Fede Alvarez Quotes

The nature of motion capture is only going to work for certain films. It's not going to put any other type of movies out of business.

I mean I've seen 3D films so far and I think it's a long way to go before they replace actors. It's a funny thing with 3D, I haven't quite got it yet. Yet.

I'm not a big fan of CGI. I'm not a fan at all, unless they use it in a way that doesn't call attention to itself.

That's the trouble with anything which essentially has a lot of bits that are physically impossible: You're left, stuck, in the studio. And that's a shame. You're making a movie. You don't want it to stay put, you want it to be a movie - to move.

It's all about the special effects.

I have a sneaking suspicion that if there were a way to make movies without actors, George Lucas would do it.

The nature of the movies is different than it was five years ago, and they're all driven by the possibilities of CGI, which means you can make anything happen on screen that you can possibly desire.

Truthfully, I don't know how those special effects people do it.

The thrill of doing visual effects doesn't exist.

The key to digital effects is to do things that are visually accurate but done cheaply and approximated.

I remember feeling that technology was like trying to draw with your foot. In a ski boot. It was the most indirect way to work imaginable, but the potential had us all excited. I started in stop motion.

Unless you're making Marvel movies, I think CGI usually suffers, especially in mid-budget-range horror movies where you see CGI.

In 'Star Wars: Episode II,' when Jango Fett is chasing Obi Wan Kenobi through an asteroid field, they needed a big asteroid to shatter into a million pieces, and I had to figure out how to do the fracturing, write the code, and show an artist how to use it.

We have an amazing team at ILM who can create fantastic effects.

I don't have anything against CGI.

In 'The Greatest Showman,' I'm back doing VFX myself, allowing me to craft exactly how something looks, one frame at a time.

Every 'Star Wars' film was about pushing what was possible in terms of effects, puppets, matte paintings, stop motion and, now, digitally.

The daily work on special effects is fairly mundane.

CGI is to me like watching a cartoon. It can be effective, if it's done well. A lot of times you don't feel any real risk. You're watching a bunch of computer-generated graphics.

I think you should be prepared for a green-screen CGI at all times.

In the first earthquake scene [ in "2012"], there was only a limo and a plane. That was it. There was nothing else there, so everything had to be created in the computer, and that's always very difficult.

I mean I think people prepared me for like a lot of green screen [in Oz the Great]. I didn't have a lot of green screen. They build most sets. When this castle was tangible, Emerald City was tangible, the forest, the woods was tangible, the cemetery, everything was there.

We tried to do Yoda in CGI in Episode I, but we just couldn't get it done in time. We couldn't get the technology to work, so we had to use the puppet, but the puppet really wasn't as good as the CGI. So when we did the reissue, we had to put the CGI back in, which was what it was meant to be.

If you always want to look relevant, just be CGI-prepared.

When I was in architecture school, rather than giving us drafting boards and t-squares and lead pencils and stuff they gave us all the same tools that places like Digital Domain and ILM used to make features films or special effects. They gave us all these digital tools like Alias and Mya and Soft Image and all these kind of high-end computers, so I came out of architecture school knowing how to use all that stuff. And I started making short films at night.