Jon Favreau is standing in the African savannah, eating a bowl of Rice Krispies. It’s a little after nine in the morning, though the sun is unusually high, beating down on a rocky promontory that juts across the grassland. Standing up there is the multi-Oscar-nominated cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, who eyes the scene, then calls down to Favreau that the light isn’t quite right, in a quieter voice than you’d expect.
“Change it?” murmurs the 52-year-old Iron Man director, at which point Deschanel, 74, reaches up, grabs the sun in his fist, and drags it downward. The sky instantly bruises and dims, and the promontory’s shadow whips across the ground almost too fast to see, like a tablecloth pulled out from under the dishes. “Better?” asks Favreau. “Better,” Deschanel nods, and starts sizing up his shot through a viewfinder.
In a sense, none of this is really happening. The two men are standing a few feet apart, wearing virtual reality headsets, in a large, matt-black warehouse numbered 5419, in the Playa Vista suburb of Los Angeles, in February 2018. But simultaneously, within a parallel digital realm, they’re surveying a film set that doesn’t actually exist.
Specifically, it’s the set of Disney’s new version of The Lion King: a reworking of the 1994 hand-drawn masterpiece that still stands as the high watermark of the studio’s late-20th-century renaissance. In line with recent second swings at the likes of Dumbo and Aladdin, Favreau’s film has been billed as a live-action remake – but it isn’t, though nor is it animated, at least not in any remotely conventional sense.
“It’s really a game we’ve created,” Favreau explains, setting down his breakfast beside his director’s chair and removing his headset. “A multiplayer VR filmmaking game, in which the objective is to make a movie.”
Favreau was recruited late in 2016, while his partly live-action remake of The Jungle Book was closing in on $950 million (£755 million) at the global box office, a sum that brought it just inside the 50 most lucrative films ever made. That success gave him leverage to demand the studio take the technological leap to what sounded back then – and, quite frankly, still does – like a ludicrously advanced new hybrid filmmaking method: a real-life crew shooting animated characters on virtual sets.
“The difference this time is we’re playing with the house’s money,” he grins (the new film has a budget thought to be significantly more than even The Jungle Book’s $175 million). “So the only question is, how good can we make it?”
