Hey, how you doing? I'm Rel, co-director of ProjectPower.
I'm Henry, the other director guy.
That's how you prefer? "Other director"?
Other director.
Other director Rel and other director Henry.
-And action. -What's your power?
-Pretty good. -Let's move on.
The way that Henry and Rel are approachingshooting this
is with the exuberance and joy of kids making a short film.
I have not worked with two directors before.
It's like a dance. Together, they make music.
They're part of a new generation of directors
that came up doing their own thing.
Oh, yeah.
They're always taking an ideaand evolving it,
making it into something like you've never seen before...
It works.
...which is like the Henry-and-Rel superpower.
Henry just had a big new idea.
It'll require time, a script supervisor,
a second camera. Let's do it.
It's fun making a big action movie
with two guys who have such unique style.
We don't really have our roles delineated
in any kind of organized way.
Each movie sort of evolves in a different way.
It's organic. One person's behind the camera,
one's talking to actors. We get more done that way.
All right, last shot before lunch.
It's a democracy for the most part,
unless one of us feels
more passionately than the other.
If the P word comes out, you go with it.
-You go, "Okay." -Yeah.
We got the script from our agent.
I got about ten pages in,
I called Rel and I was like,
"I think this'll be our next movie."
"What's that, Henry?
You haven't finished the script,
and you're ready to dedicate 3 years of your life to this?"
I got ten pages in, called him back,
and said, "I agree."
The moment we read it,
we both had the same person in mind
and that was Jamie Foxx.
You just cross your fingers that he'll be into it,
that he'll love it like we did. And he did.
-Not bad. -The first time we met him,
we really clicked.
Getting Jamie Foxx,
that was a game changer. It just blew me away.
Listen to my voice. Am I lying?
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, he went like 200% in.
I want to see what happens.
JGL loves to do research.
He really dug in deep
with the localpolice department there.
He wasn't just a typical cop.
His character is bounded on the notion
that a unique town like New Orleans
has to fend for itself.
They think they can test
the people of New Orleans and no one's gonna care?
There's Robin, played by Dominique Fishback.
I always dreamed I could play a role like Robin,
running the streets, trying to solve this problem.
She always wants to save somebody.
I thought we were like Batman and Robin.
No Batman and Robin.
That's a movie. This is real life.
She's got an incredible amount of confidence.
She's this incredible spoken wordpoet
and went toe-to-toe with Jamie Foxx
in these chemistry reads that we did.
I'm sorry. You gonna be the next Cardi B?
Cardi C?
I've been about it, even if my mental space is crowded
I may be little but in these waters
You won't catch me drownin'
One day I swim in all them dollar bills I'mma be countin'
You smoked that.
Dominique stole the show.
-Thank you. Appreciate you. -You got it, man.
It was a dream come true. It was totally surreal at times.
We knew we were making our first big sci-fi action movie
but one decision we made early
was that the world of
wasn't a totally fantastical sci-fi world.
We're documentary filmmakers originally,
so we tried to make everything as grounded as it could be.
This is Power.
It was very science-based.
Movie-science, yes,
but every power had real animal superpowers behind it.
That's where this idea comes from,
that there are bits of DNA code that we all have
and Power can awaken that for a short amount of time.
The next evolution of the human species.
Choosing the city and locations
was an important part of our creative process.
New Orleans is so inspiring. When we got here,
we said, "This is the place it should be,"
once we started seeing things like this amusement park.
For us, we really wait to get inspired by locations
and start building and adapting
scenes around them.
We're in front of the Superdome
and the Smoothie King.
We're shooting a scenewhere Robin is practicing her raps.
I've been on a journey Of a warrior
The Odyssey
Got to see the remnants of this hurricane inside of me
It's one of those scenesthat could be done in ADR later
but it's not that kind ofmovie. This is authentic.
-Yes. -This movie is nitty gritty.
-City Committee. -That's right.
So, she's right here rapping.
This place has been abandoned since Katrina.
The graffiti was already here.
The art department have turned itinto a working squat.
Machine Gun Kelly's character, Newt,
has taken over an entire floor.
This is going to belike the big crazy fire sequence.
It's going to be lit.
This is my third movie with Henry and Rel.
They are just so creative that...
I kinda just trust their vision anytime they call me.
He said yes before knowing he'd have to spend all day
in full-body prosthetic makeup.
'Cause I'm punk like that, dude.
We're gonna set up...
Mike, we'll get the macro eyeball shot right now.
We try to adapt to the location,
we try to adapt to the actor.
The character'snot fully formed
until we cast the actor.
And that person informs the way the character should be.
-You need anything else? -No, I'm fine.
Yes, you are.
On their own,each one is incredibly intelligent
and creative andfun.
But when you bring it together,
the total is greater than the sum of its parts.
Cameras are set.
There are very few things that just kind of like pop out
of your imagination
and they're exactly the way they end up on screen.
So first, we've got a character who grows really big.
So we did a lot of conceptual drawings.
"Here's what Biggie could look like."
Started figuring it out with our VFX supervisor.
Henry and Rel want to create something truly unique.
Ivan Moran really embraces practical effects.
So he takes the actor, Rodrigo,
and starts building this amazingprosthetic suit.
And we went back to a lot of earlier cinema techniques,
like forced perspective,
and we actually built a version of theset in miniature size
that lets Ivan just enhance it.
Go, go, go!
You know what might be nice?
As he's punching him, just yell, "Stop!"
Stop!
That was pretty damn good.
The action is really creative.
It's just a really cool sideways take
into that superpower genre.
That really felt like the movie we always wanted to make.
It's been nice having you on set.
I'm glad you got to see all this, it was your eyes seeing it.
Wish you'd been here more.