Rian Johnson Quotes

I love CG - it's a great tool. I just don't think you should use it to replace reality; you should use it to augment and enhance. Do matte paintings, do composites, do replications, stuff like that, but you're taking something real and working with that as opposed to trying to fake it from scratch. The human brain can tell the difference.

I don't know, I'm still a little bit like, when you blend CGI well with real life, it's impressive, but if you remove real life completely, I still get pulled out of the movie a bit.

Because Naughty Dog relies on their facial team to hand animate the faces of each game character and they do such a remarkable job, I think you can be more realistic with your acting. It gives the story and what's happening to you the feeling that it's a game.

There's something known as the Uncanny Valley where things look a little too real and you're not quite sure what you're looking at. It becomes weird like it did in 'The Polar Express,' where the eyes seem so realistic, and yet you know it's animated.

Polar Express is not an attempt to do animation. It is a technology-based film.

I once said that CGI makes you less inventive. At the time I was bemoaning the loss of the practical stunt. If a stunt can be done practically and safely, I'd rather do it old-style.

Get the shading right, the lighting right, and there are things you can do to make the CGI look more real. People end up going crazy and give themselves a little too much freedom in how they use CGI, and if you overuse it, it draws attention to itself.

It's always fun when you're doing the CGI stuff, to actually get to work with someone who is real, who's there.

If you stood me in a costume next to a computer graphic of the same-looking character, I think there would be a difference. And many movie fans I've spoken to would rather see an actor in a costume than CG.

If you think about it, you can have the best CGI, but you can always tell that it is CGI. Your brain can spot that is not real even though you think it looks cool. Your brain knows the truth, so you don't jump and you don't scream. It was very important for me to expose the audience to real elements.

Critics in particular treat CGI as a virus that's infecting film.

When I see myself in the videogame it's amazing how realistic I look. This is the most authentic and realistic soccer game I have ever seen. It is like I'm looking in a mirror. The attention to detail is incredible.

There were challenges with production because of the special effects. There are just some things that, although written, special effects just isn't able to do.

Every film that comes out that incorporates CGI or performance capture is a little bit ahead of the last film that came out. You're on the cutting edge for a certain amount of time, and then the new technology comes out.

If you look back at Disney's 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame' or 'Pocahontas,' animated films were trying to get more and more real before CG really arrived.

People have a natural tendency to read emotions out of faces, so when you see a face that is hyperreal but without the life behind the eyes, it's really off-putting and intriguing.

When I was a graduate student in computer science in the early 2000s, computers were barely able to detect sharp edges in photographs, let alone recognize something as loosely defined as a human face.

If you need to do a movie where you have an army of 10,000 soldiers, that's a very difficult thing to shoot for real. It's very expensive, but as computer graphics techniques make that cheaper, it'll be more possible to make pictures on an epic scale, which we haven't really seen since the '50s and '60s.

The computer is limited in expression. It can't do what the human player can do. What's dangerous is that you fall for writing for the computer and what sounds good on it instead of writing something that actually sounds good when a player performs it. It's dangerous when you go down that road.

I'm a fan of hard science fiction, which is science fiction that is possible.

'The Terminator' is grounded in so much realism. It's again a story that centers around a woman that isn't a 'woman's picture' necessarily. I found it really thrilling, both 'Terminator 1' and '2.' When you watch it it's such fine storytelling.

We will work on ways to digitally enhance Everest, matching it with Dolomites and Everest, but I'll do everything physically first. If there's no other way, then I'll go to CGI.

On 'The Dragon Prince', we wanted to push that even more to leverage the strengths of a CG and 3D pipeline. We wanted details on the character designs, in the costumes and sets, that you really can't get in traditional 2D animation.

There's a depth to the look that you get with models that you just can't get with CGI. It's about the detail that you just wouldn't think to put in.

On 'Ghost In The Shell,' I'm looking forward more to working with Scarlett Johannson and Rupert Sanders than portraying a lead!