37th Montreal Festival of Nouveau Cinema: Jean Marc Vallee’s Young Victoria

What happens when you don’t have access to a specific location for your set in the 18th century film production? Or you want to transport the backdrop of the ocean against the 16th century castle? Or you found a great setting but want to get rid of the telephone polls in the backdrop?

Day 1 of the festival began with a little advertised, beginning of the afternoon roundtable discussion on digital film with two of Quebec’s most prolific contemporary filmmakers and one of Hollywood’s secret weapons in the digital visual effects medium. Montreal-based Fake Studio’s director of visual effects maestro Marc Côté brought along examples of its collaborations in works from Denis Villeneuve’s exquisite short film/2008 Cannes winner Next Floor (which I’ll be discussing somewhere down the road) and a sampling of portions of renderings and footage from Jean Marc Vallée’s highly anticipated The Young Victoria. For those who aren’t familiar with digital EFX house, Fake Studios has worked on and with Marty Scorsese’s The Aviator and Darren Aronofksy’s The Fountain, and not to mention, Vallee’s breakout, international hit C.R.A.Z.Y which sadly never had a theatrical showing in the U.S due to a soundtrack (integral to many of the film’s scenes) that would have cost quite the penny for an art-house release. 

Digital film tools and the technical artists that operate them are the solution. When I first saw the listing for this conference and saw the Vallée would be on hand to discuss his latest project (a 1838 set love story), I began to wonder what kind of work might have gone into the picture – would there be heavy CGI sequences like that infamous beach shot in Joe Wright’s Atonement? Côté and Vallée reminded me that this is the kind of work that can make an otherwise costly and perhaps unattainable shot into reality. This technology is just as much about the crazy 3D mapping and green screen digital compositions as it about reducing costs and filling out a scene or adding the sort of detail that the viewer isn’t supposed to take notice.

Whether  one shoots with a 7 million (C.R.A.Z.Y) or 35 million dollar production (The Young Victoria), the real money saving comes by strategizing during the pre-production process. I didn’t point my camera upwards on the big screen or else, I’d have been escorted out, but I managed to get a glimpse into this process with a fine storyboard sample of a portion of the film where Emily Blunt’s Victoria receives a blessing and crown at the Westminster Abbey – a great montage of shots where the camera never once makes eye contact or shows the facile expressions from Victoria and instead, focuses on a partitioned reaction from the crowd and their gaze upon her.  

Vallée also showed how layering can work as cited in the example of a simple medium shot of Blunt, inside a horse-drawn carriage with the camera picking up on the scenery in the window seat’s reflection. The French Canadian director wanted a landscape that included the ocean and green foliage which can be easily done when you compress three layers into one. Since this small event was about the digital process, Vallée didn’t go into further details about the production or release date, but I’d read somewhere that he was working with Sigur Rós on the film’s score.

Villeneuve, who has already completed his work on Polytechnique and is in pre-production for an epic film that takes place during a couple of centuries back is looking forward to looking into this process once again in order to meet a considerably less imposing budget. Next Floor, is a great example of how the above mentioned technology can take all the usual 35mm shot elements and then add the weight of special effects to push a tale beyond simple constraints and into a little fantasy. The short film about a group of carnivores (think a Roy Andersson film merged with perhaps Greenaway’s The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover) sitting at a dinner table and tipping the scales enough to bring the floor into collapse…only to continue the process until they reach the bottom floor.