They’re Still Going to the Matte

When Deak Ferrand studied art in his native Switzerland, he dreamed of becoming a movie matte painter. Ferrand apprenticed with a master of trompe l’oeil, learning to paint huge photorealistic murals that played with perspective and tricked the eye. But by the time he got his first film job, at Buzz Image Group in Montreal in the early 1990s, the field already had changed.

“I wanted to do real matte painting,” he says. “When I started in the business and I heard that people were switching to digital, I said, ‘No, I’m 10 years too late.’ ”

In this age of virtual movie landscapes and digitalized demons, when nearly anything imaginable can be rendered on screen, it’s easy to forget the matte painter. In the days before Photoshop, when computer 3-D rendering was a dream and “Star Wars” not even a seed in a young boy’s mind, every studio had a matte department.

It all seems so quaint. A special effect back then was a squirt of ketchup, or so it appeared. Artists painted scenes--distant mountains, maybe, or a shadowy lamp in the foreground. Combined with filmed action, painted mattes could turn a sparse set into an ornate mansion or make a sound stage look like Calcutta.

Movie magic nowadays is both easier and more complicated. Matte painting still exists, but the works often involve nary a drop of paint. Conjuring Calcutta would probably engage the labors of visual effects artists--the new matte painters--who may be better versed in technology than they are in the traditional arts.

Matte painting, then, as that term once was used, is a dying craft. The development underscores the tremendous evolution taking place in movie post-production. Technological advances have made it possible to populate films with nearly lifelike digital creatures and wondrous imaginary worlds, but some in the industry fear that they also may be moving an art form that always was bound to technology even farther away from the realm of emotion and flesh-and-blood.

The conflict between heart and hardware will grow still sharper in coming years as the computer wizards creep closer to creating truly lifelike digital actors and ever more realistic effects and settings. True to the inconspicuous nature of matte painting--where seamless invisibility is essential--the behind-the-scenes changes going on in this world are far less dramatic than what appears on screen. But they nevertheless are real, and they affect what audiences see.

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In today’s Hollywood, computer effects have developed a prominence that not only overshadows other contributions to the way a movie looks but also often threatens to overwhelm the movies themselves.

“It’s a very delicate balance, the design of a movie,” says Eugenio Zanetti, the production designer of such movies as this year’s “The Haunting” and “Restoration,” the 1995 movie for which he won an Academy Award.

“In theory we can visualize just about anything,” he says. So much can be done with computers that for some directors who work without a carefully thought-out vision of the story and subject “it’s like offering candy to a child.”

An example of a production that got out of control is “The Haunting,” the summer movie Zanetti designed for DreamWorks about a haunted house. The $80-million movie directed by Jan De Bont garnered lots of attention for its spectacular sets and special effects. But the movie did poorly financially, and many critics said it paled in comparison to the much less explicit original, made in 1963 and directed by Robert Wise. Not only is most of the scary stuff left to the viewer’s imagination in the earlier movie, but that film also suggests that nearly all of the ghostly manifestations exist only in the mind of the troubled main character, played by Julie Harris.

The horrors all are graphically presented in the remake. The house is filled with the ghosts of dead children, and it features a gigantic, ornate bed that threatens to imprison star Lili Taylor in a claw-like device. A giant computer-generated ghost stalks the corridors.

Zanetti’s audacious designs drew lots of attention, but he acknowledges that much of it was wrong for the movie.

The house in the original novel, “The Haunting of Hill House,” by Shirley Jackson, was the projection of the main character’s psychological anguish involving issues of guilt and an absent father, he says. “You try to design everything around that,” he says, explaining how he wanted to approach the movie. “If everything happens in the woman’s mind, there’s no monster in the house, no ghost. They’re all in her mind. But I remember [DreamWorks’] Steven [Spielberg] saying people love ghosts,” says Zanetti, “which is true.”

And so De Bont’s version became a special-effects spectacle in which--as many critics observed--the effects not only did not serve the story, they fought against it.

This is typical of the way movies get made in Hollywood, says Zanetti, whose background is in the Italian theater. “It was a conceptual problem. There is always the problem of understanding what is literal and what is mythical in film,” he says.

In the theater world, lengthy discussions take place before plays are produced in which the concept and subtexts are hashed over. “In theater, directors have to have theatrical understanding of what the play is,” he says. In film, directors are quick to resort to technical tricks, but in reality “the answer [to dramatic problems] is not found in technology.”

But technology seems to get most of the credit. For all the justified praise for the visual effects of such recent films as “What Dreams May Come” or “Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace,” those movies also relied heavily on simple matte painting to achieve their stunning looks.

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“Dreams’ ” winning of the Oscar in visual effects but not in production design may be one sign of the way today’s Hollywood perceives high-tech magic over less showy behind-the-scenes work, says Zanetti, who designed the production. The effects teams did standout work, using cutting-edge technology in new ways to create visuals unlike anything ever seen in the movies. But while they were executing Zanetti’s designs, he was nominated but did not win.

The industry’s fascination with computer technology is such that Ferrand says artists who still paint mattes by hand sometimes feel obliged to scan their work into computers for touch-up work--even when it isn’t really necessary--just to satisfy studios and directors who think that it has to be digital to be good.

Now the senior matte painter at POP, a Santa Monica-based visual effects company, Ferrand says one of the pleasures of the job is that he gets to work with veteran matte painter Rocco Gioffre. The two worked together on “Dreams” and on other recent films such as “Mystery Men,” in which matte paintings were combined with digital work and miniatures to create impressive effects.

“He came from the old school, and I come from the digital school,” says Ferrand of Gioffre. “I never had the opportunity to work with a real matte painter, so we’re trading knowledge.” Ferrand says painting mattes by hand requires more skill.

For all the recent changes, the first blow to the craft of matte painting occurred in the 1960s, when financial pressures, as well as an increase in location shooting, prompted the studios to begin to dismantle their matte departments.

“Once ‘Easy Rider’ came out, everything changed,” says Syd Dutton, co-owner of Illusion Arts, whose career as a matte painter began 25 years ago. “People wanted a more real, gritty look.” There still was plenty of work, though, mostly because of the disaster movies that flourished during that period and the science-fiction movies subsequently inspired by “Star Wars,” but increasingly studios had little use for full-time matte departments.

Then came the digital revolution.

Artists who paint with computers say technology makes the job of, say, turning a one-story facade into a four-story building, or adding clouds to a clear-blue sky, faster and easier. And learning to control technology to create the desired effect is in some ways analogous to mastering a red sable brush and pigment. Still, Dutton says, something has been lost.

“When you paint with a brush you’re really painting through your heart, and when you work on a computer it’s a cerebral process,” he says. He eschews the computer, choosing to continue painting by hand. Then the work is scanned into the computer, where Dutton says another artist finishes it.

It’s not that Dutton thinks it’s impossible to do good work that originates on a computer screen. “I know wonderful digital painters who paint with their hearts,” he says. He just thinks it’s harder to emotionally connect with a painting that exists only in pixels.

He mentions Ferrand as someone capable of getting incredible emotional resonance from his computer work. “But he knows how to use a paintbrush too,” Dutton pointed out. “His background is as an artist.”

With digital art, “almost anybody with a little practice can create and paint something that looks very good. But if you’re going to go beyond that and give the work something emotional,” he says, “you need an artist.”

As technological possibilities continue to expand, Zanetti says things will get even further out of hand. “We have to develop the next generation both in production design and art directors and special-effects people,” he says. “People should learn to do structural analysis of films and understand the text of films.

“People must realize that the question isn’t whether you can build [a stunning effect], but why would you want to build it and what does it mean?”