Interview: Leave The World Behind’s VFX Supervisor Chris Harvey
LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND (2023) Ethan Hawke, Julia Roberts, Writer/Director Sam Esmail and Mahershala Ali. CR: Courtesy NETFLIX
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity, and contains mild spoilers for Leave The World Behind.
The trajectory of your career, starting out as a digital artist to then working with Frantic Films, Prime Focus, Image Engine, your own company, Oats [Studios], and now working on this film, Leave The World Behind, what perspective has this 20-year adventure given you?
Chris Harvey: It's been a journey, for sure, but it's been a fun one. I mean, I started years ago when I quit University and kind of fell into visual effects, for lack of a better way to explain it, but it just kind of worked with what I like to do and with my background. I started working freelance, eventually got onto Frantic Films, Prime Focus... actually, for a while I quit the industry completely because it was too much. You know, people do a lot of long hours – they talk about it all the time – I quit, started selling paddleboards, and then found my way back into it because I couldn't resist being part of the cinematic experience and telling stories. And then from there, I started supervising overall projects, which is really cool for me.
Knowing that your involvement starts all the way in pre-production, how do you challenge yourself with every project you take on?
Chris : Every project innately comes with its own challenges. That's one of the cool things about visual effects because it's very rarely the same thing every single time. There'll be aspects that are similar, but you've always got new challenges to solve. Technology is always evolving, so that keeps it fresh innately. But I guess for me, what I'm looking for is to find a project that has a good story that needs to be told, and to be part of the creative team that helps to tell it.
From your collaborations with Neill [Blomkamp] on Chappie and all of those short film you did together, how did those experiences with independent workflows change from project to project when you had different teams to manage?
Chris: Working with Neill was awesome. Obviously, Chappie was where we first worked together and met each other. It was such a great experience, that afterwards he wanted me to come onboard to start Oats [Studios] with him and his brother. One of the cool things about that experience with Oats was that there was no one looking over us, it was just us. We could throw out everything that had ever been done before and find out from ourselves how we could do it differently. We got to try and experiment with all these different techniques, and wear like a million different hats in a very compressed short amount of time. It was like two and a half years or so, we shot a tremendous amount of footage, did a whole bunch of different short projects, and just got to experiment with all kinds of new stuff. Sometimes you'd find out something and go "oh, there's a good reason why we do it that way." But other things are like "you know what, there are way better ways to do it. These big visual effects shows or facilities are too big of a ship to steer and be nimble enough to try those things." To experiment on a very accelerated timeframe while wearing so many hats, you get to see behind the curtain of so many things and get a broad experience, which was really awesome.
CR: Courtesy NETFLIX
This year you've been involved with two features, 65 and Leave The World Behind. How were you introduced to Sam [Esmail], and what hooked you in wanting to be involved with this project?
Chris: A very good friend of mine who I've worked with on a number of projects together was a visual effects producer on Leave The World Behind. She and Sam were looking for a visual effects supervisor, and she kept hounding me like, "you gotta meet Sam. You gotta meet Sam. This is a great project." At the time, I was still finishing up 65, and I told her "I'm busy right now, I don't need another show." She just kept hounding me, and then at the same time, my agent had heard about this project, and was a big believer in the story and Sam. They said "Chris, you gotta meet this guy. I think it would be a cool project, I think you'd really like him." Finally, I thought I had enough people telling me about this, about Sam and this project that I know nothing about, that maybe I should do a phone call and actually find out what this thing is. So, Sam and I had a call together, and I was immediately taken with his approach, his personality, and how he wanted to accomplish his vision for the show. I came away thinking it was a fit, and obviously he felt in a similar way, because he brought me on as a supervisor. It was a lot of fun, and it's been a great collaborative experience working with him.
Since your involvement as the film’s VFX supervisor is a role that’s needed throughout the entire production process, what efficiencies from your previous projects were you able to implement on set with Sam's crew, while also ensuring elements of experimentation?
