By Gill Pringle
“We decided pretty early on to not go to a real jungle, and to not use real animals, for a lot of reasons,” Jon Favreau tells FilmInk. “The CGI technology has come to the point that I now find fur and animals very convincing, especially in something like Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes, where there were shots where I literally couldn’t tell. And I’ve been pretty adamant about not using CGI for decades now. I started to work with it on Elf, and then I worked on it a little bit more in Zathura. But I used a lot of miniatures and stop-motion in both those movies. Then by the time that I did Iron Man – because of the breakthroughs that were happening at ILM with films like Transformers – the metal and the hard surfaces started to be very convincing on camera. A lot of times, too much was asked of it, but if the director wasn’t too ambitious with the technology, it was very convincing. And now I’ve come to the point where you might be able to tell a story where the CGI disappears…where you don’t know if you’re looking at a CGI animal, or if you’re looking at something that’s real – you don’t know if it’s a real forest, or a fake forest.”
With The Jungle Book, Jon Favreau – who burst onto the scene as the writer/star of the indie hit, Swingers, and then reinvented himself as a powerhouse director with the aforementioned Iron Man, Elf, and Zathura – has achieved something truly extraordinary. Shooting in “downtown Los Angeles” (as the end credits amusingly point out), he has created a living, breathing jungle, filled with living, breathing creatures, all via the technological magic of computer generated imagery. Though heavily inspired by the work of Pixar (he’d visited the animation studio many times, and has a longtime creative relationship with head honcho, John Lasseter), Favreau didn’t want to make a traditional animated film. “We used motion capture,” the director explains. “On the set, it looked like Avatar. There were people wearing dots and markers, and there were sets built that people could interact with. So instead of, like an animator, dealing with virtual cameras and virtual performers, I was working with real performers, real stunt people, real cameramen, real prop men, and real choreographers. I was interacting with the crew like on a real film set. That was the way that I came up. I didn’t come up from animation, as much as I like it. And so that brought me to the cut of the film.”
Based on a series of collected short stories penned by the legendary Rudyard Kipling in the late 1800s, The Jungle Book tells of Mowgli, a boy raised by wolves in the Indian jungle with the help of Baloo the bear and Bagheera the black panther, who then has to fight the fearsome tiger, Shere Khan. Previously filmed in 1942 (by Zoltan Korda, with Sabu in the role of Mowgli) and 1967 (as an animated feature from Walt Disney), Favreau’s take on the storied source material is anchored by Neel Sethi, an unknown young actor who is the only human character in the film. “That was a big search,” Favreau sighs when asked about finding his leading man. “We did a traditional casting call. It was tricky because the character is ten-years-old. Sometimes when you’re looking at movies, you’re seeing someone who’s not a little kid anymore. There was a certain quality that we wanted, and I knew that he was going to have to carry the film. So I knew that it was going to have to be someone with a certain charisma, a certain charm, and a certain quality that I remember from the Disney cartoon. He needed a playfulness and an athleticism, but most importantly, we needed someone who was interesting to watch, and intelligent. I always like to watch smart actors, and it seems to be the one quality that unifies all the actors I like to watch. They make interesting smart choices.”
“I want to make sure that this is worth the years of my life that it’s taken, to the exclusion of anything else creative.”
Not surprisingly, Favreau and his casting directors left no stone unturned. “We looked at 2,000 kids,” he smiles. “We looked in LA, New York, Canada, India, the UK, and Australia. We opened it up, because we just wanted to find the best kid that we could. And then we found this kid, Neel Sethi, who had never done a movie, and who had never really acted. He happened to come in for an audition, and I saw something really interesting about him. I just smiled when I saw him do his read. He was very green, but he was very watchable. I really dug him. I’d worked with enough young actors to know what I needed as the basis of a relationship between an actor and a director. And being an actor myself, I could help guide him through. There was also a lot of support from other people who were actors on the set who were doing things off camera, or running lines with him. I was also fortunate enough to have that motion capture portion to get him up to speed with being on a set in a much lower stakes environment. So everything that we were performing, he’d already done once. It’s amazing how fast kids learn. He’s a kid from Manhattan who has a really nice sense of humour, and a lot of charm. A lot was demanded of him, but he had a great attitude and hopefully it was a great experience for him. It definitely has been for us.”
