GOING OLD-SCHOOL

One reason Nolan was drawn to the live-projection technique, of course, is that it fit neatly into the type of world he imagined for Westworld’s characters to inhabit. “One of the ironies of Westworld,” comments Nolan, “was creating this artificial world, but one that you have to imagine that people would be willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars a day to experience.

“Our take was, it had to feel more real than real,” he continues. “There can’t be any sense that it’s an illusion, because that’s what the guests are paying a lot of money for. They want a tactile, lived-in, beautiful reality that they can experience that may feel more real than where they come from. So the challenge for us was, ‘Okay, well, it better look pretty damn good. If all these people are paying all this money to experience a theme park, it better look pretty great.’”

To make it look ‘pretty damn good,’ Nolan and his collaborators chose to film as much as they could for real, then use visual effects to flesh out what couldn’t be shot. For example, a common approach in the show has been to take advantage of existing architecture to shoot scenes in, at least to acquire one particular direction of action.

“Then,” notes Nolan, “we’d take the actors and re-build, practically, a piece of that set on the opposite direction. So you’d have basically both sides of the scene of reality – they’re married with a little bit of movie magic. Inevitably, with those sequences you’d have a couple of ‘stitching’ moments. You’d have an angle where you’ve got to extend the architecture or extend the landscape.

“Our goal from the very beginning was to try to find a hybrid approach to any of these challenges that honored what every system could do best. If you have the time and energy to recreate a part of your set in both places, to marry a piece of architecture to a location that you loved, if you do all that, then you’d know that you have an amazing team that can, in the moments in between, literally marry those two places together.”