Aquaman director James Wan has revealed his process for creating the incredible visuals in the underwater scenes.
It is the volcanic underwater duel for the throne which was particularly memorable. Arthur Curry (Jason Mamoa) and King Orm (Patrick Wilson) participate in an epic battle in a fiery underwater coliseum. Wan revealed his vision and process behind the scene to the New York Times.
“It’s something that we haven’t quite seen before and that was really my goal,” he explained. “And these guys, being Atlanteans, they have the ability to swim and move really fast. I think the reason why I set this inside a volcano is because I wanted to sort of get the interesting colour palette of the warmth from underneath the characters, and then have the cool light from above. “
He continued: “And so what that does is it allows me to always let the audience know where they are when they’re actually watching the fight sequence. Because the characters are spinning around and the camera’s twisting all over the place, you know, defying gravity, and so it’s kind of hard to know where you are and having the strong colour palettes just let the audience have a sense of this geographic space.”
When explaining how they managed to make the actors look as if they were fighting underwater, he said:
“I worked closely with my stunt team – an amazing group of stunt choreographers and stunt performers – and we laid the fight flat on the floor to begin with because you know, we’re surface dwellers, and that’s how we know how to do it.
“We’d do it on the ground coming up with cool moves, cool attack moves, cool dodge moves and jumps and flips and stuff like that. And then once we have a look that I’m happy with, now we put the actors and the stunt performers either on wires or these rigs that help to give the impression and illusion of floating underwater.”
You can watch Aquaman in theatres worldwide now.
