Without a doubt, Christopher Nolan’s new film, “Tenet,” looks like it’s going to be one of the most visually stunning films of the year. Granted, the year has been largely without any major studio films due to the pandemic, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that “Tenet” looks like it will have some pretty incredible action and spectacle. And according to the film’s director, quite a bit of the action you’re seeing is practical. In fact, there’s more CGI wizardry in a rom-com than this upcoming Nolan epic.
Speaking to ICG Magazine, Nolan spoke about the upcoming film and how the action of “Tenet” contains quite a bit more practical effects than you might be expecting.
“The visual side of the film is huge in scale, but our VFX shot count is probably lower than most romantic comedies,” he explained.
In pure numbers, “Tenet” editor Jennifer Lame said that she believes the final cut of the film will include approximately 300 VFX shots, which is well below the industry average for a film of this size and scope. For comparison, it was revealed last year that “Avengers: Endgame” and “Avengers: Infinity War” had 2,500 and 2,700 VFX shots, respectively. As far as Nolan films are concerned, “Inception” gets compared to “Tenet” quite a bit and the decade-old feature only had roughly 500 VFX shots, still dwarfing the number in the new film.
As far as how Nolan was able to keep the number of VFX shots down, he credits the visual effects supervisor, Andrew Jackson, who was able to keep it as practical as possible. (Don’t forget, we’re talking about the movie that found it was cheaper to explode a real jet plane than a CGI one.)
“Visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson was responsible for coming up with our safety net,” Nolan explained. “We wanted it all in-camera, but if it couldn’t be done, what choices are there in post-production? I like to say Andrew kind of bid himself out of a job because he helped us achieve such an enormous amount practically. There were still very complicated visual effects for the team at Double Negative, but Andrew’s expertise and background in on-set effects benefitted us enormously.”
We’ll see if we can spot all the VFX shots when we’re able to watch “Tenet” sometime in August or September (or later, depending on where you live and if you’re willing to go to a theater to see it).