Tom Debenham’s credits as Visual Effects Supervisor stretch back to Pierce Brosnan’s final 007 film, Die Another Day, and include The Golden Compass, Cloud Atlas, The Selfish Giant, Jupiter Ascending and the forthcoming Electric Dreams: The World of Philip K. Dick. Given the size of the effects work on Daniel Espinosa’s Life, he was Visual Effects co-Supervisor, and with the movie now available on Blu-ray, DVD and download from Sony, he looked back with Paul Simpson…

At what stage did you become involved with Life? Right back at conceptual level of the script, or at pre-production?

Not quite conceptual, but early pre-production, almost at the beginning early last year (2016). We went out to Shepperton [Studios] when the film was in pre-production, gearing up, planning, and figuring out how on earth we were going to get through what was an incredibly difficult visual story to tell on a number of levels, with huge amounts of collaboration between different departments required to pull it off.

It was such a big project in terms of the technicalities of shooting it: an awful lot of stunts, wire work which required a lot of rehearsals, and a lot of very difficult camera movements through very tight sets which couldn’t be built all as one big piece, and had to be treated as modules that we then stitched together in various ways.

It ended up being split into two parallel units: I looked after one of those and what ended up being my particular area was the very long opening shot, which is actually stitched together of 13 separate pieces of action. There was an awful lot of engineering solving the problems about how that worked: a lot of technical planning on our side, and a lot of conversations and collaboration and toing and froing between art department, camera department, grip, lighting as well as very importantly stunts and action and the wire coordinators.

That ended up being something of a test bed for how we would operate across the film and solve those problems of working in zero gravity, which was a huge challenge.

By the opening shot – do you mean up to the rescue of the Mars ship?

Yes, exactly – it goes all the way to the end of that when they grab it with the arm and all celebrate in the control room.

My daughter’s comment about that scene was “Do they just hire Ryan Reynolds to play Ryan Reynolds on screen?”

Yes, I think he has a certain value in that direction! He’s extremely charming, and what was great about seeing actors work together was how they fire each other up. There is some genuine camaraderie among them – being chucked in small sets and strung up on wires for hours on end, I think the stir crazy aspects of being in a spaceship somehow comes across. Making a film is sometimes not unlike being on a space mission sometimes!

Were there any elements you had to deal with on this that you hadn’t had to deal with at all before?

I don’t think there was anything particularly that I hadn’t done before at some level. I’ve done lots of wirework, and lots of complicated [shots] defeating gravity in different ways – and working with action and trying to make the best of that and help plan that. That was familiar territory.

I think the sheer volume of technical challenges that crossed so many different departmental boundaries was both very exciting and very challenging, and required much active diplomacy. The people side of it I find continually fascinating and rewarding: that collaboration of How can we all make this better? What can we all bring to the party? What can you do that I haven’t seen before? Pushing each other, I suppose, to up the ante to make things good and memorable, and reinforce each other’s work. That’s a satisfying thing, and this was a different level of that kind of collaboration.

Working very closely with pre-vis and tech-vis was a big part of that, to quite a surprising degree figuring things out before we shot them, and the director really buying into that process. That included our visual effects editor putting on full-on sound design and music which you’d turn up to a level [so director Daniel Espinosa could] experience the pre-vis in as cinematic way as possible. Gluing his nose to the screen, wanting him to feel what it would be like and really being quite literal about how we would then go in and reproduce those things.

I think that is somewhat frustrating to people outside the digital world sometimes, but it was our job, and mine in particular, to say “This is the pre-vis; it might not work out quite like that but that is the spirit of it. What can we all do to make that work?” We all know that a real stuntman moves through space in a different way to an animated figure that is not subject to real physics.

The idea of getting from Point A to Point B is there, even if the exact mechanism is slightly different…

Yes, and I think you have to talk your way through that way and get people understanding that you know they can do better than this, but this is the idea and this is the kind of pace that we want to get.

Making sure that those intentions survived and we didn’t forget the ambition of what we were doing takes constant work and constant good humour from everybody really – it’s so easy to get tired and try to figure how we can get from A to B [quickly]… No, let’s get from A to B and make it feel like we’re on the way to C, or whatever it may require for that particular sequence.

