Explaining the Acting Avatar Disconnect

The LA Times’ Rachel Abramowitz talks to Jim Cameron about the actors shutting Avatar out of its awards both at the SAGs and at the Oscars:

“There’s a learning curve for the acting community, and they’re not up to speed yet,” Cameron said. “We didn’t get out and proselytize with the Screen Actors Guild as we probably should have to raise awareness. Not only should they not be afraid of it, they should be excited about it. There is a new set of possibilities, after a century of doing movie acting in the same way.”

Cameron describes it as “an actor-driven process.”

“I’m not interested in being an animator. . . . That’s what Pixar does. What I do is talk to actors. ‘Here’s a scene. Let’s see what you can come up with,’ and when I walk away at the end of the day, it’s done in my mind. In the actor’s mind, it’s done. There may be a whole team of animators to make sure what we’ve done is preserved, but that’s their problem. Their job is to use the actor’s performance as an absolute template without variance for what comes out the other end. “

“I like to think of it as digital makeup, not augmented animation,” said Spielberg, who is using Cameron’s “Avatar” technology in his new movie, “The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn.” “It’s basically the actual performance of the actual actor, and what you’re simply experiencing is makeup.”

In the case of “Avatar,” he said, “the digital makeup is so thin you actually see everything that Zoe [Saldana] is doing. Every nuance of that performance comes through digitally.”

Digital makeup is an interesting concept. I think actors might feel less threatened by it if there was a separate award and industry for “performance-capture” acting. The thing is, it requires a certain skill but anything the actor can’t do the digital effects can “fix.” Some performances are already digitally enhanced, like Brad Pitt in Benjamin Button – or any time they digitally age an actress, or remove wrinkles. The Academy might need to start thinking about adding special acting categories for this new technique. It is probably a long way from being readily accepted as the future of acting, however.