Annalise Davis on Fireworks

Courtesy of Paul Franklin

Fireworks (directed by Paul Franklin and written by Steven Lally) is making milestones for being one of the first complete works to utilize virtual production. While it has its cons, virtual technology creates a more lively environment for the actors than they would on green screen. It makes the audience feel that they’re everywhere at once due to the technology’s abilities to show many settings on its LED walls.

The film follows MI6 agent Gillian Lye (Charlotte Riley) making a tough decision to kill a terrorist in Libya via drone strike. Though it may sound easy to end a target, she contemplates it for moral values when she listens to her co-worker Pep (Ivanno Jeremiah) or for a career boost from her boss Ellie (Denise Gough).

Fireworks made its North American premiere at Tribeca 2022. Franklin, an Oscar and BAFTA-winning VFX Supervisor (Interstellar, Inception), makes a compelling narrative with these arguments and puts the Virtual Technology as part of the story. I spoke with Producer Annalise Davis spoke via zoom about working in virtual production and its benefits, race, and inserting moments of humor in a typical serious genre.

EF: What sparked you to tell the story?

AD: So I've worked with writer Steve Lally, and [director] Paul Franklin for years on feature films. Steve Lally came up with the idea for the story initially with this character. He was fascinated by this woman who's incredibly ambitious, wanting to get ahead in MI6. She believes that she's doing the right thing. Through the film, we start to question whether she really is. So he was fascinated by that character and he actually wrote it originally as a normal short film. When we were talking about it, because it was set in an MI6 ops room, it's very contained. I've made quite a lot of short films before, and I wasn't that keen on making a short film like that, because I think we should push the format and push the grammar of cinema and storytelling in a different way. So that's why we started looking into different ways of telling the story. We looked into VR in immersive ways, and we went down that route for a while. But ultimately, what happened is we hit upon virtual production, which is essentially what that means is we're in the MI6 ops room and through the telling of the story, one of the walls gets broken down. What we see as the Libyan target on the screen that they can see as blobs on the screen, actually becomes part of the set. So we broke down the set. So part of it is the MI6 ops room and the rest of it is this screen, which is virtual production. So it's essentially a massive TV screen with Libya on it, and the people in Libya on it. So we're able to use virtual production and the technology to tell the story in a way that hasn't really been told before that suddenly blobs on the screen where they're like, oh, let's press the button becomes something much more real. 

EF: How is virtual production different from green screen or blue screen?

AD: It's much better. Once you use virtual production, you'll never go back to green screen. Because of two main reasons. When you're there, you can see the images on the wall. So the actors can see the images, the designer designed the images in advance. The cinematographer can see the images for everyone. So it's part of the creative process in prep. So it's really part of organic storytelling. The other thing that virtual production does is that when you move the camera, the images move as if you're really there. So they focus. So you get parallax, and you get the focus change with the images. So that's the other thing that makes it like you're really there, and you're really part of the environment. So it's fantastic compared to green screen.

EF: There's a lot more pre-vis[ualization] before making it.

AD: Exactly. So the key thing about virtual production is there's a lot more prep, which is really great, because it means it's part of the creative process. All the department heads are involved and Paul oversaw it all. So that's all fantastic. But it does mean that the prep is way longer than it would be with green screen or a normal film.

EF: Did you worry that this would fail? You have to do a lot of tests with this setup.

AD: Yes, we did have to test it. We should have tested more. We probably didn't test enough. What we did was really new technology. Although they've done things like the Mandalorian, nobody ever tried to do a realistic setting in the way that we did because we were doing a real Libyan marketplace. I'll be honest, in our shoot, the wall did break a lot. So we did lose a lot of shoot time to the wall. But you get used to that as filmmakers and you sort of rewrite the script and you just rework how you're going to shoot it to make up for that time. So we got through it.

EF: The film tackles a lot of implicit biases. How do you convey that, in casting choices? You have privileged White women talking about coffee, or about the other things besides the main issue about thinking about the children, as Ivanno Jeremiah's character was pointing out?

