To create a film as enormously epic as Avengers: Infinity War, you need a small village of folks, all highly skilled in a variety of areas and all working in sync with each other, to bring audiences the incredibly visually astounding final product that Marvel has become known for. When they’re done right, visual effects can leave you in awe and wondering just how they pulled it all off.

Collider was recently invited to Disney Studios in Burbank, Calif. to chat with Visual Effects Supervisors Dan DeLeeuw (Marvel Studios), Russell Earl (ILM) and Kelly Port (Digital Domain) about how they came to be working on Marvel films, the combination of art, science and technology that it takes to complete these epic productions, working up until the last possible second, the process of bringing a key character to life through visual effects, the challenges with Thanos that they didn’t have with the Hulk, whether they were fans of comics growing up, collaborating with such talented casts, and the development of the de-aging process.

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Image via Marvel Studios, Photo: Chuck Zlotnick

Collider:  How exactly did each of you guys get here, working on these insanely crazy Marvel movies?

DAN DeLEEUW:  It’s something that I’ve always wanted to do. We all share Star Wars as our favorite movie, in the past. It blended nicely with the types of things that I was interested in, with art and technology, and bringing them together. You just have to work your way into the business as best you can, and work your way up. I got lucky enough to get on second unit for Iron Man 3. And then, I met the Russo brothers on Winter Soldier and have been running with them ever since, through the Avengers movies.

RUSSELL EARL:  As a kid, I would get toys and remote control cars, and I’d take stuff apart. I’d hide under my bed until I could figure out to put it back together. I did a lot of model making and building stuff. I went to art school, and studied design and industrial design, which naturally led into visual effects. I actually started as a traditional model maker, building spaceships and buildings, and flying cameras through it. I also had an interest in computers and played with the computer side of things. I just tried to transition from the traditional work into the computer stuff. I got a job at ILM and worked on a bunch of films, and then I fell in with Dan [DeLeeuw] and the Marvel crew on Winter Soldier. It’s been great.

KELLY PORT:  I was interested in and inspired by Star Wars when it first came out, and I always had an interest in computers, photography and art, and a curiosity about so many different things. When this small company, Digital Domain, started in ‘93, I was fortunate enough to start relatively soon. I started in ‘94, and I’ve been there ever since. I worked my way up through that company. Just being interested in lots of different things keeps your interest pretty tight. Everything is always changing with the technology and new problems to be solved. You want to always keep it fresh.

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Image via Marvel Studios, Photo: Chuck Zlotnick

It’s a career where it’s such a huge combination of things, and people probably don’t realize just how many different creative aspects are involved.

EARL:  It’s a big mix. It’s a great combination of art, science and technology. We’re fortunate in that we all work at places where we have a lot of really smart people. You can put the problem forward, and then get everyone in the room and say, “How can we do this?” And someone will go, “Oh, I know. Why don’t we try to do it this way, or photograph that, or we could write this code to do that?” The problem-solving aspect of it is super fun, but there are so many nuanced aspects of it and such a variety that you’re always doing something new and different. That keeps it fun.

PORT:  It’s incredibly hard work and it’s time consuming, so if we weren’t passionate about it, it’d probably be the most miserable job ever.

DeLEEUW:  Yeah, you have to love it.

It seems like you probably keep working on stuff, up until the very last second. What were the scenes or sequences in this, that you had to work on until literally the very end?

DeLEEUW:  There were a lot of them, really. It’s interesting, based on the amount of film everyone has done, over the past ten years, what you thought was going to be impossible two movies ago, is not impossible anymore. What you thought were gonna be deadlines just don’t matter anymore. You keep pushing and pushing until the end, and then eventually you stop because they tell you that the film has to go to get rendered and sent out, in a matter of hours. We had 14 vendors on this, and maybe two or three of them finished their amount of work, before the last day. You have the ability now to just keep updating shots and dropping them into the final cut. Wakanda went until the end.

PORT:  There was a shot where Thanos’ belt buckle was shining too much. I was actually at home, and I logged in and tried to fix myself ‘cause it was literally being done. I thought we won the last shot award, but Russell was actually five minutes later.

