Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac stalk a grittier New York in A Most Violent Year

In an era of big budget extravaganzas that rely more on computer graphics than the actors at the top of the marquee, visual effects producer Mark Russell has dedicated much of his career to the service of story over spectacle.

Though he began his career by working on Steven Spielberg’s AI: Artificial Intelligence and Minority Report, Russell has spent the last half decade subtly enhancing and adjusting comedies and adult dramas. The highlights for the Blackbox Digital vet include Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York; Mike Cahill’s I Origins; Brett Ratner’s Tower Heist; Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street; and J.C. Chandor’s upcoming 1980s-set crime drama, A Most Violent Year.

They are all movies that place emphasis on character and story, but rely a surprising amount on Russell’s ability to shape the background in post-production. His goal: To do work that’s virtually invisible.

“I think the tendency is to put things right up in front and know if you’re going to spend the money on it, you want everyone to see it,” he tells Yahoo Movies. “And I think that’s the wrong approach to visual effects, or at least not as entertaining…. I feel like I’ve done my job if people walk out of the movie theater not thinking about the effects.”

On a modestly budget period drama like A Most Violent Year, what role does a visual effects artist play?

I look at my role in A Most Violent Year as partly creating 1981, along with the production designer, John Goldsmith. Very few buildings have been built in New York since then that are recognizable from Brooklyn. There were a couple we had to get rid of on a regular basis: That big black Trump Tower that’s just above the UN — that was like the blight every time I’d see it.

For me, a lot was adding graffiti, dirtying up New York in shots that looked too clean. New York — I love it now, it’s a wonderful city — but in 1981 it was a very different place. It had this gritty, graffiti texture that we don’t have anymore. A lot of my job was to add that in, in particular in the subway chase. I don’t know if you’ve talked with anyone who’s shot with the MTA [New York’s transit and subway authority] before, but it’s challenging. They’re great, and they allow you to do a lot of things, but they have a lot of restrictions. And one of them was that we couldn’t change the interior or the exterior for that matter. So anytime you see graffiti on the train car, that was me.

What were your graffiti references?

There are a great many books about subway art in the ’70s and ’80s, and we actually had an artist named Bill “Blast” Cordero, who was a graffiti artist back in the ’80s. He painted some murals for us, and we used some of his artwork from the time as well.

So do you line the interior of the car with green screen? Is there a more advanced way now?

We did a laser scan, a Lidar scan of the interior of the train, which gave us the 3D dimensions. So we built a 3D version of the train and then we plastered all our graffiti onto this 3D version. Let’s for the sake of argument call it an invisible 3D version: It has walls and it has geometry, but you can’t see anything, except the graffiti that we put onto it. So once you track the camera that’s inside the train in the real shots, once you photograph them, you track them in 3D, then we put our 3D version inside of that, and it’s tracked along with the real thing. So tracking was very key that it worked perfectly, and then there was a lot of rotoscoping, which was painting people out in the foreground.

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A look at A Most Violent Year’s tweaked skyline

Related: Capitalism Is Deadly: Oscar Isaac and JC Chandor on ‘A Most Violent Year’

One thing I did notice: During one scene in Long Island City, you can see a blurry version of the Twin Towers outside a car’s rear window.

Absolutely. The scene where [Abel, Oscar Isaac’s character] meets the cops, that was actually shot right near Hunter’s Point in Long Island City. In the background behind him, when we photographed it, you could see the Freedom Tower, which clearly would have been a big no-no. Actually, they cheated the car, turned it in another direction just to get the right light, so what was actually in the window was the Empire State Building, which should not have been there for that direction. So we got rid of the Empire State Building and replaced it with the Twin Towers.