Chris: In a lot of ways, we talked about it a lot on set, Sam, [Director of Photography] Tod [Campbell] and I about... not even so much, I mean, there's a technical aspect of it, but beyond that, one of the things that they would often talk about was a matter of taste. And I think that between myself, Tod, and other people on the project, you know, Sam had assembled a team of people that had a similar taste, so we had a certain style and aesthetic choice that work together, and an approach to filmmaking. Sam doesn't want to lean heavily on visual effects. Obviously, he has to in certain cases on this film, but at the same time, if we can shoot it, let's shoot it, and I'm the same way. Just because I do visual effects doesn't mean I want to do visual effects. If there's a way to shoot it, practically, we should shoot it practically, and if we can't shoot it, practically, how do we do it in a way that's going to be as authentic as possible. The deer in this film, we obviously couldn't assemble herds of deer and put them on camera, so I 3D printed a whole bunch of deer heads, and I would put those in front of the cast. I would even hold them and puppet them in front of them, so that they had something to respond to. They'd be like, "oh, just shoot some plates." And I'm like, "no, let's not just shoot some plates. I'm gonna put a deer head where that deer is going to be. Sam, you're gonna look at it. Tod, you're gonna light this gray plastic head." I want everything to be an informed choice, as if we had a real deer there, so it isn't just some random throw away plate. Let's treat it just as importantly as if there was a cast member there. Let's actually make decisions based on something real, because at the end of the day, it has to cut with those other shots that had attention paid to them. Making those kinds of informed choices ultimately helped the overall project.
CR: Courtesy NETFLIX
What I specifically loved with certain sequences in this film, is that there's a tactile aspect to the on-screen performance in conjunction with the VFX. Whether it's Mahershala art on the beach seeing the aftermath of a plane crash or seeing what you were just talking about with the deer situation. How do you gauge when a scene or environment calls for those moments before going to camera?
Chris: Sam would give us a brief on what the scene is, you know, you'd read the script, you'd sit with him, you go through the scene. Then he and Tod would come up with a shot list the way they wanted to film it. We would often do Techvis for some of these more complicated ones - it's kind of like pre-vis, where you're figuring out technically what can go where. Then you've all got a moving picture to look at, and you'd all sit down and at that stage, the production designer would do their thing and be like, "okay, we can cover set dressing up to this area, we can fill in this much of it, can you take over from here?" And you're like, "okay, yeah, we can take over from there." It really does become kind of a group collaboration on making informed decisions of where each department can best cover the needs of what's going to be in the shot, and then where the overlap lies, and where you do the hand-off. It's funny, like the beach scene you mentioned, there's one – I can't believe I haven't brought this up in any other interview – but there's dead bodies lying around, and in one shot, there's a dead body floating in the water. Originally, no one was gonna get in freezing cold water in New York in early March, or end of February, whenever it was we shot it, like it was cold, cold, cold. The crew suggested to use CG bodies, and I told them that's crazy. That was gonna be really expensive to spend our money on floating dead bodies in the water, so I said I'd get in the water. And they're like, "no, you wouldn't" and I told them "sure I would. I'm from Canada, man. I'll get in the ocean. I don't care." I showed up on set that day, and they're like, "Chris, you ready to get in the water?" and I was like, "what?"
Was it actually shot? Do we see it in the final cut?
Chris: I did. I went and floated in the water. I was the dead body floating in the water, because I'm like, "I'm gonna do deal with it now, and we're not going to deal with it later."
You know that old adage about suffering for your art?
Chris: Yeah, exactly. But it was fun, you know? It was a cool experience. I played a floating dead body in this. [Laughs]
As technology is constantly changing the way these productions are being shot, spatially and temporally, what was a major takeaway you had working with Sam on this film that you could apply to your career in the future?
Chris: Typical films are very quick and cutty and fast paced, and I think something that Sam does – again, it's his style – is that he will linger on the shots, let the audience sit in the moment, and just watch it slowly unfold in front of your eyes. Some of these moments create an emotional response for the audience, and I guess that's something to take away. We don't always have to be so quick and cutty. Let's not be afraid to sit in the moment. Even for visual effects, that was one of the things that was quite challenging. There is an element of restraint that we had to do in this film, that in other movies I've been on, it's like, "go bigger, go bigger, more!" And it was like, "no, let's do less, do less." Let's just sit in it and watch it without going bigger. I think that's kind of cool, and a little bit fresh and different.
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