Close to thirty years have passed since Doug Liman’s breakout feature Swingers played in the Venice Film Festival’s now defunct Overtaking Lane sidebar devoted to emerging directors, having been rejected by Sundance.
The Bourne Identity and Edge Of Tomorrow director was back on the Lido this year unveiling his XR thriller Asteroid which is among 30 works competing in Venice’s Film Festival Immersive Competition.
Starring Hailee Steinfeld, Rhenzy Feliz, DK Metcalf, Ron Perlman, Frieda Pinto and Leon Mandel, the work revolves around a group of strangers who head to an asteroid in an old Russian Soyuz rocket on a risky mission to mine wealth beyond their wildest dreams. Only one of the space travellers will return to earth.
It is the latest work from 30 Ninjas, the immersive studio Liman created more than a decade ago with Julina Tatlock and Jed Weintrob using technological developments to expand the boundaries of storytelling.
Produced by 30 Ninjas in association with Google’s 100 Zeros, Asteroid is among a slate of XR films being lined up for the launch this fall of Android XR, the new operating system, combining AI, AR and VR, being developed by Google and Samsung.
“At 30 Ninjas, our mission has been to embrace new technology and storytelling. I have always been interested in movies that reflect the moment they’re made – that can be through the content, but also, the technology,” Liman told Deadline in Venice.
“I’m a huge fan of Jim Cameron because he’s on the cutting edge. He’s telling stories that couldn’t have been told until that moment in time,” he continued, adding that the work’s unveiling in Venice had extra resonance for him.
“I’m sitting here in Venice, not far from where I first premiered Swingers, which I was also able to make because of new technology.”
Written by and starring Jon Favreau, the buddy comedy about a struggling comedian getting over heartache, was shot over the course of 18 days on a budget of just $250,000 and went onto gross $4.6M at the U.S. box office.
“Back then we shot movies on film, but there were new film stocks, and I thought, ‘With these film stocks, I can shoot a movie without a crew and lights, and with the camera on my shoulder’. I was like, ‘People have been shooting movies the same way for 100 years. I think given where film stocks have evolved to, I can change how you shoot a movie’. Swingers doesn’t look like other movies, and I think it’s a better movie for that.”
“Right from the beginning, my career has been intertwined with advances in technology and obviously with Asteroid, this is by far the most ambitious thing I’ve ever done. It’s a giant Hollywood movie idea told in a VR headset and that just hasn’t existed before. The reason I’m so proud of it, is it was so friggin’ hard to make and why I now get why it hasn’t existed before.”
The Asteroid experience, tried out by Deadline in Venice, features a pre-chat with NFL player Metcalf generated by Gemini, Google’s AI assistant; an immersive 180-degree, live-action short, and an interactive extension, also using Gemini technology, in which the viewer is given the opportunity to help solve what really happened on the perilously icy slopes of the asteroid.
Rogues in Space
The 180-degree short immediately plunges the viewer into chaotic scenes inside the Russian Soyuz rocket as Metcalf’s character has second thoughts and tries to quit the vessel via a hatch before it lifts off, with the story proceeding on the icy terrain of the asteroid, and then an interrogation room as one of the crew members is questioned on what went down on the trip.
Steinfeld emerges as an ambivalent figure whose true motives for her actions remain unclear; Mandel plays a former Russia astronaut, whose avarice gets the better of him, while Perlman’s character, is an older man struggling to cope with harsh terrain and sub-zero temperatures. Pinto plays as an official leading the investigation back on earth.
“Asteroids is a story I’ve been wanting to tell for a long time… in my movies, I pride myself on my world building, and part of the world building is the visual spectacle but it’s also about the characters,” said Liman.
“In the way that The Bourne Identity changed how you looked at a spy movie, I’ve been very interested in doing movies or stories told in outer space with characters who have no business in being there. Characters who look up at the moon and see money, not romance,” he continued.
“In Asteroid, five of them are cramming into a Soyuz capsule that’s designed for three because they think there’s a trillion dollars to be made on an asteroid that’s passing near earth.”
Perlman, who also made the trip to Venice alongside cast members Feliz, Metcalf and Mandel, said working on the XR thriller had been an revelatory experience.
“I thought that I had done everything in show business until I saw this,”” said the veteran actor. “I’m gonna have to stick around for a little while longer to be able to say, been there, done that.”
“Sometimes it felt a little detached. but Doug knew exactly what he needed to do for the storytelling in this thing, including the fights with the gravity and conditions,”
For Liman, Asteroid was one of most technically challenging films that he has ever shot.
