Real Steel Set Visit

The evolution of robot boxing:  

Shawn Levy: We don't start with a prologue of that sort, but what we do is in the first scene we learn that Hugh was a boxer and the kind of boxer he was. He wasn't the champ, no offense to Hugh, which I'm sure would have been [laughs].

But as Evangeline Lilly says, "24 and 19 but in every fight a knockout." With this guy, the fight wasn't over until someone was on the mat. That's how he lives. The guy has no illusions about what he is, but he's a scrapper and he's going to keep swinging until he can't swing no more. That's the heart of the movie.

Do we get any shots of Hugh in the ring? Flashbacks?

Hugh Jackman: We did shoot, actually, Shawn and I came up with the idea. We decided that I was going to be more out of shape. Before that happened we shot some sequences of me that are in the movie. You don’t see any film flashback, but you get a sense from that. And then I put on a whole lot of weight - because you want it to look like, you know, he could have fought but is a little out of shape now. I came to the first fitting and Shawn said, “Ok, I think we need to back off a little bit.” I was sort of preparing for another movie too that Lee Daniels was directing, but that got pushed back. So I was twenty pounds heavier than I am now.

On the various leagues:

Shawn Levy: There are two tiers in the movie: underworld and league. For instance, someone I know just sent me a website that was making a big deal that we've already copy-written wrb.com. The WRB is the World Robot Boxing League. It is NASCAR, NBA, global, corporate-sponsored big money... But that ain't the world he lives in. He lives in the underworld.

Shooting the robot fighters:  

Shawn Levy: We basically pre-motion-captured real boxers and converted them into their avatars.  Whereas Avatar took those virtual creatures and put them in a digitally created Pandora, we go to real fight venues and we re-insert the robot avatars in live action in real time.

Literally, this didn't exist ten years ago, and there's about 17 guys out there who invented it with and for Jim [Cameron]. And some of them were on Avatar for nine years. I'm very that I got a lot of them.

When Ben and I did Night at the Museum, you're lining up a dinosaur shot with nothing. Same thing like what Hugh was saying on Wolverine - you're constantly just acting to nothing. Here, when we line up a shot, I see Hugh and I see my robot already, and I'm operating my camera to that, and that's called Simul-Cam B.

So, the first step, seven months ago, we brought in these boxers and we captured them fighting. Then, when you mo-cap, you have that performance from infinite angles. So you take the virtual camera and you pick your shots, and I lay out what I think I want my sequence to look like as a preview. So that's basically heavily evolved storyboards. Then we went into Crash Palace, we lined up a shot, and the robots get simultaneously comped into the image, no matter where I put the camera. That's the evolution from mo-cap through Simul-Cam B.

Improvisation when acting with pre-programmed visual effects:

Shawn Levy: In LA, that would have definitely created problems, less so in Detroit. There was a lot of improvisation on that day, but not so much the fighters as much me and the choreographers. Like when Sugar Ray [Leonard, boxing consultant on the film] came in, he watched the fight and choreographed some of it and then he goes, "You know what we should do? Mighty should be so dirty that he should just go right down onto a knee and straight right into the balls. Because that is something you could never do in a human fight and it'll be funny." We would allow ourselves to find stuff like that.