Not only has every care been taken to preserve elements of the source material but it also has those cool retro and also modern anime moments. Fans of anime will seriously lap this up despite what the recent comments have said. “It was quite confusing,” Walpole admits.īut it works.Most of the older generation watched when they were kids, the source material barely even bordered a 12A and yet the film managed to in fact surpass it's source material in maturity. The rest of the room was inserted digitally in post-production. To help the actors know where a door or a window eventually would appear on film, simple green frames sometimes were erected. “There would be an island of dressing,” says Walpole, using the British term for furnishings, “floating in a green space.” Walpole and his team then positioned pieces of furniture within the imaginary confines of the room. The dimensions of the setting, such as a room in an elegant Moroccan residence, were chalked out on the green floor of the set in Germany. First, after studying the photographs of the interiors, Walpole and his team had to find or construct furniture that would look like it belonged in the varied locales. By bringing the locations to the studio, the Wachowskis were able to get a European casino, the Brandenburg Gate, a Dubai skyscraper, Death Valley and much more into the film for a fraction of the cost of having cast and crew on location.īut using this technique to such a degree had its challenges.
“It was like we were working in a green goldfish bowl,” Walpole says, explaining that most of the movie was filmed on minimal sets encircled by green screens.īefore physical production began, location scouts and photographers traveled the world taking 360-degree, high-definition photos of settings that later were dropped into the scenes using green-screen technology. Everything was shot on the sets of Studio Babelsberg near Berlin. And despite appearances in the film, they never shot in Asia, the Middle East or North Africa, either. Although Paterson and his team did tour the California desert and the Los Angeles area looking at midcentury architecture for inspiration for the Racer home, the cast and crew never filmed in Southern California. The house across the street would make you believe that part of the film was shot in Palm Springs. Pops spends his time building race cars in his home workshop, often with the garage door open.
In this parallel universe, it’s all about the cars. Throughout the house, shiny racing trophies grace shelves, hundreds of tiny Hot Wheels cars line the sills, racing posters decorate the walls, and Speed’s pristine Mach 5 sits in the middle of the living room. “You want it to be about the acting, not the set.” “The set needs to be comfortable with the viewer. “Speed’s world is a parallel world, an exaggeration of color and action and images.” in the late 1960s and veritable cult status later.
“The intention was to make a live-action version of the original cartoon,” Paterson says, referencing the Japanese anime series that achieved a huge following in the U.S. However, the eye-popping race scenes that make up much of the movie, which opens Friday, could happen only in the distant future - or in a video game. Adds set decorator Peter Walpole: “You never quite know where you are or what time you’re in.” “We were trying to make the film quite timeless, retro and midcentury, but set sometime in the future,” says Owen Paterson, the production designer, who had worked with Andy and Larry Wachowski on their groundbreaking “Matrix” trilogy. But there’s also a futuristic television and a spotless workshop where Speed’s dad, Pops (John Goodman), makes battery-operated race cars that can defy gravity. The hallmarks of the era are there: graphic wallpaper, bold colors, bamboo accents and streamlined furniture upholstered in nubby fabric. IN THE Wachowski brothers’ new movie, “Speed Racer,” the eponymous main character (Emile Hirsch) and his family seem to live in a modern ranch house in midcentury suburbia.