A Scanner Darkly’s unique look may still look somewhat familiar. The animated film has such a lifelike resemblance to actors Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Robert Downey, Jr. and Woody Harrelson because it was actually drawn from live-action footage they shot. Director Richard Linklater did this once before, with his indie film Waking Life.
“This one wouldn’t have happened without that,” Linklater said. “As a director, I think you have all these tools at your disposal, possibilities of how you can shoot your film. I’m lucky that I have this technique as one of the colors on my palette as a way to tell a story. So when I thought Scanner Darkly would be best told this way, having done it once before and seeing the possibilities of it, I saw how I could use it to tell this story and it’s just different. It’s a very consistent look. We had a very much a visual design for it unlike Waking Life. It looks the same throughout. It was very difficult to do. It was much harder to do than Waking Life, like 10 times harder it felt but that was the way the story could work. It was interesting to see that process evolve, but it was difficult. I don’t have another animated film I want to do just yet.”
Animation aficionados refer to the technique as rotoscoping, but it’s not quite the same. Rotoscoping had artists trace over actual film frames. Linklater’s technique is executed via computers.
“I know the guy who wrote the software. He’s a friend of mine in Austin. So he was sort of creating it. It’s a computer variant of rotoscoping which is an old technique. I don’t even know if that’s the right way of calling it rotoscoping. It’s just a computer variation. It’s something you can do on your home computer via the software. It still takes over 500 hours to do one minute of this. It’s very artist intensive. That’s why we spent a year and a half doing it.”
Linklater had been thinking of Philip K. Dick’s novel about government surveillance, drug culture and paranoia for 20 years. Waking Life gave him a proper mode of presentation.
“I felt it worked here because Philip K. Dick is always asking what is reality? And I think this technique puts your brain in the right place to take in this particular story because it seems real, it sounds real, you recognize these people, their gestures are real and it seems like the real world, but it’s not. It’s this painted world so it’s probably the right kind of split brain thing going on in your head as you watch it that, hopefully, you take it in just like a movie and you care about the people in the same way, if not more than you would in live action.”
Though live-action performances were shot, there is no live-action cut of A Scanner Darkly. The raw materials served only as a guide for the animators and don’t look like a proper film. “I don’t think we could’ve got the movie made probably, like this story probably wouldn’t have warranted the $20 or $30 million budget that it probably would have been. We did it very low budget because of the animation. Our original budget was $6 million.”
And the actors had free reign to act bigger. “Actually Woody, Downey and Rory I think because of their characters, I think pushed them a little bit, but that didn’t really have that much to do with animation. It had more to do with their characters who were a little more tweaked out.”
Casting the actors still followed normal considerations, looking for the right performer for each character. "With Winona and Keanu, I was just lucky that they would want to be in the movie. I felt they were perfect for the parts. You know, you meet with people and talk about it and stuff and hopefully, you engage them on a level and you’re off to the races with the characters and stuff.”
The animation also allowed Linklater to capture one of Dick’s most intriguing devices. A scramble suit changes the wearer’s face in fragments every fraction of a second. “In the book it’s described as a vague blur, so he leaves it very much up to the imagination of what that looks like, but it’s just a multi-personality. So we spent months on the actual design of it, but what we came up with was, every four frames different sections of the body changed to something else so no moment is it one person, different sections are changing. We needed illustrators who could really draw, there’s thousands and thousands of people in those scramble suits, and if you look closely there’s Phil K. Dick, there’s everyone, they’re looking through magazines and yearbooks, every ethnicity, it’s all over the map, but it’s all these people. That’s kind of the metaphor for the movie, about identity, but it was tricky to come up with. You have to be able to watch it and be intrigued by it.”
Fans of Total Recall and Minority Report will find a very different Philip K. Dick in A Scanner Darkly. This one’s not about action or even visual effects, save for the scramble suit. “I would probably have the same attitude for most of the films that most people do. Like Blade Runner is the only other novel that has been adapted. All the others are stories. I think this one strives for being the most thorough adaptation, but it doesn’t mean it’s the best. It’s the most authentic to the source material”
A Scanner Darkly is now playing.
http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Scanning-Richard-Linklater-2939.html
