Beowulf: 'It blew me away'

"Didn't you think it was spectacularly different? Have you seen a movie that looks like this before?" asks producer Steve Starkey, a tad superfluously the day after Beowulf's first media screening at a Los Angeles 3D Imax cinema. Angelina Jolie certainly hadn't. The actress not known for any inhibition in the past (witness her nudity in Gia and Hackers) looked down bashfully at her Prada heels when asked how she felt about her "performance-captured" 3D alter-ego.

"I really wasn't expecting it to be like that. Bob Zemeckis [Beowulf's director] showed me these pictures of a woman half-painted gold and then a lizard. And I've got kids so I thought, 'That's great. I'm going to be this crazy reptilian creature.' Then I saw the poster [in which her breasts are intentionally prominent] and saw a few other things. I actually had to call home after I saw the film and explain that the fun little movie I had done was in fact a little different from what we were expecting."

Jolie's tour de force moment in the film – on a sexual level, anyway – sees her exiting the water, essentially naked bar a wafer-thin layer of computer-applied gold paint. It is evidently not an accurate representation of Jolie's body now – she is much skinnier – but more than two years ago, Jolie had her entire body mapped digitally. She wore a leotard, had every dimension measured, pulled every facial expression known to woman and then acted out every facet of bodily movement while covered in performance capture "dots". Later, she arrived for what she smirkingly notes was a "two-and-a-half day shoot". She acted out all her scenes in a device called The Volume without the support of props, makeup or costume. And still, she was surprised. "I just didn't expect it to feel as real."

Nor apparently did her illustrious fellow actors, Ray Winstone (in the title role), Anthony Hopkins and John Malkovich. Yet the creative team behind Beowulf knew exactly what it was doing, and how the film would look. "We were able to realise what we imagined," says Starkey. "You do these renderings of how you see the movie and then to see them come to life is just spectacular."

Hollywood is forever searching for a new toy, a new medium, anything to lure ever-dwindling audiences away from their state-of-the-art home viewing systems and back to the multiplex. It thinks it has found it in this new amalgam encapsulating 3D and a technique once called "motion capture" now called performance capture ("perfcap" in the industry). As James Cameron, a pioneer in the field likes to explain, "Actors don't do motion, they do emotion."

Enter Beowulf, not the first film presented in 3D, but the one with the most photorealistic humans yet seen.

"We were trying to create a new form of cinema," enthuses Starkey, Zemeckis's business partner of more than 20 years. "3D has been around for 50 years but everything we are doing is new. We are trying to expand a new art form ...it's just really stimulating and exciting."

Starkey and Zemeckis are so excited about the technology that they and longtime partner Jack Rapke have formed Imagemovers Digital, which will make 3D performance capture films to be released by Disney. (Beowulf's effects were created by the Sony-owned Imageworks which also worked on another film pioneer in the field, 2006's Monster House.)

The downside for all concerned with Beowulf is that theatre owners are not keeping up with the cinematic Joneses. The majority of audiences worldwide will see the film in bog-standard 2D. A decade ago the debate began raging as to whether actors themselves would become redundant, replaced by cheaper, less demanding "stars" created by computers. Beowulf and the series of films which will follow it have already put paid to such human concerns.

"We're trying to get as much of the performance as we can," says Starkey. "That's the key to the art form. So you're always trying to evolve that as much as you can."

In January, Cameron announced his feature film follow-up to Titanic. Avatar, starring Sigourney Weaver and an unknown Australian actor, Sam Worthington, has had its summer 2009 release date staked out well in advance. The co-heads of Fox Filmed Entertainment announced this summer: "It will take two more years but in the summer of 2009 Avatar will be a seismic change in the movie-going experience."

Avatar will be the first film released only in 3D. "3D can become a fully accepted way in which audiences view movies," Cameron told Business Week earlier this year. "It will become another consumer choice, like premium or regular gas. The premium experience of 3D will be the preferred viewing experience for action, animated, fantasy and science-fiction films."

Hollywood is banking enormous sums of money on Cameron's being right. Digital Image Movers is already working on its first project, A Christmas Carol. Tailor-made for Jim Carrey's expansive talents (he will play Scrooge and all three ghosts, alongside Bob Hoskins) it will be released next Christmas. Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, meanwhile, have teamed up to direct and produce a "perfcap" trilogy based on the Tin Tin books.

Fortunately for Hollywood, its movie stars seem as enamoured of this new trend as its creative, behind-the-scenes geniuses, even self-professed neophytes like Anthony Hopkins. "I'm not into computers and I'm not a great aficionado of the movies.

"People say this is exciting and it's going to revolutionise everything and I say, 'Oh yeah? OK. Good.' "

John Malkovich says: "To me it was remarkably reminiscent of doing plays. You get up in the morning and put on all your dots. And then you act all day. A lot of the things that might have come into play in normal film-making don't: you don't wait for lights, or for camera repositioning. Continuity doesn't really matter. For most of us it was quite liberating."

Yet not all of Beowulf's cast is convinced. Surprisingly, its youngest principal, Alison Lohman, 28, is the least enthusiastic proponent for the form.

"I don't get too excited about it because I don't have that control, says Lohman. There's a part of me that wants to know how I'm going to look and I don't. I don't know how long my hair will be, what my dress will be like. I definitely look younger. I'm sure I have bigger boobs, though. I was like, 'Yeah, that's great.'"

For Winstone, the benefits are myriad. His Beowulf is a strapping 6ft 6in blond adonis. Winstone is 50 and neither tall nor blond, but every line delivered, every vestige of expression on the hero's face is his.

"So the thing is you can play anything. You can go to work now and play parts you are too old for. I don't think anyone knew what you were going to see. I know I didn't. You felt like you were inventing something. And when I saw it, I sat there with my mouth open. It just blew me away."

Only one factor remains to be tested: with home-viewing 3D technology some way off, will films like Beowulf really get people out into the cinema? Starkey cannot be certain.

"I think this is a bigger cinematic experience but maybe not necessarily what everyone wants. We will have to to wait and see."

'Beowulf' opens on 16 November

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