By Iain Blair
Director Chris McKay first made a name for himself in animation, helming over 50 episodes of Robot Chicken. Next, he directed The Lego Batman Movie, the second feature in the Lego film franchise, after serving as animation director and editor on the first one.
Director Chris McKay on set with Sam Richardson
Now he’s made the leap into live-action filmmaking with the sci-fi, action-adventure The Tomorrow War, which kicks off when a group of time travelers arrive from the year 2051 to deliver an urgent message: Thirty years in the future, mankind is losing a global war against a deadly alien species known as “white spikes.” The only hope for survival is for soldiers and civilians from the present to be transported to the future and join the fight. Among those recruited is high school teacher Dan Forester (Chris Pratt). Determined to save the world for his young daughter, Dan teams up with a brilliant military scientist (Yvonne Strahovski) and his estranged father (J.K. Simmons) in a quest to rewrite the fate of the planet.
McKay assembled a creative team that included DP Larry Fong, editors Roger Barton, ACE and Garret Elkins, ACE, and VFX supervisor James E. Price. I spoke with the director about making the film, dealing with the VFX and his love of post.
Live action is very different from animation. How did you prepare for it?
Very different, but there’s similarities as well as big differences. When you’re building animation reels, you’re doing animatics and layout. And in live action, you’re still doing some version of animatics with storyboards and doing previz, which is layout. I like playing around with all that stuff.
I have a team that helps with all the previz, so we can see how it will come together, and I want to show the crew what we’ll be doing. The thing is, even on a big movie like this, you never have enough money or time, so all that prep and communication is so helpful. And there are huge differences — in animation you can control everything, but in live action it feels like you can control nothing. You have to think spontaneously and adapt constantly to weather, logistics and so on while you’re shooting. That’s why I love post so much.
This was visually ambitious. How early on did you incorporate post and VFX?
Right away. Animation is all post, basically, and post is huge in a heavy-VFX movie like this. The first two people we hired were VFX supervisor Jamie Price and VFX producer Randy Starr. They were both there in Iceland for our very first scout because they were such a huge part of the whole process while they were designing the white spikes aliens. Then they were on set for the shoot, and if I did a splinter unit to capture something specific, they would oversee that and stay on to clean up plates. There are a million plates on a film like this.
How tough was it shooting on location in Iceland?
Very tough. We shot on this remote glacier, which took three types of transportation and two hours to get there. All the crew and equipment had to be moved there, including a massive techno crane that we had to build skis for just to drag it up there, which was a very big deal. And it’s dangerous and freezing, but also a lot of fun and we got amazing footage you just can’t fake on a soundstage with greenscreen. We wrapped just before COVID hit.
Where did you do the post?
We began at Fotokem who set up an office for us with all the Avid Media Composers, but a month or so later everything shut down and then all post was done remotely, and everyone worked from home using Evercast. And what we figured out in this post-COVID world is that there are definitely meetings you need to go to, and then there are the ones you can do on Zoom.
Didn’t your editor Roger Barton co-found Evercast?
He did, and he was instrumental in developing the user interface and making it work well for editors and directors, and it was a lifesaver. Not only could we see each other’s cuts but it let us communicate with the studio and show them stuff. We were also able to talk to composer Lorne Balfe and so on.
It’s such a great platform and it helped us so many ways in post as it has brilliant sound and there’s this immediacy to it, so you get instant feedback on ADR or from the studio and producers. There’s the face-to-face component, and you can draw on the screen. I used every tool it has and it’s a really robust system. Then we did some VFX reviews on CineSync, and in the end, after testing and so on began, we were able to set up a screening space to view some of the big VFX shots as they came in.
The film was edited by Roger and Garret Elkins. What was the process like?
I’ve worked with Garret since Robot Chicken days, so he’s really involved in building animatics and previz. Then as we got deeper into post we were dealing with not only figuring the story out — the tone and all that — but also a million scheduling things. You have all the VFX and all the vendors, which have to be fed, so it really helps to have two editors with different skill sets that you can assign stuff to, and the whole first act has limited VFX, so there’s all the comedy and drama to deal with too.
Roger came on as the primary editor, and he’s a brilliant, highly experienced guy, and Garret’s got great comedy timing, and I really trust his instincts, so it was a great team.
Talk about dealing with all the VFX and creating the membrane and white spikes aliens? Who did what?
We had so many VFX shots that we had to divide up sections of the movie. Weta was the main vendor and took on most of the latter half of the movie. They created most of the VFX and built and rigged the aliens and did a lot of stuff for the Iceland scenes and inside the spaceship, and then stuff we did in Miami. Then we also had Framestore, Method, Proof and Luma do a fair amount of work, along with Twisted Media and Connect, and sometimes it would be, “They’re doing the hallway, and someone else is doing the stairwell,” and then it’s all pieced together. Then there would be stuff like the lab, which was practical with a lot of greenscreen work for backgrounds. Proof and The Third Floor did the previz and postviz, and Clear Angle did the Lidar.
The film has a great vintage look. Talk about the DI and working with colorist David Cole at Fotokem.
I’m glad you noticed because that’s exactly the look I wanted. David has an amazing eye, and a brilliant sense of color and contrast, and is a real hard worker with great creative instincts. I hadn’t worked with him before, but Larry Fong had, and we shot this anamorphic with lenses that were not coated, so you get a bit more lens flare, which I like. David emphasized some of those elements, along with a bit of grain and that old-school projector look I wanted, plus and a million subtle little touches to give the sense that it’s a film from a different era.
Given your long career in animation, getting to direct this original sci-fi epic must have been dream come true?
Yes, because it was films like Star Wars, Terminator, Raiders of the Lost Ark and so on that made me want to be a filmmaker — big genre movies. So the chance to do this, working with a big movie star like Chris and with the huge scale and lots of VFX – and also great characters and a big heart — was exactly a dream come true.
What’s next?
I’m working on Renfield for Universal. It’s a story about Dracula’s assistant set in the present, and it’s a story about co-dependency. It’s horror, comedy and action. It even has a musical number and is somewhere between Deadpool and Evil Dead 2. It’s gonna be fun!
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.
