By Iain Blair
The new Warner Bros. film King Richard is getting a lot of attention this awards season, especially for its star, Will Smith. In this true story, Smith plays Richard Williams, the driven father of Venus and Serena, who had the unwavering belief that his daughters could be tennis legends.
Director Reinaldo Marcus Green (right) with Will Smith on set.
The film was helmed by indie director Reinaldo Marcus Green, whose credits include directing episodes of the Netflix series Top Boy, and his sophomore feature, Joe Bell, starring Mark Wahlberg.
The behind-the-scenes creative team includes director of photography Robert Elswit (There Will Be Blood) and editor Pamela Martin (The Fighter). I talked to Green, who’s also getting a lot of awards attention, about making the film, post, editing and VFX.
Fair to say that, coming from your indie background, this was a big step up onto center court?
The scale and scope, and working with Will. It was huge. But I was fortunate to have taken my first project, Monsters and Men, to the Sundance Lab, where I met Robert Elswit and Pam Martin. When this film came along, I reached out to them, and they came on board early on — during the months we spent on pre-prep, even before prep. That was so helpful, having my DP and editor there right from the very start.
How early on did you integrate post and any VFX?
We had a lot more visual effects than you’d think, so we began dealing with all that very early on in prep. Part of that was dealing with the girls — they had to play different periods growing up. We have a big time jump of four years at one point, so we had to use VFX to make that seamless.
We used a combination of VFX and body doubles to create realistic tennis sequences — the girls we cast weren’t tennis players, so that needed a lot of work in terms of just dealing with all the tennis shots and so on.
I assume you also did some previz?
We did, and I’d never done previz before, so it was a bit of a learning curve. I had worked with storyboard artists before, so it was just a different way of doing that. There was a lot of discussion between my DP, me and VFX supervisor Jeremy Burns because the big thing was trying to figure out just how to shoot all the tennis.
That was very complicated, and we studied every tennis movie we could get our hands on and planned it all out in terms of the shots. Where are you on the court? What lenses do you use? How do you make it feel like you are part of the action but not a voyeur? So all the previz was crucial to that, and we used that as proof of concept to show the studio how we’d shoot all the big tennis sequences. All the VFX had to make all that stuff seamless, and then when COVID hit, we needed even more VFX work in terms of creating extras and crowds. We literally shot the final scene with just 100 extras in the stadium before COVID shut us down, and the stadium seats over 7,000, so it took a lot of VFX work to fill it up in post.
Tell us about post. Was it remote because of COVID?
We did it mainly in LA, including the edit, and it wasn’t all remote. I was able to sit down with my editor the entire time; we had to get tested weekly. Pam had a much more streamlined process than usual, as all her assistants were remote.
How did you work together, and what were the main editing challenges?
She was key to this whole film. She’d cut two films — The Fighter and Little Miss Sunshine — that are both family- and character-driven pieces, which I felt were comparable to this story. She was the right editor at the right time, and she was amazing.
I’ve seen my first cuts before, and that’s usually when I would think, “That’s it, I’m never going to work again.” All you see are the mistakes. But she got this into really great shape before we even began editing. The hardest challenge was cracking the beginning of the film because how it was written and how we shot it were different from how it ended up. We had to find it, so what you see is a bit of a recreation of the material we shot. It introduced you to Richard’s character and the whole journey the family’s about to go on more effectively by shifting some things around.
You said there were quite a few visual effects shots. Who did them and what was entailed?
In the end, we had several VFX vendors, including Luma, Lola, Crafty Apes and Static Chair Productions. Dealing with all the VFX was a bit of a learning curve, but you have to be receptive to the process. For instance, Lola did a lot of the face replacements, and they did a fantastic job, but when you see some of the early drafts, you’re like, “How’s this going to work? I’m not seeing what I need to see.” But you have to trust the process, even though it takes so long to create shots like that, or crowd scenes. You don’t get to actually see the finished VFX till far later in post. So the learning curve was more about patience than anything technical, and all the vendors really delivered.
What was the most difficult VFX shot and why?
It was definitely some of the moving tennis shots in the final sequence. That was very tricky because you have a lot of kinetic energy, face replacement VFX and crowd VFX, and all that had to be combined into seamless shots. It’s hard not to cringe when you know it’s not real, but that’s just us — audiences won’t even notice. Another very hard VFX shot was where Venus throws up a ball, and it comes down three years later. We did a lot in-camera where you’re going up on one girl and coming down on another, and it’s also a close-up, so we spent a lot of time getting it just right. All the VFX shots came in after we’d locked picture, so that was tricky too.
What about the DI? Who was the colorist, and how closely did you work with them and the DP?
It was Stefan Sonnenfeld at Company 3, and we spent a lot of time on the look, as ’80s colors can be very bright and vibrant, so we took some whites down so it wasn’t so distracting. Overall, we went for a warm look. Stefan did his pass, and then we went frame by frame.
Robert is a stickler for seasons and time of day and the way light changes, and he’s a master at all that, so he and Stefan did a lot of tweaking, but it was so subtle. Robert was actually in the UK on another film, so all the DI was done remotely, and we’d be piped in from New York.
This isn’t just an inspirational sports film, is it, so what sort of film did you set out to make?
No, it’s not just a sports drama. It’s a story about family and belief, and I set out to make it as personal a film as I could, as I related so much to the story. I’m the same age as Serena, and I grew up in a very similar neighborhood and as an athlete with a very unconventional father, who in his mind was raising a major leaguer. I spent the first third of my life on a baseball diamond. I was fascinated by the time period of the film, as most people probably don’t know anything about Venus and Serena’s childhood, and I understood the family dynamic.
What did Will Smith bring to it?
Everything — from his charisma and humor to the way he also related to the character, being a dad himself with kids who are very successful. Richard is so eccentric and complicated, and Will captured all of that.
Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.