“The moment you say you’re going to cram people in a teeny space and shoot that for a VR headset you’re in for a world of hurt. Right from the beginning you’re like, ‘You can’t do that, you can’t get the camera that close to people’, but you have to be close because the space is claustrophobic when they’re in the capsule.
“Technically how to film that was more ambitious than any filming I’ve ever done,” he continues, adding further challenges included capturing the impact of the different gravitational forces in the capsule and on the asteroid.
“The world building of the asteroid, I loved. My production designer from Edge of Tomorrow (Oliver Scholl) designed the asteroid. Some of that is sort of conventional, but how you technically film for the headset and give the audience a Hollywood cinematic experience… it’s more technology than I’ve ever used in a movie.”
30 Ninjas co-partner Weintrob added: “All the stuff in the spaceship and on the asteroid is performance capture in the game engine Unreal, then touched up with VFX, which enabled us to get that close into the capsule and the characters, but also with a huge focus on performance fidelity of the actors. None of it’s generated. It’s all live performance capture. All the actors were scanned using Google’s next generation top secret scanning stage. Then the stuff in the interrogation room is shot with a somewhat more traditional camera.”
What’s next… more episodes, a feature film?
Liman and his 30 Ninja partners said it was too early to say whether there will be further instalments of Asteroid, or indeed a feature film spinning off the immersive experience. For now, the next focus is nailing down the extension element of the overall experience.
“This started as a feature script which I cut down, or just one part of it, to create a short film. I haven’t made a short film since film school. They’re really hard. If you saw my film school short films, you would be like, ‘Oh my God, these things are terrible’. I literally have never made a good short film until Asteroid… it’s never too late,” said Liman.
“There is a full story I want to tell of Asteroid that is feature length or longer and then part of the excitement of getting to do this with Google and with the Android XR headset is that I’m hoping you want to know more. With The Bourne Identity, you wanted more, and you got four more movies,” said Liman.
“My goal is to create movies and experiences that people want more of… but I’m also really excited about where it’s going with the story extension,” he continued. “You’re just getting a little taste of it. The film is done, other than a few technical things that I noticed here, because it’s really right off the press, but you only saw part of the story extension. My plan had been to do the short for Android as a launchpad to go make the feature. The reality is that the experience is so powerful in 180-degrees, that I’ve set a very high bar for what I would hope to create on the big screen if I did it for IMAX because as incredible as IMAX is, it’s hard for it to compete with the experience you have watching on a headshot.”
A feature version of Asteroid remained an ambition, he continued but said no such had project had been greenlighted as yet.
“We could end up making seven more instalments for the headset… I’ve learned so much about storytelling on this… I was also planning to go shoot a movie in outer space with Tom Cruise and the reality is the experience you have watching Asteroid on the Android XR is that you are so inside a Hollywood movie in a way I’ve never experienced before,” said Liman
Pressed on the outer space project with Cruise, first revealed by Deadline in 2020, Liman said it remained on the cards, but there were no updates.
“I’ve just finished this [Asteroid] so I’m now processing what next and what I learned, part of it will be how the audience reacts to it. You’d rather I give you more concrete answers but you’re getting me totally raw… I don’t know where it leaves me. I know I want to do more in space… I am more excited about this idea of characters who have no business of going into space after making this. In the way, I was excited after The Bourne Identity, “ said Liman.
“My movies are all anti-heroes. Tom Cruise is a coward in Edge of Tomorrow; he’s a full on criminal in American Made; Matt Damon kills people for a living in The Bourne Identity and Brad and Angie both kill people for a living [Mr. and Mrs. Smith]. I’m interested in like my kinds of characters going into space and I love that in Asteroid, we got to cram five of them into this teeny second-hand capsule.”
Liman added that shooting a film in outer space remained on his bucket list but that nothing was scheduled as yet, with both he and Cruise tied up in other projects.
“I’m more excited about going to space, not less… but our goal is too make something great. A lot of people are trying to do gimmicky things like, ‘Oh, it’s in space’. I’m not interested in doing something that’s a just promotional gimmick. I want to make a film that people watch in a hundred years when maybe there’s hundreds of movies shot in outer space and there’s nothing special about it being in outer space. That’s the goal of everything I do. With Swingers, it’s very meaningful to me that lots of people who watch it weren’t even born when it premiered here.”
“If I ever shoot a movie in outer space, the question will be what could I do that you couldn’t do on earth that makes for a great piece of entertainment, that’s better than if you didn’t do it it space. Again, its also about technology and storytelling… you can run a line from Swingers all the way through to this potential film in outer space.”