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Everything Everywhere All At Once swept the Oscars this year, winning 7 out of its 11 nominations, one of those going to Jamie Lee Curtis for Best Supporting Actress. I walked away from EEAAO with the feeling that I really liked the idea of it, more than the final execution. This is a matter of personal taste, but I would love to have seen more time spent getting into just how the mother-daughter relationship (Michelle Yeoh and Stephanie Hsu) went awry and less time on fighting sequences. Again, just personal preference, and I still totally understand how the movie did well.
One element that was consistently a pleasure in the movie was watching Jamie Lee Curtis. She was having the time of her life, and as a viewer it just made me feel relaxed and joyful watching her have so much fun. (That’s my commentary just on watching the movie–I’m not saying here that she was the most deserving in the supporting actress category.) Jamie is now promoting her first post-Oscar-win movie, Disney’s Haunted Mansion, where her character Madame Leota appears in a crystal ball. In an interview with Collider, the motion capture work Jamie did for this role led to her discussing technology and how the human quotient can never be replaced by AI:
“The visual effects level is all technology. Once you know how to do that, it’s science. The performing part is not science, which is why AI will never work because emotions are real and they come from human beings. They don’t come from machines. So to watch beautiful actors do that kind of work, under those circumstances, is something very impressive to me.”
As the interview progressed, Curtis clarified that, having starred in massive productions like the Halloween franchise and Academy Award-winning sci-fi comedy Everything Everywhere All At Once, she has done the green/blue screen several times, but the motion capture part of filmmaking is one she’d never had the chance to do.
Curtis also mentioned watching behind-the-scenes features of movies like Avatar and praised “the emotional work that these people are doing.” She also suggested that the work gets even more beautiful to contemplate once you consider that those actors need to conjure up a scene while “they’re just wearing suits with cameras all over them,” and caps it off by saying it’s “astonishing.”
Based on the iconic Disney theme park ride, Haunted Mansion centers around a woman and her son as they move into a house that’s chock-full of ghosts. The star-studded cast features Winona Ryder, Rosario Dawson, Jared Leto, Owen Wilson, Dan Levy, LaKeith Stanfield, Tiffany Haddish, Hasan Minhaj and Danny DeVito.
Haunted Mansion premieres in theaters on July 28.
I appreciate how clear she makes the distinctions of which parts are science and which are performance. Although there is a part of me that’s kind of exasperated over the fact that we need to even make a case for why AI can’t take the place of humans. Still, I enjoy Jamie’s energy here, heaping praise on the actors who can work in concert with technology to illuminate their performances. Plus I just plain love a gal who has firm boundaries on when she needs to go to bed. Now if only we could blame AI for the phrase “based on the iconic Disney theme park ride.” But sadly, a human came up with that movie premise.