Though the anchor on The Jungle Book is new kid on the block, Neel Sethi, Favreau surrounded his unknown young star with a host of big names…if in voice only. Making a huge impact in just one scene is Favreau’s Iron Man 2 star, Scarlett Johansson, who gives breathy, hypnotic voice to the snake, Kaa, who was voiced by a male actor in the Disney animated film. “There weren’t a lot of female characters in the original, so we tried to shift that,” Favreau says. “It feels strange to see a film that’s so polarising gender wise, and it’s not a story point. Scarlett has a great voice, and I thought that it would be an intriguing and interesting way to go. She’s dangerous and confusing and motherly…it worked very, very well. She’s very effective. And for a voice actor, as beautiful as she is, her voice is equally as interesting. She was great.”
Johansson, however, wasn’t the only interesting talent in the sound booth. “I’d worked with Giancarlo Esposito on [the TV series] Revolution,” Favreau says of the rest of his voice cast. “We actually did a commercial years ago, for the video game, Destiny, in which he was reading a poem, ‘The Law Of The Jungle’, from The Jungle Book, so maybe I was thinking of him from that too. It sounded so cool when he read it, and he plays the wolf, Akela. I didn’t know Lupita Nyong’o [who voices the wolf, Raksha], but I met with her, and showed her the artwork, and she was into it. Idris Elba was a really interesting, different take on [the violent, evil tiger] Shere Kahn. I let everybody use their natural speech patterns and accents; I was trying to bring a naturalism to it. Christopher Walken is a very unique voice talent, and he’s just great for [the malevolent ape leader] Louie. He makes that character feel a lot scarier and a lot less comical. Ben Kingsley is great as [the fierce but kindly panther] Bagheera.”
Not surprisingly, the big scene stealer in the cast is Bill Murray, who voices the sweet but manipulative Baloo the bear. “You don’t just call his agent and book the guy,” Favreau laughs of the mercurial actor, who places himself curiously outside the usual reach of most directors. “I know Ted Melfi, who did St. Vincent with Bill, so he gave me some advice, and then I tried to contact him through his lawyer. There’s also a phone number that you can call, but I eventually got through to someone who was doing temporary assistant work for him. It was like a real detective adventure, but what’s good about that is that there’s a vetting process. Anybody who works with Bill really wants him. It’s not like you just arbitrarily cast him. You have to work hard to get him.”
“You don’t just call [Bill Murray’s] agent and book the guy… It was like a real detective adventure, but what’s good about that is that there’s a vetting process. Anybody who works with Bill really wants him.”
Another big star on the film’s set was James Cameron, who swung by to offer a little technical. Like the director of Avatar, Favreau was actually shooting The Jungle Book in 3D, as opposed to converting it in post-production. “There’s only a handful of people who use this technology,” the director explains. “He’s working on Avatar 2 and 3 now. It’s fun for him to watch people using this equipment that he developed. For instance, we’re shooting native 3D on the pace rig. It’s not really in vogue now to shoot native. A lot of people convert in post because it’s a lot quicker and cheaper, but it’s very hard to convert things like hair, or the shape of a child’s face. Because if you change the geometry at all, it’s a bit weird. You might not notice it consciously, but it affects you. A set like ours is a really good environment to shoot 3D in because there’s not a lot of dust or wind; it’s a stage floor. It gives it a much richer image, and I know that James Cameron is big on shooting native as well. Not a lot of people are shooting native 3D.”
The joy of working with such technology is one thing, but the undeniable weight of it is another altogether. “There’s a lot of responsibility because this technology’s expensive,” Favreau says. “I want to make sure that this is worth the years of my life that it’s taken, to the exclusion of anything else creative. This is a completely immersive experience. I’ve never had anything else use more of my brain, because you’re dealing with myths and stories and traditions, and you’re also using state of the art technology at the same time. Technology lends itself easily to making spaceships and superheroes and things blow up, but making that technology appear to be organic and to disappear represents a whole other set of challenges. It’s more ambitious than anything else that I’ve done.”
The Jungle Book is released in cinemas on April 7.
