Pirates of the Caribbean Director Thinks Visual Effects Are Worse in Movies Now Because Filmmakers Rely on Unreal Engine Too Much
"Unreal Engine coming in and replacing Maya as a sort of fundamental is the greatest slip backwards."
Walt Disney Pictures
If you believe that the quality of CGI in movies has dropped in recent years, you're not alone. There could be many reasons behind the decline, but Gore Verbinski, the director of such hits as Pirates of the Caribbean and The Ring, highlights one of them specifically.
In an interview with But Why Tho, he said that the problem is Unreal Engine "entering the visual effects landscape" and filmmakers relying on it too much.
"So it used to be a divide, with Unreal Engine being very good at video games, but then people started thinking maybe movies can also use Unreal for finished visual effects. So you have this sort of gaming aesthetic entering the world of cinema."
"I think that’s why those Kubrick movies still hold up, because they were shooting miniatures and paintings, and now you’ve got this different aesthetic. It works with Marvel movies where you kind of know you’re in a heightened, unrealistic reality. I think it doesn’t work from a strictly photo-real standpoint," he continued.
In Verbinski's view, it just doesn't take light the same way and doesn't react to subsurface, scattering, and how light hits skin and reflects in the same way. "So that’s how you get this uncanny valley when you come to creature animation, a lot of in-betweening is done for speed instead of being done by hand."
With time, he said, it became acceptable to think that no one would care "that the ships in the ocean look like they’re not on the water. In the first Pirates movie, we were actually going out to sea and getting on a boat."
"I think that Unreal Engine coming in and replacing Maya as a sort of fundamental is the greatest slip backwards. And there’s also something, a mistake I think people make all the time on visual effects. You can make a very real helicopter. But as soon as it flies wrong, your brain knows it’s not real. It has to earn every turn; it has to move right. It’s still animation, sometimes it’s not just the lighting and the photography, sometimes it’s the motion."
In his new movie, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, which is scheduled for January 30, he is making at least half of the frame photographic to keep it "honest".
We'll see how good its CGI is then and whether UE actually makes a difference. Don't forget to subscribe to our Newsletter and join our 80 Level Talent platform, follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, and Instagram, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.
