How Jamie Foxx Fights a Man on Fire in ‘Project Power’
Hi, I’m Henry Joost. And I’m Ariel Schulman. And we are the directors of Project Power. [MUSIC PLAYING] All right. So this is almost 10 minutes into the movie, and it’s Jamie Foxx’s introductory scene. You don’t know anything about this character. You don’t know his name. He hasn’t spoken a word. So he’s sort of like a man with no name. And instead of running in on a horse, he rode in on an old landscaper’s pickup truck. [DOOR OPENS] And he’s looking for this dude, Newt. Newt is played by Colson Baker, a.k.a. Machine Gun Kelly, and this is actually his third movie with us. We asked him if he wanted to do this, and he agreed right away before finding out that he would have to endure five hours of prosthetic makeup every day in order to prepare for this role. “Everything’s slow. If you want, you can call Simon. He’ll verify who I am. Tell them—” So here’s Jamie trying to get inside this guy’s house. And I think, maybe even in the script, he pulls out a shotgun and just blasts through the door, which— no disrespect to the script, but that’s kind of what happens often. And I think Henry just started Googling cool ways to pick a lock and saw a video of some kid throwing this shoe string over a door, and pulling it around the chain, and getting in that way. And we gave that little move to Jamie, who practiced it a bunch. And it turned out to be a really great character moment to show that he is really aware of his surroundings and very clever. We really wanted to flesh out the ecosystem of power and of this world where the movie takes place. So we wanted to understand who this character is. Where does he live? What kind of place is it? What are his neighbors like? We found this amazing abandoned apartment complex in New Orleans that has been turned into kind of a beautiful graffiti art project. And our production designer, Naomi Shohan, designed this apartment complex as if people had been living there without any electricity and without any running water for some time. You’ll notice, in his apartment, there’s a lot of heat lamps. And all of the stove tops are on. And he’s creating sort of a hot moisture within his own ecoclimate. And the idea was that, if your power was to spontaneously combust, the repercussions— the symptoms— would be the opposite. You’d start losing your ability to thermoregulate. We had this amazing VFX supervisor, Ivan Moran. And we told him, we want to make the most realistic-looking man on fire we’ve ever seen. How do we do that? And he said, the key to it all is interactive light. And a lot of the reason why CG fire looks fake is because the fire itself is not lighting the set or lighting the skin of the person who’s supposed to be on fire. So our approach to this was all about figuring out, how do we add interactive light to the set and to the actor? So we had Mike Marino, who’s this unbelievable special effects makeup guy, come in with his team. And he built Machine Gun Kelly, basically, a second skin. And then every time we would shoot a scene with him on fire, we would run it through once with MGK, pull him off the set, bring in a stunt man named Tim. He would put on a fully fire-retardant suit, get lit on fire. We’d do the same shot with Tim so the VFX artists had a perfect reference for what the fire would do and, more importantly, how it would light the rest of the set. And then we would move on to the next scene. [MUSIC PLAYING]
