In the Pics section, film critic Floortje Smit casts her eye on contemporary visual culture.
Have you always wanted to know how long Hollywood stars can hold their breath underwater? No? Bad luck, because Avatar: The Way of Water is coming and the publicity circus has begun. Zoe Saldaña lasts for five minutes. Signourey Weaver six and a half. But that’s nothing compared to Kate Winslet. ‘Seven minutes and fourteen seconds, baby‘, in the words of the Oscar winner herself. They defeated with that Tom Cruise, who with his six and a half minutes ahead Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation was a record breath-hold before that.
All this thanks to thebest breath holding trainers in the world‘ which director James Cameron hired for his spectacular digital animation film. Almost everything off Avatar 2 comes from the computer – the world is artificial; actors become thanks to motion capture technology blue-green fantasy creatures – but he wanted the actors to actually play the underwater scenes underwater. The special one motion capturetechnique he devised for this is one of the technological developments with which he wants to lure the visually spoiled viewer to the cinema.
But why, wanted The New York Times know, since The Little Mermaid (2023) and Aquaman (2023) in similar scenes their actors are breathing freely for a green screen to make. Cameron: “Um, because it looks good?” Good point – movements under water are different and that is hard to act on. Small beer that makes a top actress like Winslet hold her breath until she’s not quite sure whether she’s alive or dead once she’s upstairs.
Anyone who thinks that an actor’s life has become easier due to advancing technology is wrong. It is the human-machine combination that makes it difficult. Christian Bale mentioned working with a green screen in Thor: Love and Thunder ‘the definition of monotony.’ Ian McKellen found it on the set of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey so terrible to stand alone in a bright green room day in and day out, that he had almost stopped. “This is not why I became an actor,” he cried.
But it is also often physically demanding. Look at set photos in which actors often dangle in the air from cables while crew members are everywhere. If you want to make a superhero or action movie, you have to be in extremely good shape.
The question is how far you can push the technology before it affects the film. When acting on an emotional level is difficult and the play is almost reduced to a purely physical affair, the actors have to be in good hands. If they can only talk about their work as an endurance competition, that’s not advertising.