‘Mufasa: The Lion King’ Director Barry Jenkins Gets Biblical on His Virtual Production Roller-Coaster Ride
How did Barry Jenkins, the Oscar-winning director of “Moonlight,” find himself making “Mufasa: The Lion King” with the same virtual production tools that Jon Favreau used on “The Lion King” remake? Simple: He instantly fell in love with Jeff Nathanson’s prequel script and wanted to play in the same high-tech sandbox as Favreau and James Cameron.
“When I first read the script, I was surprised to find so many things about ‘The Lion King’ universe that excited me,” Jenkins told IndieWire. “This very biblical, ancestral story about the origin of Mufasa and the Pride Lands, the idea of transcending tribalism and how we can lead ourselves from that and replace it with community.
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“I just thought all those things were just so wonderful, and the canvas was so large that I had to make the film,” he added. “And because Favreau’s film was done this way, it made sense to continue it in the same production process and the same tools.”
That put Jenkins in a virtual production partnership with MPC, the same VFX studio that made Favreau’s “The Lion King,” along with his trusted crafts team (cinematographer James Laxton, production designer Mark Friedberg, and editor Joi McMillon).
In the exclusive tech featurette below, Jenkins highlights some of MPC’s latest tech innovations for the journey in “Mufasa.” This includes fur simulation, a massive flood, an elephant stampede, and immersive world-building covering much of the African continent.
The biblical premise concerns orphan Mufasa (Aaron Pierre) surviving a flood and being rescued by young prince Taka (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), who becomes his adoptive brother and eventually Scar after Mufasa proves to be the worthier king. On Mufasa’s noble journey to find the mythical Pride Lands, he endures a rite of passage that includes battling the rapacious white lion, Kiros (Mads Mikkelsen), and his pride called “The Outsiders.”
Along the way, Mufasa encounters Sarabi (Tiffany Boone), his future queen, Zazu (Preston Nyman), the uptight hornbill and future scout, and Rafiki (John Kani), the wise mandrill and future shaman, who tells the origin story as a framing device to Mufasa’s granddaughter, Kiara (Blue Ivy Carter), and the comic duo Timon (Billy Eichner) and Pumbaa (Seth Rogen), the wise-cracking meerkat and child-like warthog.
But, unlike Favreau’s vision of “The Lion King” as a NatGeo film made with CG photorealism, Jenkins wanted a scrappy, indie-like film, emphasizing animated performances that are more emotional, relatable, and anthropomorphic. In other words, a Barry Jenkins film about nobility, ancestry, and community.
At the same time, Jenkins wanted more expansive CG photorealism for the environments, covering the breadth and beauty of African landscapes. This would help convey the epic and biblical nature of the storytelling, bolstered by action set pieces functioning as immersive roller-coaster rides through the swirling flood, elephant stampede, and fights on land and underwater.
“I’m from this very typical live-action background,” Jenkins said. “But what that means is getting all these elements in place, most of which you can’t control, and then finding what is the best version of this. What is the shot that moves me the most? How far can we push these expressions? And I said to those guys at MPC: ‘I’ve got to find a way to do that with these tools.’ And so, what we did was, we started evolving the production, up until the point where everything was sort of set [with the voice actors recording their sessions as a ‘radio play’].”
This meant learning how to use VR remotely and in an L.A. studio as a continuation of “The Lion King” workflow for scouting locations and camera layout: setting up shots every day for immersive master scenes. And also understanding the ins and outs of a new system that MPC developed for “Mufasa” called “Quad Cap”: a quadruped motion-capture system for choreographing complex and organic character movements. This involved a group of MPC animators moving around on a stage in mo-cap suits, which was converted onto the lions in their virtual world.
“It takes a certain sort of algorithmic knowledge to know how to move accurately, to capture something that can work,” said Jenkins. “But what that allowed us to do was, we could film them in real-time, in an actual physical space, which is something that wasn’t possible on ‘The Lion King,’ and I think some of that expressiveness comes through.
“When one character stands up, the other character takes a step back. In cinema, the camera should react to that step back in real time. The movement should be in sync. It should be in flow, in spirit, with the other characters. And I do think this is what filming the animation, as it was created with an intuitive camera, opened some of those things up as well. Even though they’re lions, when talking, we have to relate to them as people.”
Although Jenkins found it difficult at first to adjust to such a controlled process, he enjoyed working with cinematographer Laxton, who laid down the cameras with movement in real time. He also credits MPC’s Adam Valdez, the production VFX supervisor, with making the virtual production process Jenkins-friendly. Once he had rough character animation placed in the scene, Jenkins was able to flourish with Quad Cap, in which two or more characters have a conversation, circling one another, in real time.
There’s one scene of Mufasa and Taka coming out of the forest that’s a particular favorite. “They’re being chased by ‘The Outsiders,’ Jenkins said. “They hear the sound and the camera pans around. And this little deer comes running out. Then the camera pans with it. And the deer’s running away. Then the camera keeps panning. And then Kiros and ‘The Outsiders’ come out of the fog. You don’t realize that you’ve been in one take for 35, 40 seconds.”
Jenkins also enjoyed choreographing massive action set pieces where the camera could be everywhere. “I want to be on the roller-coaster, I don’t want to be standing up at the theme park watching it,” he said. “Because I was trying to find a way to have an immersive camera and immersive cinema for those action set pieces, it was actually really fun to build those in virtual production.”
The idea for the early flood, in fact, came out of the last fight between Simba and Scar surrounded by fire in Favreau’s “The Lion King.” “There’s a James Baldwin quote, ‘God gave Jonah the rainbow sign: No more water, the fire next time.’ It’s what ‘The Fire Next Time’ book is named after,” Jennings said. “And just this idea of water being this thematic element for Mufasa that he has to overcome, stuck in my head. And so this idea of him being separated from his parents by a flood, it just wouldn’t leave me.”
Even though water and swimming are central to “Moonlight,” Jenkins is not a good swimmer and recalled watching kids in Hawaii having fun playing in the water with riptides and a tidal bath. He went to Valdez and asked him to build a water sequence following a drought that becomes a source of sustenance and then a source of peril when it goes out of control.
“The principle was the roller-coaster,” Jenkins added. “If there is a sequence we built using the tools from the [Favreau film] sort of working footprint, it had to be that sequence because there’s no way to block that in real-time with animators and mo-cap suits. You have to shot design, storyboard, and go in, build it, beat by beat.”
Although “Mufasa” (which has been shortlisted for a VFX Oscar nomination) is likely a virtual production one-off for Jenkins, he came away a more enlightened filmmaker. “It was so much fun to do because these are some of the richest archetypal characters that we have in human history,” he said. “And little kids are watching and learning these wonderful, complex lessons about human life. I’m also glad I did it because there are tools that we acquired making this film that we wouldn’t have otherwise. There’s never been more ways to make a movie than there are right now.”
“Mufasa: The Lion King” is in theaters now.
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