Had Daniel worked on anything comparable to this before?

No I don’t think he had; I think it was very much a  learning process for him, and we were delighted to hold his hand in that process. Sometimes it can be a really good thing both ways round – he doesn’t know enough not to ask for really impossible things which can put everybody on their game, from all departments. Also, he was telling a story that did have huge demands; it wasn’t as if he was making it harder than the script on the page.

He was not afraid to compare what he and we were doing to greats of filmmaking, and very high recent examples like Gravity – all sorts of very ambitious, sometimes bigger budget films with much longer schedules. We were up against it and we knew it, and we had to pull the stops out not to be eclipsed by those films.

The audience don’t care if you have tuppence halfpenny to spend or two and a half billion dollars – they want something that they are going to believe in when they see it on the screen…

Absolutely, and it’s our responsibility as filmmakers and collaborators in that craft to be on our game all the time. If somebody happens to have done something last year that upped the ante then you’ve got to take it on the chin and either be very smart about it or shoot around it – but what ultimately matters is the human story, and anything that distracts from that or doesn’t reinforce it means the film is going to get judged by the wrong standards. If you can make it a ride, visually immersive as well as humanly immersive, then hopefully we’re doing something right.

How much did that long scene change from the pre-vis to what we saw on screen?

The key sequences, both at the beginning and again later when the Soyuz craft comes to rescue them and that whole destruction sequence, and the airlock is breached? A lot of that we were very closely following it. There was a lot of collaboration between storyboards and then pre-viz and then rehearsals and animatics involving those.

Where we differed was largely because of what the actors brought to it – Jake Gyllenhaal in particular is a very intense performer and very keen to push things, and that tends to have an affect amongst actors. If one person does a simple thing like changing the rig that they’re on in order to move in a certain way, then everybody else wants to be not upstaged by that, in the best possible way, so that the action feels synchronous and alive. Sometimes things would change pretty fast on set and we’d all have to respond to it, deal with it, act accordingly and shoot around it.

I think that energy does keep everybody from getting stale and saying, There’s the storyboards, there’s the pre-viz, let’s shoot that and go home because you don’t end up responding to performances, and the reality of the set and the lighting, and the nuances of what you’ve got on the day. Things don’t end up more than the sum of their parts which they very much should. That’s the excitement of what we do.

How involved were you with the creation of the creature, Calvin?

The stage that I was mostly involved with it was before we got so busy on set, when we were discussing what it could be and also very excitingly working with people like Adam Rutherford, the scientific advisor. What is the molecular basis for this thing? How could it exist? I think we were all very keen that it might have some sort of basis, and that’s fed into the script. You’ll see those lines in the script and hear them spoken and understand from the scientific point of view that this could possibly exist and there would be a rationale for it existing.

It was very fascinating being part of that and figuring out how you could visually make an analogue for this scientific process and turn that into something that felt alive and real and somewhat plausible.

It’s a creature and everyone gives it a certain leeway because they know it is what it is, but I think there was some scientific basis to it. We were working out how brave we could be and how much the studio had an appetite for pushing things in an artistic and abstract direction and not necessarily in a predictable creature direction.

That was an exciting process – I think it ended up being something a little more physical and muscular with a hint of a face than perhaps we thought it might at the beginning but also there’s a reality that the audience has to engage with something that they think, That would be really nasty if it wrapped itself around my arm. Something ethereal and abstract might not have that effect. It’s always a balance of sensibilities and creating the reaction that you want the audience to have.

Of all the scenes in the movie, what’s the one you’re proudest to have achieved?

I think for me it has to the be the opening shot, just because I hope people don’t think that it’s an effect and just think that it’s the camera just keeping going and finding people and driving through a big spaceship. I hope we didn’t break that spell and it has the effect it has – months and months of planning and rehearsal and collaboration and figuring things out went into that, but I hope it boils down into seven or eight minutes of accumulating the experience and making people feel that they’re in the place. If we succeeded in that, I’m very happy.

It certainly felt like very good storytelling, which is the key aim at the end of it.

I hope so and I’m glad it felt like that to you!

LIFE is out on Blu-ray & DVD now

Thanks to Sarah Holland and Katie Ollerenshaw for their help in arranging this interview