Aquaman | Making an Underwater World Behind The Scenes Livestream | Warner Bros. Entertainment

Because of that, part of the challenge has been trying to show him in a different light. Okay, so for any of you people who know how much jokes get played on the Aquaman sort of mythology, people make fun of him for riding seahorses. Well, now you see my seahorse. We've never really been able to kind of tell his story on the big screen before, and I think a big part of that is due to the fact that he is a very different kind of superhero. He lives in a very different environment to what we're used to, and I think the world where he's from makes him very interesting. We have explored space more than we have explored the ocean floor on our own planet, and so the opportunity there to create this whole different world is so exciting for me. This is January 23rd, 2017. This is the year that we dive into everything Aquaman related. Right now, you guys are inside my production office here in Burbank, California, where we've been prepping for the last two or three months, designing the visuals and the look of this world. There's nothing in this movie that isn't drawn, not one thing, and everything's built, so it's pretty crazy. So these are the Atlantean soldiers. Before they ever make a costume or they do anything, Ed designs these guys right down to every little seam on their outfits, and then these are translated into three-dimensional models, and then they're turned into costumes. We're starting to prototype the costumes, which have been approved by James, and we'll start fitting our actors in the next couple of weeks, and then we have six weeks before we go to Australia, and 14 weeks till we shoot. I mean, this is just a walkthrough. That's what today is, right? No, it's just a walkthrough. It's a walkthrough to see what we need. Bang, his head just goes up. James, right here, when he's elastic, smash him up there, and then he hits back down onto this and breaks through. Okay, do you have a piece? Yeah. How are we going to shoot that? Actually, you know what would be great? It would be like when he goes through, just break it. Yeah, make this breakable. I think it would be much more dynamic. That's cool, too. Like, we're really going to hurt Kim, too, so, like, you don't even need to rubber it. Kim's not here right now to… To defend himself. This is great, you guys. It's going to look so good. Guys, we'd like to now go to an underwater fight sequence. The very first time I was pitched the movie, the first thing you automatically think is, well, we're going to be in the water all the time. We've all heard stories of how difficult it is to shoot water-related movies. They tell you not to work with kids and animals, but they really tell you don't work in water, if you can help it. But that's going to be very difficult for a movie that's called Aquaman. I don't think you can shoot the movie that you want to shoot underwater. Water work's just impossible. I can hold my breath for five minutes. The camera guy's got to do the same thing. It just can't work. It's not practical to shoot underwater, so obviously we're shooting in a green screen situation. And the movement was important to distinguish the underwater world from the surface world. There's so much stuff that's never been done before, and we're really just discovering it as we go along. Think of the fight sequences. Imagine what that would look like if it was underwater. I don't know what underwater fighting camera work looks like, but we're here to make it up. The greatest challenge as we entered the production of the movie was, how are we going to make it look realistic underwater? When we know we're shooting a dry set, and the water will ultimately be brought in later as visual effects. It was the first thing that we had to sit down and figure out is, how are we going to make people really look like they're underwater? I didn't know how they were going to shoot this. I had no idea until I showed up for stunt rehearsals and they showed me what they were going to do. We're setting up one of our guys on the tuning fork. It's to help simulate their swimming instead of actually being in a tank. It looks like a fork, a tuning fork. There's no easy shot in this movie, and even the movement of the actors is all new. It's all unique. It's all different to this particular film. The reality is, even a simple scene of two people talking is never going to be that simple. I never thought I'd see the day when my own father would bow before the king of Atlantis. My first scene was coming off the sea dragon to meet with Orm, and it took like 50 takes just for that particular motion. King Orm. King Nereus, we need to be a little closer together. Yeah, a little closer together. But the thing is, you could do a perfect reading, but something was wrong with the rig or whatever, you have to do it again. There's just no way of getting around how time consuming it is going to be to shoot this film because of all the technicality involved. It's a bit uncomfortable. All the pressure comes in at a very sensitive spot. I mean, I love doing stunts anyway. I do. I love it. So I'm excited to get in the harness. You said that you love stunts, and I'm very, very excited to get into the harness. That's a naive actor saying that. That's someone who has never been in a harness. I really said that? Aquaman, day one. Super excited to be on set on the first day. Feel ready to get this going. James has always wanted to shoot movies practically, and we really did build a lot of sets. It was important for me to give