EARL:  I had just landed on vacation ‘cause I thought we were done, and my bag didn’t show up where we landed, so my wife and the kids went off to the hotel. I was there waiting for my bag for two hours, and then Dan called me, and I was frantically on the phone.

DeLEEUW:  The rule used to be that we couldn’t go on vacation until the premiere ‘cause once it’s the premiere, it’s done. That’s not the rule anymore. Now the rule is that you can’t go on vacation until it comes out into the theater. That’s when you’re done-done.

EARL:  People are always asking, “Is that shot final? Is that done?” And I say, “Ask me when we’re in the theater.”

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Image via Marvel Studios, Photo: Chuck Zlotnick

So, what was that shot that you were working on so late?

EARL:  Oh, I don’t even wanna mention it.

Typically, when you do visual effects, you want them to blend in seamlessly, so that people don’t necessarily realize that things are visual effects, which means you tend not to get as much credit for all of the work that you do. Is it nice to get more credit, appreciation and attention for doing all of the work that it takes to bring these movies to life?

DeLEEUW:  Yeah. One of those life highlights was on Winter Soldier. We were on the set, where Cap goes back to the museum, and Stan Lee showed up that day. It was like, “Stan Lee’s on set!” So, I got the producer to introduce me to Stan Lee. The producer said, “This is Dan Deleeuw, he’s a visual effects supervisor.” And Stan was like, “Oh, you’re the guys that make these things possible!” I was like, “Whoa, this is the greatest thing ever!” If you think about it, that was just Stan being Stan. Looking at the stories Marvel told, over the years, you had the Hulk series, and Spider-Man, and Thor guest starring in some of them, back in the day, but we’ve gotten to the point now where we can really tell these stories. The Hulk can be in a movie and you can believe in him. Now, you can do Thanos and you can sympathize with him, and he can basically carry the movie. Not only are you getting a chance to do the things that you love, but this key character in the movie, you’re helping to bring to life. In terms of Infinity War, since so much of it’s from his perspective, it’s not a movie without him. You could’ve told another version of Infinity War that was centered around the other characters, but in this case, Thanos was actually driving the entire movie, which was pretty cool and amazing.

Did you guys grow up with comic books, or have you just found yourself in this world and have since developed an appreciation for them?

DeLEEUW:  Yeah, it was always comic books, Star Wars, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, for me. That was always the trifecta. With comics, I was an idiot, back in the day. You could get Star Wars action figures, but there weren’t any action figures for comics, so we would cut out the characters in the comics to have little paper characters to play with. Then, when you go back and look at your old comics, there are cut-outs and you’re like, “Huh, maybe that wasn’t the best idea.” But, it was the right thing, at the time. I was lucky enough to work on a lot of the pre-vis and plan a lot of the fights for Civil War and Infinity War, which was about taking your favorite characters and putting them in place with each other, and stealing stuff from the comics.

EARL:  I was probably less into comics. For me, it was Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and BMX bikes.

DeLEEUW:  That’s why you sent that shot of Black Panther on the BMX.

EARL:  I thought we could add that, which was really fun.

PORT:  For me, it was less comics. They were in my life, but not in a crazy way. But I did a lot of making plastic models. I would spend two weeks, making a beautiful model and detailing it out, and then I’d go blow it up with firecrackers. I’m still doing that today, but in a different way.

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Image via Marvel Studios, Photo: Chuck Zlotnick

What were the challenges that you guys faced with Thanos, that you didn’t have with the Hulk?

DeLEEUW:  The technology is improving, from film to film. If you go back and look at the Hulk in the first Avengers movie, you can see how he changes from that to Ultron, and then in Ragnarok, he was speaking more. With Thanos, he had to carry the film, so you needed to be able to interpret Josh Brolin’s performance. Ruffalo is definitely a big aspect or component to the Hulk, when he performs for him with the mo-cap and stomps around. We did this test, early on, with Josh, and we thought we were just gonna get these big, broad, bombastic lines that were typical of a movie villain, but when Josh started playing with it, you ended up getting this very subdued performance. So, what was already gonna be a difficult challenge became something that you had to be able to capture the subtlety of. There was a lot of spoken dialogue, but then a lot of it was just playing on Josh’s face, and you have to sell that. Especially when he throws Gamora off of the mountaint, there’s a good three minutes of the movie where the horror of what he did plays on his face. She finally figures it out that he does love her. She’s like, “Oh, my god, he actually loves me. This is the best moment of my life, and the worst moment of my life, because my father loves me, and now he’s gonna kill me.” She’s screaming and acting it out, but Thanos has to play it as this stone faced character. Having to get all of that into the character is what Kelly at Digital Domain and the folks at Weta have to do. There was a lot involved with making Thanos super awesome.

