Interview: Christian Volckman

The year is 2054. The city, Paris. Walled off from the rest of the world, Paris has been expanded in every direction—up, down, and inward—but out, resulting in a futuristic maze-like metropolis superimposed over the classical architecture for which the city is world famous. A network of streets and passageways (and also waterways) crisscross the airspace between street level and the heights of the city’s towers. Glass enclosed shopping centers operate below ground. Images on billboards move and speak, advertising the sale of eternal youth and beauty. Among these streets a woman in her early twenties is kidnapped outside a dance club in an intense, stylish, and bizarre sequence that projects through the windows of your mind like a scene from a David Lynch remake of Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train animated by Frank Miller.

The title of the film is Renaissance. Distributed across North America by Miramax Films, Renaissance is the feature film debut from French director Christian Volckman. The plot centers around the kidnapping mentioned above, and the detective, Karas (Daniel Craig, who will be seen in the role of James Bond this winter in Casino Royale) charged with finding her. It is a hybrid live-action/animated film that is bound to remind audiences of both this year’s A Scanner Darklyand last summer’s Sin City, though the filmmaking/animation techniques employed in the making of all three films are different beasts. Sin City was shot entirely with green screen, A Scanner Darkly shot on digital video and then animated over using a computerized rotoscoping technique, and Renaissance uses a motion-capture technique (Volckman explains a bit about the technical elements of this process in the interview below).

Renaissance is the latest in a string of neo-noir films released over the past month during the transitional period between the summer and fall seasons. First there was Crank, starring Jason Statham as a hit man infected with a virus that will kill him if his adrenaline level drops, which is essentially a hyper-charged version of the 1950 Rudolph Mate directed D.O.A. (an acronym for “dead on arrival,” this is actually a remake of a 1931 German film by the title of The Man who Sought his own Killing). Then there was the true-crime drama Hollywoodland, based on the investigation into the death of actor George Reeves, who played the title role in the 1950s Superman television series. The Black Dahlia, adapted from a novel by James Ellroy (who also wrote L.A. Confidential), revolves around two detectives investigating the gruesome murder of a young woman against the sunny backdrop of 1940s Los Angeles.

A brief tangent on film noir: Though many use the term “film noir” to designate a specific kind of film, noir is not technically considered a genre, but a movement. Scholars argue that noir films lack the stable features that adjust over time that defines a genre, and consider noir a chapter in film history occurring between 1941 through the late 1950s. There is historical evidence to back this up: no particular studio focused on producing noir films, noir was diffused across the industry; and some noir films are considered four star movies, while others considered B movies; no single director or group of directors dominated or defined noir, yet nearly every major director made a noir film (Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, Howard Hawks). Scholars see noir as a product of the social influence after the end of WWII, during the first decade of the cold war. Everything after 1958 is considered neo-noir.

Read enough interviews with directors and you get the idea that a lot, if not most, filmmakers are fans of film noir, and the influence of this movement is apparent in their work. But as much as filmmakers draw influence and pay homage, there is a noticeable difference, in terms of both visual and dramatic content, between the films in the 1940s and ‘50s and the noir-like films that came after—films in the 60s and beyond are just not the same, though a few have come close. Renaissance is certainly one of them. Non-transparent lighting for black and white film is pretty much a lost art at this point in history, but director Volckman has created the next best thing with Renaissance’s two-tone animation—the film is literally black and white. There is very little gray, and only a handful of color shots (and only during a particular sequence). That the film was animated and not shot on film stock might have been a problem had the film been set in the 1940s, but the high-tech look of the film blends well with the high-tech futuristic world of 2054 Paris.

The plot too, is pure noir, though Volckman and the screenwriters have replaced the Cold War’s moral/social dilemmas and paranoia over nuclear warfare with present day concerns over genetic and biological engineering. The effect is the same. In the 1940s scientists played god to destroy life, now they play god to create life, and both concepts are equally terrifying. Karas is a classic noir archetype, a detective both hardened and haunted by his past, driven to succeed by a psychological obligation to protect innocents rather than his oath to uphold the law. He is tough, violent, and willing to take insane risks. And Craig should make a great Bond.

Volckman has directed a unique, ambitious, and very entertaining debut film. Knowing that this is his first film, I had to wonder if he was not a little insane to take on a project of this size his first time out. But his skill, visually, technically, and dramatically, is obvious from the opening moments of the film, and Renaissance will please both classic noir fans and sci-fi fans alike.

I had the opportunity to speak with the filmmaker while he was in New York City for the opening weekend of Renaissance.

Jameson Kowalczyk: My first question is about the animation process. Did you use green screen, rotoscoping? How did you animate the footage?
Christian Volckman: It’s a motion capture film. It’s all 3-D models, and it’s animated by the actors. Are you aware of the motion capture, I mean the technical part of it?

JK: Could you explain it a bit?
CV: The actors come in this kind of set, which is just a rectangle, it’s about a six meter by ten meter square rectangle, and there are twenty four cameras that are shooting, and all the cameras have infrared on them. And the actors come in this rectangle and they wear a kind of swimsuit, it’s very close to their body, and on that swimsuit you put some little balls—on the main joints, you know, like the knees the wrists, the head, the hips—the main twisting points of the body. You put these little white balls on them, and the twenty-four cameras only pick up the balls. So they act, they do whatever hey have to do, like run or talk to someone, whatever they have to do, it’s kind of normal acting. Then the cameras analyze the movements from the balls into the computer, so you have the movements of those little balls. And once those movements are captured into the machine, you can make a 3-D model work. That’s how you animate a 3-D model. The actors are pretty much the center point of it all, that’s where all the information comes from, and the 3-D models are pretty much the same proportion as the actor is, so you do not have any difference from the character. The only difference is, their faces are different. The weight, the size, the proportion is exactly the same, the actor has the same exact proportion as the 3-D model.