the actors as much reality as possible. When you have so much blue screen, we need the set built so that they can stand within it and kind of go, oh, okay, I'm inside a nuclear submarine. That first day was just, I'm like, hey, let's go, let's dance. This is one of the hardest sets you can do. Submarines are so complicated. We base it on reality as much as we can, and the way we do these sets, we buy large chunks of gauges and panels from the big ship repository where they strike the ships, and they take them apart and they sell them for scrap. We build a whole sub-interior with hallways and control rooms and a torpedo room that goes underwater. This is one of the more cool submarine sets. This whole thing is built on this big steel platform that can be sunk underwater on big hydraulic lifts. If you want to fill a set up, you can't pump enough water in. The easiest way to do it is push it into the water. It's like if you want to fill a bucket up really fast, you push it underwater and you fill it up. This will be a wet sink. So in the very unlikely event that we have a failure with the hydraulics of the system, the set will sink to the bottom. The water level will be right there. So make sure that you have the ability to float or swim. For those who don't know how to swim, I recommend you don't be in this set. I've got Bruce standing by. Set on the move. And falling in 3, 2, 1, action. And action. When you have an actor and he's getting blasted by water, it's much more dynamic. Cut it. This location is our home for Aquaman Amnesty Bay. It was a really hard location to do here because we went all over the place looking for bars that didn't show Australia out the window. So we built it from scratch. As soon as we got the signs up, we had locals pulling up. So I said, I never knew this bar existed. I'm sure security shooed away quite a few people. Well, here's the funny thing is, James does a lot of takes. You can't drink that much coffee. You'll be cracked out. You can't drink that much sugar, but we had to do it. The worst part is I had to finish this in the very beginning. Pound it. That's fine, but take 40 or whatever. You're just taking shots at the beginning before you even start the scene. If Tim messed up the line... Tim, you don't want to mess that line up. So that was the problem. It wasn't the sipping to the scene. Bang, bang, bang. To start off the whole thing. And then things got a little carried away. That is funny. The sunken galleon is a phenomenal set. It's really a full-size galleon that looks like it's been sitting at the bottom of the ocean for a thousand years. In here, they get attacked by these soldiers. And the stunt guys are practicing. There's a huge fight that happens. It's one you don't sleep easy when you know it's coming up. We had to pick a gap through a 45-degree angle, which made the whole wheel going through even smaller at a super high speed while inverting and twisting. Excellent. Cut it. Well, the advantage is the explosion of the statue could knock them back to where we want them to be. Manta could land over there. I mean, it's not a bad thing to actually move the statue over a little bit. The problem is, if I move the statue over here, Manta only has this place to come. So if Manta comes here, now the trajectory is going this way, right? Well, then, okay, if we put the statue back here, then Manta can come up that way. Because if Mera is over here, she's going to want to run that way. And we need maybe Merc's men to come up, boom, land over here. So maybe we have a few flanking Manta. And two or three others, right? Kind of surrounding them. Yeah, so that when she tries to step forward, these men land here and try and cut her off. So we're on shooting day 59. Today is August the 3rd. And we're sitting right now on the Sicily set. We were going to shoot in Sicily. Erice is the name of the town. We were originally going to shoot in Erice until they found out what we wanted to do there. All the destruction that you'll see in Sicily, that's like Black Manta's responsibility. So I take full credit for the trouble that we caused. At the end of the day, going to Italy and working in a historical town wasn't going to work for us if you're going to blow stuff up. Are you not entertained? So we built literally a whole portion of the town. It's really beautiful actually, turned out great. It is a perfect replica of the town of Erice in Sicily. We'd sit here at the little cafe and have our lunch and feel like we're in Italy. It was fun. I love this set. It's quite an ambitious thing. And you don't get to do this very often. This is very old school. The lighthouse is really one of the most central locations for our film. And it's the opening of our movie, so it's such an important sequence. We were looking for landscapes that would be reminiscent of Maine. And for the most part, Australia doesn't look like Maine. We found this extraordinary location in New South Wales called Hastings Point. And Bill built an entire lighthouse there. What we're building here is a lighthouse. And if you're going to build a house on a beach, you've got to build it so the wind won't blow it away. We're literally dropping it right on top of this park with heavy weights so it doesn't blow away. We're not digging into the ground, we're not doing any ecological damage. So that was probably the biggest challenge. It is a brilliant location. It's all the rocks and everything exposed, just like you would see in New England. It doesn't matter how good the VFX guys are, they still can't get it as good as the real thing. It really