Spoilers follow for Doctor Strange.
Doctor Strange is a hit, and certainly part of the reason for the film’s success is its exploration of a new side of the Marvel Cinematic Universe -- the world of magic and the mystical that until now has existed at the periphery of the franchise at best.
Obviously one of the major challenges of the film was in the creation of those magical and other-dimensional beings, acts, and realms, and that’s where visual effects supervisor Stephane Ceretti came in. I spoke to Ceretti recently about this task, as well as the design of Doctor Strange’s surprise villain, Dormammu. Marvel had kept the CG character’s presence secret up to the film’s release, but the inclusion of the dread one hits an important part of the Strange mythology while also serving as a great third-act face-off between the hero and villain.
To begin with, Ceretti explained that one of the goals in depicting Dormammu was to avoid the whole “head on fire” imagery that is the character’s motif in the comics.
Dormammu
“We didn't want to do that because it had been done before,” Ceretti said of the fiery head trope. “The whole idea is he's a character that lives in-between dimensions. He can also take whatever shapes he wants to take. But in order to talk to Strange at the end of the film, he's taking that shape [and] you can feel all these ripples in his face and all that stuff… these kind of opening windows to other dimensions, and all the reflective qualities of it. We really wanted to add the evocation of that fire, but we didn't want to do fire so we went for [a] multicolored approach to try and keep the psychedelic [look] of the entire space. [That] was pretty difficult because when you start putting too many colors together it becomes very, very muddy and kind of painterly very fast. We had to find the right balance of colors within the lighting of Benedict when he was on our stage and trying to find the best way to kind of make it all work together, which is actually not very easy.”
Yes, Benedict. As in Benedict Cumberbatch. As director Scott Derrickson revealed to IGN recently, the actor behind Doctor Strange is also the actor behind his nemesis, Dormammu. Cumberbatch did the facial capture for the villain, and in fact it was his idea to take on the dual role in the first place.
“In the end we felt like, for us anyway, it was making sure that we had a great performance. That's what we were pretty excited about it,” said Ceretti of using Cumberbatch. “You don't have to know about it to appreciate the sequence, but when you know about it, it kind of makes it even more interesting in some ways.”
Indeed, the idea that Dormammu would create an image for itself that reflected the person it was talking to is pretty cool. But the dread one’s Dark Dimension was also a very important aspect of the film for Ceretti and Derrickson to nail.
“We tried to make it alive all the time -- the whole idea of the Dark Dimension is that it's a dynamic environment,” he explained. “We looked a lot at obviously the references from [original Doctor Strange artist] Steve Ditko, who created all these comic panels in the '60s and '70s. We had a few key reference images from him. And also there was a poster that we called the blacklight poster for the Dark Dimension, which actually Scott had in his office. It's the poster where when you light it with a blacklight it becomes very saturated [with] colors, crazy blacklight colors. Scott's idea was to put that in the film. We went for that. We looked at whatever geometrical elements we could use from all these comics and created that world based on that with today's technology, with the computers and everything to make it feel real and big and like a very threatening space but yet very colorful. It was all about finding the right balance between all these elements to pay homage to and to tribute the work of Steve Ditko, but to make it more current to the 21st century. If you look at the detail of the shapes that we have in the Dark Dimension, you can almost point to things in the comic books and we really tried to be faithful to.”
Ceretti and his team also attempted to convey a “dynamic” aspect to the other environments in the film, even some of the earthly ones like New York City and Hong Kong. The latter locale actually was used to visually comment on the state of superhero and action movie climaxes in general.
“New York is always evolving and changing as we go through a sequence, through a chase sequence,” he said. “Hong Kong is the same thing. Hong Kong is un-destroying itself which is kind of our take on the blockbuster movie. Instead of destroying our entire city we're building it back together, which I think was a clever way to have a twist on the kind of films we're doing. It's just always constantly moving environments. And you look at the magical mystery tour [the scene when the Ancient One pushes Strange into other worlds], we go from one dimension to another to another and it's always emotion, always active. It's the scene dynamics that Scott wanted to get throughout the film.”
With credits ranging from Batman Begins to X-Men: First Class to Captain America: The First Avenger and Guardians of the Galaxy, Ceretti has obviously covered a wide variety of comic-book movies that have run the gamut of “reality based,” period pieces, sci-fi and more. But Doctor Strange was always going to be a unique property because of the character’s very specific psychedelic origins. And yet, it was important to keep things grounded too.
“Even though we have crazy colors and psychedelic stuff and the motion of things looking very unreal and very bizarre, we tried to make the environment physical by adding heat and smoke and particles and wind,” he explained. “All these things that make an environment feel more present. It was every step of the way from what I would call the mundane magic to the big environments that we've created. We've tried to always relate to some physical thing that we could really get the audience to react to because they know what they are. They know how it feels to see these things and look at them. It was always about that.”
This approach also included the actual magic that Strange and his cohorts use. The idea was to make it tangible even while being “super crazy and trippy.”
“[Scott] really wanted to make sure that … people could relate to what was happening,” said Ceretti. “When you bend a building, it still looks like a building. It still needs to feel and be textured like a building, but it behaves differently. Or when you conjure a portal, it's made of sparks. People know sparks in everyday life, but they just move in a way that is not usual. People can relate to what they see. It's not like smoky stuff and wispy stuff. He always wanted to get away from anything that was too wispy magic or little fairy stuff. His whole idea was to make the magic something that we can believe in in a physical way.”
Because of the trippy nature of Doctor Strange, one particular danger Ceretti and the production faced was losing touch with reality and going too far into the void of weirdness.
“That's what we've really been working on,” he laughed. “Not to lose the audience. In these kind of situations you can lose the audience very easily when things are too disconnected. We're taking the audience from everyday life to crazy world!”
Doctor Strange is out now. Head here for more from Stephane Ceretti about the creation of the film’s Cloak of Levitation.
Talk to Senior Editor Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottCollura.
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