JK: What influenced the visual style of the film? Was there any influence drawn from non-film sources, like video games or comic books?
CV: Actually, I’m more into cinema. I don’t know, I can talk to you about Citizen Kane by Orson Welles, which is very high contrast.

JK: You’re a fan of film noir?
CV: And film of course, The Big Sleep, and a lot of films from that period where they were trying to, there were all those guys, the cops, the girls, and they were all in this urban environment, with this very intense kind of drama going on.

JK: How did this become an animation project? Do you have a background in animation?
CV: I have a background in graphic—kind of research, painting and drawing. I’m not really completely obsessed by animation, I mean I like it, but it was more the technology that I found that was interesting to make these kind of abstract films, where you can really explore a world. But it’s this new kind of era where you can pretty much do anything you want right now. And it’s just related to your imagination, you know?

JK: How long did production take?
CV: It took three years, once we had the money.

JK: How much time was spent in post-production?
CV: Well actually, these kind of films are all post-production. Pretty much you spend six to eight months—once you have the script, that’s the first thing, it was probably about one year of scriptwriting. Then once you have the script, you spend six to eight months storyboarding, then another six months to do the design, because you have to do this work in process where you find the design of the characters, buildings, any kind of props. Yeah, that takes six months, to do the research on the buildings, and also six months to do the storyboards, because everything has to be very precise, because the people that come in after you are going to be influenced by what you did in the storyboard. So that takes a very long time. Then you go into this 3-D model process where you put all the drawings into volume, you put the models into your software, and then you start doing casting, and…. After you do the storyboard and the design, it’s all post-production, it takes two years pretty much, and in that two years you have three months shooting with the actors.

JK: Did you do the storyboarding yourself?
CV: Oh yeah, I did a lot of it.

JK: Are there any differences between the French version and the English version besides the language and the faces of the characters?
CV: No, not at all. In the animation world you don’t have any kind of shots that you’ve created that you throw away. You know what I mean? It all had to be predetermined a long time ago so that people can work on it. It is such that in the end in the editing room the idea of throwing half of it away or any of it away, we did not have the money to do that. So it’s pretty much everything that you see onscreen was made to be in the film. There’s nothing we left on the side or we could not edit another film with what we have. I mean we could, a shorter one of course, but not a longer one.

JK: How did you become attached to this project, how did you find the story and the screenplay, did you come up with it, co-write it?
CV: Well it was team work. We got together with two screenwriters and the guy who built the studio to make this film, which is called Apitude studio in France. And then we worked together for a very long time and influenced each other very much. Those kinds of projects are always team work, it’s difficult to kind of separate things, because the scriptwriters have to be aware of the technology and the design and everything, and the director to be aware of the technical part and the story part because it’s such a visual kind of film that it had to be all interwoven and mixed together. And that’s also very European, it’s always…. You never get a script and then direct it, I mean it never happens, you always kind of work with the scriptwriters and everyone.

JK: How do you pick people to work with on a project?
CV: On their skill [laughs].

JK: Is there a certain personality type you look for though? How long have you known the people you worked with on this film?
CV: Oh, well some of them, like the producer, I’ve known him since he was a child. I mean out parents know each other for a very long time, so it is very funny that we got together and worked on the same show on different parts, he’s on the production part and I’m on the directing/artistic part. Some of them, it’s very much we just had to find them for the project, you know? There’s a little bit of everybody in this film. Some people it’s very family kind of work, and some people it’s just we need them to work on the film for two months, or some others for two years, so it’s very different. There’s pretty much three to four hundred people that worked on the film, and the end credits, there’s six hundred people on the film. [laughs] You can find any kind of relationship in there.

JK: Do you have another project you’re working on now?
CV: Yeah. I’m thinking very hard about it, because this film was made pretty much only on passion and devotion, and kind of self—a lot of self-involvement. I mean a lot of people put in a lot of work into that. But now that we made one, we just know a bit more about the business, so once you know more about the business, and know more about the audience, you make difference choices about matters. This one was made kind of on an unconscious feeling.

JK: What was the film’s budget?
CV: 14 million euro, which is like sixteen million dollars. But it’s not that much for an animated film like that. And of course no money went into any kind of actors pocket. It’s just all put into people’s hard work for a long time. If you would add the total amount of money a company spent in three years on working with people. It’s like a three hundred people company working for three years. In the end it makes a lot of money, but it is really money that goes into the hard work of people.

JK: How did you get into this, how did you become a filmmaker?
CV: Actually I didn’t know I wanted to be a director until I made my first short film. My first short film was an eight minute mixed-media film with blue screen and actors, painting over, and it took me three years to make an eight minute film. I was more into art forms, like into modern art kind of stuff, more experimental kind of stuff than storytelling. And finally when you say, “Okay what am I going to do next?” Do I stay into the experimental kind of environment, but if you do you won’t be able to make it a feature film. Or do I go into the long feature film stuff. But then you need a story, you need a lot of money, you need more people. And it happened because we met the right guys and it was teamwork and all the stuff like that. But I mean I don’t know, I’m always between the experimental and the kind of audience driven or character driven film. I’m just into those kind of dilemmas now, still.