helps set the scene and gets everybody emotionally involved. That's a layer to doing things real that you can't get with digital scenery. It was nice being able to go and actually be in the ocean so that it wasn't all in the studio. That was fun. The day I actually went out to the lighthouse, the whales were there. They'd come to say hi. Then the crew just sort of stopped for a moment while we sort of gazed at the whales. Our costumes help us take that journey from dark, brooding, reluctant hero into someone who's going to become the king. So by the end, he's wearing armor that came from the kingdom of Atlantis. So it needs to be majestic and needs to be strong. And, you know, he also has to like it. The first costume is pretty terrifying. It just basically looked like I was in spandex with gold and bright green. I haven't tried on my next one yet. So I decided to put that on. A lot of our job is getting it to a point where it's got enough of Jason in it and enough of Aquaman, the comic book hero in it. You know, Kim's great. She's like, rest assured, it'll be good. So I'm really excited to see when the next interview, what it looks like, and then the next one, what it looks like. Super complicated suit because he's in so much water action. We needed something that would instantly wick, but was flexible enough. The problem with gold or metallic paints is on a flexible surface, the paint itself is kind of a metal. So as it moves, it wants to crinkle and wrinkle. And we tried probably 15 different variations of paints. We ended up developing a paint that was almost like a weatherproofing sealant that we reformulated to work with the rubber. It's one of those rad moments, just him putting on the suit for the first time and walking through, and you're like, awesome. When I put it on, I think my kids were really close by and I wanted them to see it. And, you know, it's the big wide-eyed mouth gaping and it just makes me smile. So, yeah, it's cool to be a dad who's dressed up like that. It's day 100. We're just about to finish filming the last few days of Aquaman. I've been doing this since January and it's encroaching on November, so it's been a long process. And over the course of that time, it's become like a family here. It's been a ride, that's for sure. It's been tiresome and you can start to hear it, we're all exhausted. But I got to work with my mentor, R.A. Rondell, to coordinate with him. It was just a dream come true. Of course I've had fun. I mean, if you're going to be away from your family for a long time, which most of us have here, that's a tough pill to swallow. But we're in great company, shooting a killer film with a bunch of fun people. It's a good life. It was a real challenge and it's a complicated movie. It's been a long, fun experience and I'm sure when the movie comes out, it's going to be brilliant. If this movie had no deadline, I didn't have a release date, I would just keep chipping away, I'd keep designing things. But when I get to a certain stage, I have to start putting my pen down. We're super pumped to be here tonight in Los Angeles at the massive Aquaman premiere! There he is, ladies and gentlemen. Aquaman himself. I'm just excited to see it and it's going to be a great night. Uh-oh, the shirt is coming off. The king means business. You can't really make a movie like this without all the amazing artists and the actors that put all this together. It was so much fun, it was such a collaborative process and I could not have asked for a better team to be with me on this film. Aquaman allows me to make a world creation film. It's a fantasy world, so literally everything has to be made up. From James to one of the most exciting parts of the process. It's challenging because you're designing a whole different world that we've never seen before. And you're doing it from scratch. In the comic book, they incorporated Atlantis into the storyline of the DC Universe. And I really love to dive into that world and basically create my version of what Atlantis would look like. And so to do that, I have to go further back, give it backstory. And some of it I pulled from the mythology and legends that we're familiar with, but other things I get to kind of create my own. Our Atlantis is a civilization that has been around for a long time. They're way more advanced than everyone else was at that time, thousands of years ago. And so I went and talked with my production designer, Bill Bretsky, and just designed the world with him. Me and James, we wanted to make a neoclassic culture that was on the verge of digital technology. Because they weren't like a primitive culture that went underwater, they were already pretty advanced. But the thing they invented gave them power to live underwater. One of the things I really wanted to jump into early on is just getting the aesthetic correct. And we have an amazing army of concept designers and artists who are so brilliant in what they do. And just bring them on board early on and just talking to them about the look, the style, and the kind of flavor that I'm going after the world. I'm a very hands-on designer. I love drawing myself. And so I'll kind of get in there, you know, kind of be behind their shoulders and kind of go, what about if we draw the trident more like this? Maybe just skinny up. It might look better, right? It might look more dangerous. It's more pointy. You know, that's just the process that I love, drawing and designing this incredibly vivid and lush world. Hey, big one, ladies and gentlemen. Those early days of us sitting in a room with a bunch of artists