'Rebel Moon' VFX Supervisor Marcus Taormina Discusses Snyder's Vision & The Extended Cut
Rebel Moon isn’t the first science fiction epic to debut on Netflix, but it might its most ambitious. Born from the boundless imagination of Zack Snyder, the film was clearly made with the intention of being the streamer’s very own version of Star Wars: a high-concept story with cool characters, even cooler setpieces, and modern themes. While time will only tell if it will rise to the same level of infamy as the latter, there’s no denying how impressive and immersive the film is. That’s all thanks to its breathtaking visuals.
Regardless of how familiar some of the plot points or characters feel, it’s hard to want to step away from this universe. Although Zack Snyder was the architect of the film’s lore, VFX supervisor Marcus Taormina was the engineer who helped bring it to life. Just in time for the film’s release, FilmSpeak’s very own Dempsey Pillot got the chance to sit down with Taormina to chat about the challenges of creating something original and what audiences can continue to expect from the budding franchise.
In case it isn’t immediately obvious in the film’s opening sequence, this is not Taormina’s first rodeo. In fact, he worked pretty closely with Snyder on his last genre mashup, Army of the Dead, too. Although he enjoyed the experience, and wanted it to continue, he didn’t find out Snyder wanted to continue their partnership until the tail end of the last film’s production.
“It was a finale dinner. We all got dinner together,” he said. “And that's when he was like, ‘Hey, I got this new project. He told me about the history of it, and he said, “I'd love for you to be part of it. [Then] he sent me the script.”
Taormina adds that he couldn’t set the script down. Shortly after reading it, he told Snyder that he was eager to start. That was in the film’s early days, long before the film’s grueling 152-day shoot. But not even a rough production schedule could quell his excitement. He describes the experience as being especially fun to tackle because Zack had pretty much fleshed out his entire vision through storyboards. So it was literally only a matter of bringing his ideas off the page.
There’s one sequence in the film where Kora and Gunnar (played by Sofia Boutella and Michiel Huisman) enter an intergalactic bar trying to locate a specific character. No one in the bar will answer them, except this space parasite that’s using a human being as a host. Many might remember this sequence for how cool it looks, but Taormina says it’s memorable because it’s a perfect example of the marriage between practical and digital effects.
“It’s kind of a harmony between both departments,” he said. He went on to compliment the film’s extensive post-production process for giving him the extra time he needed to perfect Zack’s world even more.
“It took time for a lot of the creatures,” he said. There were a couple [of elements] that took a little bit longer than I anticipated, or had some changes along the way, but I think just the sheer magnitude of everything together and just working on multiple movies at the same time was also a blessing and a curse. We could kind of cross and fuse.”
Taormina compared the film to a crossword puzzle, with the way that things were moved between the film’s first part and its second part, slated to come out in April. Despite it all being a part of one overarching story, he explained that not only did the team build to certain ideas in the first film, so other ideas got switched around to/from the second film too. That’s where the “Snyder Cut” of this film comes into play.
Taormina wasn’t able to discuss the extended version of the Rebel Moon in any amount of detail, but he did clarify that, no matter what, “They’re separate films. And they'll probably standalone both for the extended cuts. And for the cuts that are released.”
He added that the purpose of the other cuts was just to give life to all the extra footage Snyder shot.
“We shot so much material that it was bound to have things drop on the cutting room floor. That's just if we shot a normal amount of film or digital,” he said. “So with that amount on the cutting room floor, you don't want to just leave it there, right? You want to do something with it. And I think that's where there's potential to expand further with the extended cuts. That’s all I can say.”
But that wasn’t all Taormina had to say. When asked about the prospect of doing more than the two currently planned films, he did have one more tiny tidbit to share.
“We've never looked at this as one movie, or two movies. We've looked at it as a world that we're building,” he explained. “So we've talked about certain things that will never come up in either movies, but that we're thinking about. And then we're thinking about those worlds and what those worlds are, and what they look like, and how we put them in or talk about them or pay respects to maybe what's in the future.”
That was really all he could say.
With such rich visuals, and passionate individuals like Taormina at the helm, a return to this world would be a no-brainer for Netflix. For now, we’ll just have to wait until the next part of Snyder’s saga to come out to know for sure.