- Manga actually costs like, 10 dollars to make,
it's a pen and paper.
When you're making a big movie you have to appeal
to a wide range of audience so that people can feel like
this is a movie that speaks to them.
Whether they know a thing about a manga or not.
We give it a cinematic story that's relatable.
- (Man) It's a harsh world down here,
you've got to be willing to do what it takes.
- Alita, run!
(tense fight music)
- My god!
- This kind of particular sci-fi that we're doing
is really grounded and very real so that you
buy the fantasy.
So if a design in the graphic novel doesn't translate
to real world cause it's too whimsical or just not
doable, we'd have to alter it so that you believe what
you're seeing.
And it doesn't just start getting too fantastical
otherwise it stops being relatable.
So sometimes we can take something right out of the
graphic novel and build a real version of it
and it would work, other times we'd have to change it.
- I think there's a really interesting circle that happens,
that the panels of the graphic novel act as this
incredible inspiration.
We go out there and make the shots and create the movie
and then we go, wait a second, let's look at that frame
of the movie and it matches back up with the panel
that was there.
- Amazing.
- Well I'd bring my manga into the video village and I'd say
"Dude, we're actually, this is an exact" and it wasn't even
meant that way some of the time - I'm like,
this is an exact,
we are hitting this exact motion almost on accident.
- If you open up the page you'll find exact shot of this
right now, it looks just like this, even the lettering
and the typeface.
- Tonight is not a game,
it is a hunt.
- There's a city that's floating in the sky that's the place
that people aspire to get to,
and then there's the world where the majority of people are
which is the place that serves those lucky few,
you know, the place that provides industry
and entertainment.
Similarly, there's great disparity between the way
a few live in our society and the majority of people live.
- The physical set was actually huge.
It wasn't anything near as big as what it
looks like on screen, but it was big.
You know, Robert created that physical set so
when we were there it felt like a normal set.
Like, really it didn't feel like it was this big CGI
movie or anything like that.
We kind of just inhabited this space and lived in it.
Then to see it on screen and to see how much they'd
enhanced it, to see the world building,
the size of it, the scale of it, was just like whoa.
That was amazing.
- The work of distilling those stories into this script
was done by James Cameron,
and I like the focus that he gave it, I like the focus
of the sort of father-daughter story.
I felt like if anyone could execute this beautifully
it would be him and his team 'cause he's championed
women in his films in the past, you know?
And in the center of this is this young, teenage girl.
- One thing we were inspired by, Jim was particular,
was the manga eyes that he gave you know, Alita.
She had these large eyes which are the windows to the soul.
He is always his goal, back when he was gonna direct it,
to do a CG version of that, photo-real,
and it also services the story and the character
because you're seeing the world through her eyes.
A lot of technology we had to create in order to make it
believable and real and you needed to have an actress
that could power that so that you could relate to her
through that character.
- I love the way she sees things, that she's not cynical,
that she sees beauty everywhere, that she marvels at
what's here
and I love that she's also capable of
destruction and violence
and that it's not just like a fairytale that she's only
pure and good, she's these other things too
that she has to learn to tame and harness and focus.
- The costume was a CGI mo-cap suit so, you know, every day
I'd come out of prosthetics, put on my gray pajamas,
get calibrated by the technical team and go out there
and run around looking like a Teletubby,
like the most bad-ass Teletubby.
Everyone else was wearing normal clothes
and you're running around wearing this.
The only other people that were really wearing it was
Rosa, who plays Alita, so you know we were like
the Teletubby crew in the midst of it.
- Working with a visionary like Robert, you know where
you're going, which is such a gift for an actor.
To know what you're trying to achieve and that idea
doesn't get skewed along the way.
When the movie was over, John came down,
he said, "Well did you like it?"
I'm like, "I love it!" and we talked about it for a while
and I went, "Uh"
and he's like "What?"
And I'm like well,
"I did that thing with my mouth that I do"
like I have this little idiosyncratic behavior
that I,
I see myself do on screen all the time and it just
drives me crazy, you know? It's like a flicker of my mouth
and he's like, "That's your, you're looking at a CGI model
and you're seeing your performance."
And he's like,
"We kept our end of the deal" 'cause I was like,
"I better see my performance up there!"
- In that moment she forgot. In that moment she was
just seeing her performance up there and that's the strength
of her performance, that's the strength of what a digital
was able to do.
That's the strength of Robert never letting
anybody lose sight of what's important.
- That's right.
- And the heart that the actor gives us.