and James, just coming up with, what about this and what if this is the way the city worked, it was really exciting. The Royal Guards are only in the Royal Palace, right? Or anywhere, anything related like the Coliseum. But we don't see them outside of that. We don't ever see them in battles or anywhere else. As a director, I try to put myself in the shoe of an Atlantean and go, what is a date in the life of an Atlantean look like? How do they eat? How do they sleep? How do they use the bathroom? And so you have to think about all that stuff and all that stuff then affects, you know, the world that you're trying to create. Here in the surface world, you know, we built things out of materials such as brick, wood, metal. They don't necessarily have that down there. And so we're trying to pull a lot of influences from the ocean. The idea that maybe their buildings are very much like coral, that they're grown perhaps, right? And how does that work? And is it a living thing that they live inside? Is the building just glowing with bioluminescent glow? They're so deep down that sunlight doesn't penetrate the ocean at that depth. So what provides the light source? That's the kind of stuff that we have to really dig deep into. The development on this movie was a huge effort. It was just amazing the amount of stuff that came out of James' mind. This part here, when it's like this, it flocks together. Yeah, what an impact. And he's not going to settle for anything that isn't exactly what he was hoping for. So I think we're tangling more towards this camera. Good. Let's cut it. Going to this, I knew that it would be super visual effects heavy. And I don't think there is one frame in this movie that isn't touched by visual effects in some ways. Through the sort of post-production process of working on the visual effects, working on the CGI, we started to fine-tune and hone the look. We started out doing renditions of what an underwater environment would look like. And we had to really leverage other aspects that will be visual cues to the audience that we are indeed underwater. Just trying to go, okay, at what point does this look like water? And one of the things we found through our discovery process is we constantly need just particles floating, floating particulates. So we always have this particulate in our water volume. And you'll notice that as the characters move through the water volumes, that particulate moves around them and it moves with them. That really helped to remind the audience that they are underwater. And of course, you know, the flowing hair really helps that. One of the most important visual cues for underwater was what we did with the hair. I mean, we knew going into this that the hair was going to be difficult. But I don't think anyone appreciated how difficult it was going to be. In an underwater environment, all the hair just sort of tends to do its own thing. And this created for incredible computational hurdles to overcome. ILM actually rewrote their software trying to design this. I mean, there's over 500 shots in the movie where we had to add hair to our characters. Um, what's the plan again? The plan is to not get killed. Very early on in the process, James and I had a long discussion about how we're going to be dealing with talking underwater. Wait, you can talk underwater? Hey, I can talk underwater too! This is awesome! And what we wound up doing was thinking about how we talk. We make sounds by exhaling air over our vocal cords. So they have adapted their vocal cords to make noise when water is passed over them. When they exhale water, they make sounds the same way we do when we talk through the air. Oh, we can do more than just talk. So everything visual would start from the seed of the story concept. When you know your characters really well, when you know your world really well, it makes it easier for you to kind of visually design the world. James has a very clear vision of what he wants to do. But then he'll turn to you and say, what do you think? And then he listens, and he's very much a best idea wins kind of director. But definitely the captain of the ship at the same time. Very good. Let's cut. Let's roll right into another one. Filmmaking is such a difficult task, and it's great when we work together because we all want to make a great film. And action! I'm such a big fan of the superhero universe and science fiction movies and those big giant Japanese kaiju films. And I felt that this movie really allows me to touch on all these different worlds that I love, that I'm such a fan of. And definitely it was such an honor for me to get the opportunity to create this film. Superhero movies are only as good as the supervillains that the heroes are battling against. Form and black magic delivered on both fronts. If you look at Jason strictly as a visual cutout, he looks like a biker, he looks like a tough guy that you wouldn't want to pick a fight with in a bar. You got enough footage. Knowing Jason is the big dude, you know, and I'm barely six feet. So you got to do a lot of work, otherwise you just look like a skinny guy in a muscle suit. I wanted to gain weight, man. I wanted to get kind of big. But because of the way that the suit's going to be built, if I get too big, then I'll be bulky and things like that. But I'll probably still sneak on about a good eight pounds or something like that between now and May. They won't notice, or they will, but they'll deal with it. When we made Patrick the offer for King Orm, and obviously he knew that Jason was playing Arthur Curry, he said, I am going to