dren, the creature, and with Ginger and Fred, I did not make that a real consideration because the notion is that Clive and Elsa are not combining two or three things; they are combining ten things. Also, in the logic of Splice, one plus one equals three. There is a dialectic between the different interspecies genes and that you get something that is greater than the sum of its parts. And that is what Dren is. It gave us more creative license to do more stuff with Dren. I never wanted her to be like a mermaid; a girl with a fishtail. I didn't want to explicitly see what animal each part came from.
PM: When you were working on creative design, what were you going for? What did you draw from?
VN: I was going for reality. Our prime directive was to make a creature that we could believe really exists. And the way to do that, I felt, was to be subtractive. Most movie monsters are additive. What I wanted to do with Dren, in her later stages, was to change the human form in subtle ways. I felt the small changes would actually be more shocking than the big ones. If you make a small change to somebody's face, it is much more jarring than some kind of gross deformation.
I wanted Dren to have a biological integrity to her. To accomplish that, I worked with designers who didn't come from the film world. They were actually people who came from a fine arts background who were very knowledgeable about the human anatomy and animal anatomy . Even the average person knows when they see something that doesn't work in the physical world. They just intuitively know it. That's fine in a fantasy film, but this movie attempted to be a few more degrees closer to reality than that.
PM: Can you talk about the research done for the film? How did you come up with the final look?
VN: This film took over a decade to make. Ten years ago, I did a visual-effects test with a different company than the one that actually worked on Splice. We did a complete version of the adult Dren, which wasn't bad, but we put the actress in crazy giant elevator shoes. The end result was she moved in this clunky way. And ultimately, we realized that less was more. So when Delphine Chanéac, who plays adult Dren, was brought on to the film we just put her in high heels, 3-inch heels, and she moved totally gracefully and comfortably in those heels. And that was what it was all about: let's make it feel natural. And then we did other things, when working with Dren's thumb and three fingers.
PM: I was amazed at how real her hands looked. The detail...
VN: That's because they are! We had to develop special techniques for removing Delphine's finger. That is really her hand and that is what makes it such a jarring thing. It's totally real. Another thing I should point out is that everything on Splice was done with off-the-shelf software and techniques, so it was really about the application of existing tools. We couldn't afford to, nor did we really need to be, James Cameron in our approach to creating new tools.
I also worked with a company called KMB, which is a great makeup effects company, and we did a great deal of puppet stuff and aesthetic work so I always feel that, especially in a movie like this, digital effects work best when you have something to start with. When they enhance something that has already been photographed by the camera.
PM: Why did you choose to combine techniques then to go 100 percent CG?
VN: I think it may be a cliché but it's always about using the right tools for the job. And sometimes totally CG is the way to go and we used certain stages of Dren when she is completely digital. I mean all we had was a macquette, like a fully painted, sculpted version of her that we would use as reference. We would actually photograph it on the set as reference for the animators, but there are points where she is totally digital. There was no puppet that could do what that digital puppet could. But again, we had something real on the set and I think it helps any animator. I'm sure any lighting compositor will tell you that having real-world references with real objects, on the real set, with the same light, is invaluable to them. It's very hard to re-create that after the fact.
Popular Mechanics: One interesting thing about the Splice movie is that, going in, Vincenzo wanted a creature that didn't look like anything we've seen, but was still familiar. How did you approach the making of adult Dren?
Bob Monroe: What we were really after—with the exception the legs, which were very obviously different from human legs—were subtle changes. The eyes are slightly unnaturally wide apart. She only has three fingers. The tail is another big departure, obviously. But it was always the rule between myself, Vincenzo and CG supervisor Terry Bradley—who invented most of the VFX techniques we used techniques for Dren—was that even though the tail is not a human thing, its actions are subtle enough that it doesn't draw attention to itself. So I guess that was the key: to do things in a way, either through design or through action, that were subtle and just off-putting enough to make you uncomfortable.
PM: What kind of R&D did you guys do for Dren?