AD: It's obviously deliberate. Firstly, we wanted ambitious women who aren't necessarily into children and don't really have morals on their sleeve. We wanted that, because it's why shouldn't women be like that. You wouldn't bat an eyelid if a man was like that. So the fact that it's women we liked and Steve Lally writes brilliant female characters. The fact about the women is they're not sort of one dimensional, they're really flawed. That's much more interesting than writing a strong woman or a good woman, to me, they're flawed, and therefore three dimensional and real. So that was important for us. Within the ops room, I'm really pleased that we didn't have a single White man on the screen, which made me happy. We wanted to show different kinds of people. Ivanno Jeremiah is Black man and he's actually the moral compass of the film. But then we have another Black man [Hammed Animashaun] who's like, “Hey, what's for lunch?” We're trying to not stick to any particular stereotypes, like a particular race, or gender is good or bad, and just trying to show a diversity of human behavior and human characters. Within the ops room, it's basically only Ivanno who cares about these characters. The rest of them are essentially pretty privileged people who care more about their coffee and their Accardo order than what's happening on screen, which we did want to explore because it's real. It happens and it's too easy to think about things that happen halfway around the world. They're just like blobs on the screen, or they're newspaper articles or clicks on Twitter and it's just trying to blow that up and kind of see it for what it really is.

EF: Yeah, that leaves you want to direct about the the location of the terrorist. There's been lots of stories of a government doing drone strikes in the Middle East. How did you avoid the victimization of the parents and children involved in these areas? Stories like 24 put them on the sidelines rather than the foreground.

AD: That choice was massively helped by the virtual production, because what we realized is, the minute you put your camera in amongst the virtual production, the characters suddenly become alive. In the first iterations of the script, they were just a mum and daughter playing, they didn't speak. But because of virtual production, Steve Lally was able to give them language, give them dialogue and give them things to talk about. What was really important to him was, even though they're in a war zone, he didn't want them to only talk about death and destruction. He wanted them to talk about silly things like phones because that's the reality. That's how people talk every day. Actually, the lovely [Raghad Chaar] who plays Saudia’s mom, helped us with the translation. She had also originally come from a war torn country. She said, “That's how people speak. We speak about our phones, we speak. We argue.” She loved it. Even if you're in a war torn country, you don't necessarily have everything completely serious. That's what was really important to us, that we represented these people in a way that felt authentic, showed their real lives

EF: As this is a thriller, there are moments of humor. This is a story that's been told a lot and also not funny. How do you peak into the moments of humor, like the person wanting to eat and is hungry?

AD: That always gets a laugh, every screening. That’s the challenge. That’s cinema. One of our ambitions with this is that it's in workplaces and even though they're killing people in a workplace, they think about what am I eating for lunch? When did I last go to the toilet and what's going on there? It's authentic. That's how people talk in the workplace and people are funny, and they do have banter. I think one of the exciting challenges about cinema and telling stories is to not just be completely serious, and try to bring humor into it. Because I think any message that we may or may not be trying to put across, if you can bring in humor and real characters, then actually the message is a sweeter pill to take in a way rather than if we were gloom and doom throughout. But yeah, apparently, that's how they speak as well. Steve did the research. They drink a lot of coffee, and they're obsessed with food. 

EF: We all are hungry. 

AD: [laughs] 

EF: Where do you see the future of virtual production? Do you think there'll be a future feature length film that is completely virtual production in the next few years or so?

AD: The three of us have a feature again. It's a thriller. It's set on a roof and using virtual production of that element of it. So at least half of it is virtual production and I feel that we've learned a lot. I've just come off a feature film that I produced, where again, we use virtual production in a totally different way to sell underwater. I think the future is real and virtual, because I love real filmmaking. It's fantastic. I'm not from a technical background at all, but I can see the potential that virtual production has to work with real production and expand what we can do cinematically. So that's always going to be a good thing and always going to be exciting. And I'm sure in the not too distant future, there will be a film that only uses virtual production as well.

EF: It does blur the line at times between screen acting and stage acting, because they're all in this one location together. Even though I don't know how many takes are filmed, there's not much of a difference between the two when you have to do everything all in one room.

AD: Absolutely. Actually, Steve Lally’s background is stage acting. In many ways it is. You know, we had brilliant actors, and I think what was really great is just letting them play long tapes because it is one long scene, really, we broke it up. Paul did run a lot of scenes together so that they could block it the way they wanted to and work however they wanted to do. That's actually quite theatrical in a way because it's letting the actors perform how they want to perform. It's exciting that we were able to work with the cast in that way and what I think is really good is the virtual production helped make it not too stagey and not too contained because that was always the danger. But I think we got the best of both worlds. We got amazing performances from the actors and worked in a way that did feel quite free. Alongside the virtual production, they expanded it all and made it really cinematic too.