start working out this exact instant. We've been busting our ass so much to try to give him a formidable opponent. You can't just see Aquaman kick everybody's ass. You want, like, just a shred of, can he do this? Maybe he can't. The goal for this was weight gain, getting bigger, stronger. I did it before the wrong way, which was fun. Can't really do that here. I've always known Patrick to be a very physical guy. And I knew that this role would give him the opportunity to really showcase how strong he can be. When he showed up down here, he was a monster. And he really had transformed himself into a guy that when he stands next to Jason, you're not sure who's going to win that fight. I got my mind blown by Patrick Wilson on my first day. And I said, oh, oh, that's the movie that we're doing. A lot of my job is to work out and, you know, clank an iron. It's like playing a sport or something like that is when someone gets a little bit more physical. And then you say, oh, okay. Oh, it's like that. We're playing like that. Game on. We need badass Black Manta. And it's unfortunate that we couldn't get him. So this guy will do. I'm just, I beat the shit out of him, so, you know. As long as I can look really good for my shirt off scene and steal all of Jason's fans. I want them to say, I want Black Manta to win. Yeah, yeah, it's just terrific. And I think he's brought a sense of intensity to the role. I have a shirt off scene that's coming later on. We did a screen test. James said, hey, let's just zip that down and let's just get some shots. So I zipped it down. I came back a couple of days later and they said, hey, man, I think the shirt's got to come off, man. We got to do some rewrites, you know, so. I'm happy about that. Because there's numerous characters in here. We start out in the drill process to see what their strengths and weaknesses are. And we build on their strengths and that's how we choreograph their fights. If you're bigger and stronger like Jason, you're going to make him look brute power. Strength. More like Barroom Brawler. But you still have to have a little flair to it. And then Patrick, he's the king. He has a kind of arrogance. I am the one true king. And we also wanted Orm to be a little more flashy. So it's a little more fluid than maybe a little less brute than Arthur has at some points. And then, of course, there's Black Manta, who's a pirate. And you just want to make him more like the street. You know, he's not a superhero. He's just a scrapper. He's a scrappy fighter. So that's how we designed his fights. We fight with our hands and we fight with whatever we can find and pick up. I got my gauntlet that comes out. Damn, you don't know your own strength, my friend. He comes in, jet packs. He's flying. I have laser eyes. I'm so prepared now. So prepared. Patrick got big, but Yaya got ripped. I'm not sure who put on more weight, but Yaya definitely, he won. What's up, Patrick? What's up now? And I always joke, like, man, I did like five months of working out. And what was on screen, which literally comes down to about one arm, to be quite honest with you. Man, those guys just ate whatever they wanted to and lift weights like bastards. I like to work on Jason more than I work on Aquaman. We have those little inside jokes when we get on set, get across from each other. And I whisper, oh, somebody just turned 38 and is almost 40. That's pretty cool, man. 38, 40, just round up. Just get there already. Leave the 30s to me. I got my butt kicked a lot of days for that. I mean, these stunt guys are just unbelievable. They really are. The whole team, from top to bottom, really make us look great. We teach them the moves, but they're the ones that go with the life. The best thing about playing a villain is that you have the best lines. I think I'm gonna need a bit of a helmet. And you win all the fights except for the last one. And if it wasn't for that darn mirror, I would have had him. It would have been a much shorter movie. Atlantis. Zebel. The fisherman. Rhine. Deserters. Trench. And the Lost Nation. These seven kingdoms make up a rich, complex, undersea world. With mysteries waiting to be revealed to surface dwellers for the first time. I'm Dolph Lundgren, and I play King Nereus of Zebel in Aquaman. The myth of Atlantis has inspired storytellers for centuries. And its effect has been profound on the world of comic books. In the 1940s, the original incarnation of DC's Atlantis was just deserted ruins, discovered by Arthur Curry's father. Only later were we introduced to a thriving, futuristic Atlantis. A majestic kingdom with a more personal connection to Aquaman. Now, James Wan has reinvented Atlantis for a new age. To create such a vital and revelatory environment, he combined historical legends with a DC Comics canon, and added his own incredible vision. James Wan's kingdoms are so compelling because they have history. They're established nations with deeply felt roots and traditions. In the time before the Great Fall, ancient Atlantis was a culture on the verge of a digital revolution. But their civilization was inevitably doomed to crumble under its own might. After the Great Fall, the kingdoms broke into separate realms, each with a unique history, society, and aesthetic. Imagine diving thousands of feet below the surface, gliding past undiscovered ancient ruins, then cresting a ridge to behold the shining city of Atlantis, its 400-foot walls and looming plasma cannons guarding a gateway to a mysterious new world. Modern Atlantis became a thriving, industrialized metropolis, with hordes of vehicles