BM: We had years of R&D. We started working on this movie back in 2000, from a visual effects standpoint. Then two years ago I got a call from Vincenzo saying it was all back on, and that we were going to have about eight months of R&D before we started shooting the movie. So we had plenty of time to do proof of concept tests and prototypes, and have animators work on walk cycles and footfalls, and what we were going to have the actress do when she got to set. For what we did, you couldn't have a three month prep period and expect to be ready, which is what's typical.
PM: Dren's eyes, in particular, were really great. Didn't you transfer the adult actress's eyes onto the little girl playing toddler Dren?
BM: We actually used two completely different techniques. For both Abigail Chu, who played toddler Dren, and Delphine Cheneac, who played adult Dren, the eyes were only made possible by actually scanning their heads in 3D. At that point, the 3D model of Abigail was manipulated into the creature that you see on screen. And the only thing that's real on Abigail is effectively her mouth area. From the bridge of the nose up, including the cheeks and ears, that's all computer generated. But nothing on Delphine's head is computer generated. Instead, we used our own imagery on the 3D model. We had tracking markers on Delphine when she was on-set. We filmed her, then brought her back to [VFX house] C.O.R.E., and analyzed the data so we could track the emotion on her face. Then we took that 3D head, tracked it to her real head, projected the image from the plate back on that CG head, and moved the eyes. And then it was composited. We were using the real footage from the camera, mapped onto a CG model of her head, and then the eyes were moved on the CG model. And that worked flawlessly.
But child Dren was different. We had to track her face, just like we did with Delphine, but the eyes were computer generated eyes. After we edited little Abigail's scenes together, Delphine was flown back in from Paris, and she sat in our theater at C.O.R.E. and watched Abigail's performance. Then she moved her eyes the way she thought the creature would move its eyes at the time. [VFX company] Image Metrics videotaped her from the front and the side, took that videotape back down to LA and, through computer software, analyzed the motion of the eyes to create animation channels out of it, that we then applied to the CG eyes on the child's head. So it's Delphine's eye performance, effectively motion captured, and put on the CG eyes of the creature. We called it Eye ADR.
PM: As you mentioned, Dren only has three fingers, and her hands look great. Incredibly real. How did you guys remove the pinky finger?
BM: What we found was that any time there was a situation when the hand was facing away from camera, the pinky was easy to remove, because we didn't have to sew the side up. When there were shots, like when she's dancing with Clive, when the hand is prominently featured with the pinky toward the camera, we had to figure out how to close that seam up when we took that finger off. What we decided to do was tie the pinky and ring fingers together with green tape, and then shrink the girth and sort of digitally blend them together so it looked like one finger, and left that side of the hand intact. We also then discovered that in shots where the hand was facing away from camera, it was actually better not to tape the fingers together but to spread them apart, because it was easy to lop the pinky off.
PM: The baby Dren was completely digital. Did you have anything on-set that the actors could use for reference?
BM: Yes. We had a blue puppet of baby Dren that was hollow in the back, so the puppeteer could put his hand in—and I think sometimes Sarah even put her hand in while she was holding it. That gave both Sarah and Adrian something to look at, but there are shots where they're trying to feed it, and Sarah grabs it by the cheek, and Adrian tries to put the syringe in its mouth. So when we replaced the blue puppet with CG baby Dren, we got real shadows. We got all the information we needed to make it look realistic.
PM: What would you say was the most difficult thing that you had to tackle from a VFX standpoint?
BM: The most R&D went into how the wings collapsed. It only happens twice in the movie, and it happens pretty quickly. We were pretty much in agreement on the shape of the wings before we started shooting the movie. We never hit, until very late in the process, the look of the wings — the veining, the glassy quality in the areas between the veins. That finally came about probably two months before we finished visual effects. The animation was finally solved the day we delivered the movie. We knew, months in advance, that the wings were going to be what held us up, because everything else had some sort of basis in reality. You take a finger off, you kind of know what that looks like. Even the three-jointed legs, in the animal kingdom, you can see some reference. But who's seen wings come out of arms and then retract? There's no real reference in nature that we could have referred to.