PORT:  From a technical perspective, we used a technical innovation from machine learning, on this project, that hadn’t been done before. That allowed us to get that subtlety, which was really important. With those subtle performances, it wouldn’t have been as effective or as believable, as a character. It certainly wouldn’t have been able to convey a non-dialogue performance as well because it was so subtle. For that particular character, it really all comes down to Josh Brolin and his performance. We were very excited that we could do something with technology that allows actors to do that in digital characters. It’s an exciting time, and I hope to see more characters and actors go in that route because it really opens a big door for actors.

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Image via Marvel Studios, Photo: Chuck Zlotnick

What’s it like to collaborate with these insanely talented casts, especially when you have all of them in one movie, like Avengers: Infinity War, and to work with all of the directors?

DeLEEUW:  There are multiple levels of complexity in a movie. You’ve got the effects, and then you got the process of actually shooting it and getting it done, and there’s getting all of the actors together. With Marvel, every movie that’s happened before is a training ground. For Winter Soldier, it was [Anthony] Mackie, [Chris] Evans, and Sebastian [Stan]. And then, Civil War came along and tripled the size of that. And then, Infinity War came along and quadrupled the size of it. They’re all amazing. The Russos were into comic books, and they’re movie nuts, and so you develop a shorthand with them. With Joe [Russo], everything references back to The Empire Strikes Back, in some form or another. Josh Brolin was great because he was on board for anything. He really got into the character. I think he really enjoys playing the character. He let us dress him up in the mo-cap outfit, and put dots on his face and helmet cameras. We had these big displacement suits for when the other actors would touch him, or when Mantis was on his back, we had this big foam piece with his little arms sticking out, and he was acting through the shot. They’re all unique. A good chunk of them all have their own franchises, and even those coming together, they get along really well together. Working on a few films, they all have their own different takes on the characters. With the visual effects, Chris has the uncanny ability to always know where the shield is. It’s always CG when he throws it, but he always knows where it is. And Robert [Downey] is great with knowing what Tony is gonna do with the suit. For the bits on Titan, Thanos just brutalized him, punching him and beating him down, like Rocky or Raging Bull. There was a lot of Raging Bull style stuff, where Thanos was just destroying him, and then Robert got a look at it and modified it. Him getting stabbed was the result of Robert working with the directors and making that moment that much greater. We were going for the feel of sympathy for Tony, but when the knife comes down and Thanos catches it and turns it around, the audience completely freaks out. But, they’re all great.

One of the things we’re seeing more and more in the Marvel films is the whole de-aging process. How do you feel that’s progressed, since you’ve started doing it?

DeLEEUW:  We started on Winter Soldier, with old Peggy. That was our first foray into making someone older, and trying to sell that, so you didn’t have to cast another actress. We got to actually use Hayley [Atwell]. She had that relationship with Chris from the first movie, so it just resonated so much more. The interesting arc about this shared universe is that the relationships with the actors, as characters and as people, are carried forward from each film, so you’re not having to recast. And seeing the stuff they did in Ant-Man, at the beginning, and in Civil War with Robert, it’s something that’s getting quicker. When we first started on Winter Soldier, it was definitely something where we broke the rules, in terms of what they wanted. Usually, you’d shoot an old person, and then steal from the old person’s face and put it onto Hayley’s face. We didn’t actually shoot it on location, like they wanted to. We actually did it in post and pioneered that way of doing it. It’s interesting, the technique has become more finessed, but right now, it’s still something that is very much artist driven, in terms of what they’re able to do. With the de-aging, it’s still very much a hand-crafted thing, so it depends on the artist that’s working on it. There’s really no fixed system yet, but it’s getting better and better, with every movie.

Avengers: Infinity War is available on Blu-ray and DVD.