speeding along aquatic highways. Like their ancestors, they were dedicated to technological advancement and the consolidation of power. And they have a ring of fire. None of the other kingdoms have a ring of fire. I never thought I'd see the day when my own father would bow before the king of Atlantis. We never get a look at the kingdom of Zebel in the film, but as its king, I have the inside scoop. Zebel has a long history in the comic books. It began as an otherworldly dimension where Mera ruled as queen. But as the comics were updated, Zebel became a prison colony under Atlantis' control. In the film, Zebel is the sister kingdom to Atlantis and his chief rival. To be honest, we might be able to take him in a fair fight, but we've always preferred politics to all-out war. Violence has always plagued the surface. It will destroy themselves. Zebel may be less warlike than Atlantis, but they're even more enamored with their royalty. So, of course, my people love their king, but I think they may love Princess Mera even more. The Fisherman Kingdom is a peaceful, intuitive culture whose fish-like physical evolution is the source of mankind's mythical stories of sirens and mermaids. Their architecture has a gothic feel, which is fitting for their more philosophical, poetic way of life. The fishermen are less interested in the domination of the ocean than coexisting with it. That is, until King Orm and I persuade them otherwise. Choosing to harness the power of undersea lava flows, the Brine have taken on the attributes of massive, armored crustaceans. The tribe has been toughened by constant heat and pressure due to their proximity to the Earth's core and the extreme depth of their kingdom. In many ways, the Brine are the opposite of the fishermen. This warrior race has the strongest military of all the kingdoms, and they value a show of force over negotiation, which is why Orm gathered the might of all the other kingdoms before attacking them. Death to the Atlantean! The Deserters were the weapon builders of Atlantis. Since they had already separated from Atlantis before the Great Fall, they survived that initial cataclysm only to succumb to its aftereffects. Cut off from the majority of their civilization and coping with a rapidly changing climate, the Deserted Kingdom sank under a different kind of deluge, an ocean of sand. Their colossal machinery and statues of great warriors are all that remain of their once great culture. This is the Hall of Armory, where the legends say Atlan's traitor was forged. The Trench Kingdom, if one can call it a kingdom, is a nightmarish world shrouded in darkness. This devolved beast-like race was created by Geoff Johns for his new 52 reboot of Aquaman, and James Wan jumped at the chance of creating an even more horrific version of it. The Trench fell further than any other faction, shunning the advancement of their species and instead regressing to an animalistic form. They make their home in the Mariana Trench, the deepest natural point in the ocean, clinging to the craggy walls and scavenging for flesh. But they'll pop up to the surface if they can sense a tasty morsel or two. The headless statue among the Council of Kings is the only clue we have about the mysterious lost nation. Who were they? Where are they now? Perhaps we'll meet them in the future. With Aquaman, James Wan has given us a visionary take on an ancient world. We've seen the kingdoms of the seven seas rise, fall, and rise again, but still, it feels like its story in Aquaman's has only just begun. One of the most fun things for me about making this movie is designing the different creatures that populate this crazy underwater world. There's a wide range of creatures inhabiting the underwater world. Some of the creatures are familiar and some are very new. It's a non-explored world. The world of Atlantis has all sorts of unknown life that we've never seen before, and it comes springing from the imagination of James Wan and all the great artists that worked on the project. Aquaman riding a seahorse is one of the most absurd images from the comics, and one of the challenges going into this was how do you get past the sort of joke of Aquaman riding the seahorse? What James wanted to do was embrace it. Let's not pretend that these aren't the iconic images of Aquaman. Let's make them cool and make them awesome. Going into it, I wanted different animals to differentiate the two separate kingdoms. With the Zebelians, they have taken to seahorses, and the king rides in on a beautiful, majestic sea dragon. They do feel like ancient knights, but with a sort of fantasy science fiction twist to it. Meanwhile, the Atlanteans have domesticated and tamed all the really dangerous sharks. Willem gets to ride this giant black hammerhead shark with some really spectacular armor on it. It was very important that the animals would in some way have personalities that tied in with the characters that would ride them. And that's definitely the reason why King Orm's animal is an ancient Tylosaur. Orm, I think he gets the coolest one. He's riding this armored Tylosaur that just looks so badass. We have seven kingdoms of the underwater world. And one of the kingdoms is known as the Fisherman Kingdom. These are more like merpeople. They're peaceful, docile people. The Fisherman people are more intellectuals, scholars, and artists. They are ones that want to make peace with the surface dwellers. The initial design work had started, I think, early on with James and a couple of other people. A couple of illustrators. But way down the line, even into filming, we were still redesigning those characters. They need to be more grounded and give them a bit more humanity. So we went in and redesigned them and kind of created class systems as well. Like you see the soldiers are very fish-like. Where you look at the Royal Kingdom and they're very evolved and more human. The Fisherman people are basically a combination of practical makeup effects and a lot of visual effects on main t-shirt. We did full body suits from the waist up with silicone hand appliances and full silicone face pieces, cowls, contact lenses, and teeth. The only part that we may have in visual effects is a little bit of gill movement, but overall it's a full prosthetic makeup. Prepare your armor, Your Royal Highness. We move against the Brine Kingdom at once. The Brine Kingdom are literally the bottom feeders of Atlantis. They are the most maligned and looked down upon of the other societies. They were humans. They turned into crabs. So they're kind of like what we want for dinner. And they got multiple legs and they're kind of brutish and they live low on the ground in caves. The Brine people, they don't swim, they walk. And these creatures are big, heavier people with massive armor. And so we started with that idea designing what the king would look like. There's quite a bit of inspiration that came from really early deep sea diver suits. But he's not wearing a suit. That's his natural form. Death to the Atlantean head fish! The ocean is a magical place, but it's also terrifying as well. And so I wanted this movie to be able to reflect our feelings of the great and powerful ocean. I love the ocean. It's something that absolutely scares me and draws me in. And it's super spooky. If you've been in the middle of the ocean and you just look down, it's pretty terrifying because it's all the unknown, right? You never know what's down there. With the Trench Kingdom, I had a great starting off point because they're featured very prominently in Geoff Johns' Neo 52. And so I used that to dive into the world of the Trench Kingdom. These scary, trench-dwelling, catabolistic creatures. But through that idea, I started to develop something that's a bit different. In the comic book, they have big, giant eyes. But I started to realize that these characters probably would not have eyes because when you're so far down, the sun doesn't penetrate that far and there's no light. If anything, they're afraid of bright lights. And so then that started informing what the creatures would really look like. The Trench creatures really allow me to lean into the horror aspect of the ocean. The Trench are a super dangerous group and James has an incredible sequence. It harkens back to his pure horror days. It's a creature from the Black Lagoon, but the 2018 version. Down here we have a legend about the Carothan, an ancient sea monster so powerful that even King Atlan himself feared it. And now the beast has awakened. This creature is nearly as old as time itself. First and foremost, it's ginormous. In real-world scale, from tip of the nose to the end of its longest tentacle, it's two miles long. We needed to design a creature that is big enough to take on Aurum's entire army. There's some aspects to it that are crab or lobster-like. It also is part giant squid. It pulled from design aesthetic from the ocean, infusing it with my love for HP Lovecraft to create the most powerful creature on Earth. Permission to come aboard? The film opens with a really close-up marine sequence. This is Aquaman's hero's intro to this movie. I wanted him to be very much like a barfighter, smashing heads, kicking knees out and grabbing things. It's just going to be a fun character to watch fight. He's strong. Even without his superpowers, he's strong. And I barely used any force on that one. The submarine set piece was literally the first day of photography. There's no better place to start than at the deep end. First scene, I got my helmet on with my tubes. Helmet comes off. You know what I mean? It's the most badass thing I've done on film thus far. The location has been somewhat of a challenge because of how confined the space is. Tiny quarters, big wire gags. Everything was steel, metal, aluminium, hard edges. It was a good way to start the film for us. We pad the sets. This is kind of crazy rubber. This is all rubber. It's because a guy hits his head on it, you know? We throw people against the walls, and these are rubber stairs. We've gotten very good at moulding rubber things. Jason's great. He's really good with us and looks after us at the same time because he's a big boy. He makes sure he gives us the right amount of strength but doesn't hurt us. Jason's a pro. He's like an expert at hand-to-hand combat and things like that, so I just follow Jason's lead on that stuff. My father gets pinned against the wall and Aquaman's freaking leaving like a jerk. So Aquaman, in a sense, chooses to let his father die. By allowing David's father to die, in many ways, sows the seeds for Manta's revenge. You can't leave him like this! You killed innocent people. You have to seek for mercy. It's a great introduction to Aquaman. It's a great introduction to Jason. It really gives you an insight into who that character is. The idea of Aquaman coming onto a submarine and saving the day is a really cool way to introduce this character. Merc crashes down here, right? He gets up, he runs that way, we follow behind him. Bam! Through the wall. Bam! Through the wall again. The camera spins around him to his back. Right, Mugden runs down here, maybe he jumps down. And then somewhere along the hallway here, the camera goes out a window. Then we see her run, run, run. And then the camera does a zoom back to find Arthur in the foreground here by the bell tower. James has ideas that scare you at first sometimes when he gives them to you, like, I don't know how we're going to achieve this. He lands, crashes, there's a few cuts there. He looks up, we'll cut to his POV scene, mirror running. Then he goes running, then our one-shot thing starts. We were talking about at the conception for months, we had people running and jumping down a set of stairs, landing on the ground and keep going. And James wanted to do it as one continuous shot. The Merc run sequence was a really fun one to design. We would have miniature rooftops kind of laid out, you know, cardboard boxes. And then toy figures that we would jump from place to place. And I would talk about, you know, where we would want to put the camera. Right, I like the idea of being on a cable cam that go with him. You go down and without cutting, right? I want it to be an experiential moment for the audience as well. And so they're not just watching it from outside looking in. I want them to be inside as well. Whenever we do a one-shot, it's not to show how clever we are, but to say, come with us and be with us on the journey. John McAfee is this amazing second unit director and I work closely with him trying to work out, you know, what's the best way to shoot that. Preparation is everything for this. We have tested in our early stages our camera technology, our visceral feeling of how we want to capture it. A million things do have to go right. James captures one shots that, you know, no one would dare take on. But, you know, he'll challenge you to do that. And we did it with quite a few sequences. That one in particular was amazing and it's a one-shot from start to finish. Three, two, one, go. With the camera guy following in tow. They're both on lines, they're running through walls, they're getting connected from one system to another as they turn. Good. Reset. Three, two, one, go. Going down balconies. Woo! Yeah! If I have three different set pieces happening at the same time, I look to sort of find a way visually to kind of bring and tie them all together in post-production. And we start out with that long Merc run and then at some point we leave him and then we go see who it is that he's chasing and that is Mira in this case running across the rooftop. We transition into a shot where we track up with and find Mira running on the rooftops. We blend that with her running, being chased, jumping over things. And the camera keeps pulling back and then we go to Arthur and Black Manta at the end. It's all over the place and so that just adds to the visual interest of the sequence. It's hard to reinvent the wheel but I think what James really does well too is give you a different way to view the wheel. We have a sequence when we're on the sailing vessel and we're being thrashed about in the middle of a tempest and the conditions were very real. We're working under a torrential downpour which is exacerbated by the fact that just to get rain to read on camera it can't just be a normal rain. It has to be the equivalent of a fire hose pointed straight at you. It's a great sequence with Arthur and Mira on the boat getting attacked by the trench creatures and it is pure horror. And James loves that stuff. Pulling off the kind of horror and suspense and all the traits you need to make a great horror film, he's got that which is awesome. I definitely love the trench creatures because it does allow me to hug back to my horror roots and so I went all out and basically made those sequences just monster movies like just sea creature monster movies. Yeah, I think they should have their own movie. We had limited vision with the costumes. We had guys on stilts, a six-way motion base on a ship, tonnes of water. It basically was the perfect storm of what you don't want to have to deal with. It was tough in that water, in that rain, in the wind. They're jumping on and off boats fighting with Jason, and you're in the rain and the boat's moving and the lights go off. That's fun. You're in it and you're being real. They're from the depths! They're scared of the light! It was a lot of fun. That was like real movie making. Throughout that whole sequence, it was James' idea to use the lightning to strike the water and light the water up from underneath and so you get this beautiful subsurface lighting quality that's what can be a very abstract, featureless, stormy environment. And gives you these moments where you get super clarity. There's a huge wave out there and it's backlit and you can see through it and it makes it beautiful. The trench sequence was one that I really wanted to create a visual look that looks like a split screen of the ocean. You see them with the red torch swimming down and just tens of thousands of trench coming in and following them down to the bottom. It's just an awesome shot. That part was really fun for me. Trying to come up with a cool approach through digital filmmaking and to kind of challenge myself to do stuff that I haven't quite seen before. When the trench was swarming underwater, James was like, wouldn't it be great if they're just doing this sort of corkscrewing, double helix sort of pattern. We treated these creatures like pack animals where they work in a cohesive sort of team kind of way. And it just took it from something that just sort of felt like flocking or swarming and just gave it a lot more visual interest. So it was a fun one to dive into.