“The School for Good and Evil”It is streaming now on Netflix. True to its fairytale roots it contains action, adventure and a lot of magic. But it’s not quite as fake as you might think — director Paul Feig was insistent upon it.
He also accepted the challenge for the thrill of creating something with lots of effects. “The School for Good and Evil,” now streaming, follows Sophie (Sophia Anne Caruso) and Agatha (Sofia Wylie) as they’re plucked from their village and taken to schools for good and evil, which are responsible for training all the storied heroes and villains of the world. Sophie begins to fall apart when Sophie is sent to the school for evil while Aggie is sent to the school. After all, she believes she’s a princess, and Agatha didn’t even want to come to the schools.
She embraces the dark presence at school and uses blood magic to make it her own. Her new evil friends? One of her new evil friends is a fire demon who lives in her body through a magical tattoo. There’s a bit of magic in every scene.
Paul Feig, director and writer for the film, said that it required a lot of work. “more effects than I’ve ever done before,”He made an effort to be conscious of it. “seamlessly put them in so people don’t really know they’re effects.”
That’s largely because, as an audience member himself, Feig is a little bit tired of movies — particularly genre movies — being so reliant on CG technology.
“As an audience member, I’ve got such CG fatigue over the years, that I’m just kind of like, it’s not fun for me to watch a movie where I know nothing exists, you know?”He explained.
You can read ’s full conversation on the making of “The School for Good and Evil”Watch the video below.
Paul, let me start with the main point of the movie: fairytales. Which fairy tale is your favourite? What’s your go-to that like, sets the basis for everything?
Well, here’s the issue. I actually really didn’t like fairy tales when I was a kid. They scared me to death. You know, especially the Grimm’s, and all those things. I didn’t like fairytales. This is what it felt like to be involved in this project. ‘Oh, good. This is my chance to sort of take my revenge on fairy tales,’Do it if you can. (laughs).
Have you come around now that you’ve worked on “The School for Good and Evil”?
It’s hard to say! What I love about fairytales is that they are morality tales and then they provide guidance and cautionary tales to people. These are my favorite fairytales. But I don’t know, all the origin of the original ones, they’re pretty brutal! I mean, they really end very brutally, so I’m still hard pressed to kind of pick out a favorite, I hate to say.
That’s fair! You’ll find some Disney fairytales in the movie. But they were Hans Christian Andersen. But then you’ve got ones like Arthurian legend. How did you balance all of that, without making it seem derivative?
It was a hard adaptation! It was being adapted for six years before it reached me. Soman is the author of this book. [Chainani]It contains a lot of very interesting ideas.
And so it was really about how do you pare this down, tell that story effectively, tell the most important parts of the story in a way that the fans of the books will really respond to, but how do you also then bring in a whole new audience that doesn’t need to know anything about the books? Because I have a real issue with going to a movie and I’m like, I don’t know what’s going on. They’re like, ‘Oh, you need to know the comic, you need to know this.’ It’s like, well, it’s a movie, I shouldn’t need to know anything coming in. That was the line I tried to follow.
And, you know, Soman was a valuable friend. During my script writing, I kept him close to me. He was always there to help me and I would go along with him. ‘OK, what things do the fans respond to the most? What would they miss? What lines do they like?’When I needed to make changes or adds to my connective tissue, I would always go to him. ‘You like this? Does this work?’ And such kudos to him for not being the precious author who’s like, ‘You can’t.’ Because I can’t work with somebody like that. Because then it becomes like. ‘You can’t do this, that,’ and then it’s hard. It’s easy to go off the rails in a weird way. It was challenging. But I’m really happy with where we ended up.
I’m always I’m the weird one that’s like, I would rather see the movie first, just because that way, if it’s different, if it’s wrong, I can still appreciate the movie as its own thing.
It’s amazing! Honestly — because now I’ve been involved in a couple, like when we did ‘A Simple Favor’ — you know, people go on the internet, like, ‘I have to read the book before I go see the movie.’ And I’m just like screaming, ‘Please no, wait!’ Because it’s going — like the book you enjoy, it’s okay to kind of know where a book’s going sometimes. But a movie, if you know where it’s going, to me, it takes the fun out of it. I mean, obviously we try to make the movie so there’s gonna be fun, regardless. So, with this one, I say yes, go buy the book. You can also see the movie. thenThe book is worth reading.
I’m curious, with the story being such a spectacle, how much of this movie was done practically? Because These areThere are many effects. But with movie magic, you guys can do a lot of things that people don’t necessarily expect.
A lot, a lot. I felt it was important not to have people against green screens. It was also not to have people against tennis balls. [in]They wear the tracking suits and the balls suit. It was as if, in the beginning, ‘Oh, we should do the wolf guards digitally.’ I’m like, no, I want guys in suits, with animatronic heads, walking around, because the actors have to have something to act against.
Also, I want to be in the natural environment. These sets were built. These sets are very practical. To fill in gaps in the ceilings, we did some set extension. These sets were huge. You know that the only real green screen was what we did outside at the beginning with Rafal and all that to create change in the skies and other things. It was important to me that as much as possible be captured on camera.
Wait, you’re saying that those talking wolf guards were actually there on set?
Oh, yeah. They were animatronic, and they talk. The only thing we did was to augment their eyes and ears so they could express themselves more. They were, however, fully practical.
It’s wild. I wouldn’t have thought that’d be plausible.
Well you know what it is, as an audience member, I’ve got such CG fatigue over the years, that I’m just kind of like, it’s not fun for me to watch a movie where I know nothing exists, you know? I’m a big fan. ‘Star Wars’ fan. We saw. ‘Star Wars,’These were models. They shot them however they wanted, but I knew that these models existed somewhere. That was everything for me. And as time went on, I’m kind of like, OK, everything looks really cool, but it’s not really there. So I kind of feel like I’m watching a video game a lot of the times.
And so even our scenes that are kind of very CG, like Hester’s demon, that, we built a big kind of puppet version of that, that was green. Then we had Mikey, our puppeteer who would, he’d act it out. I could make it look the way I wanted, and I could alter it as well. ‘Oh, it should get closer. It should do this. You should react this way.’
And then like, the Storian, that’s practical. Mikey was the only one who did that. He did all the work. We then just painted the sticks, the green screens sticks. So yeah, so again, everybody’s acting with the actual props and the actual effects.
I’m curious how this compares to working on “Ghostbusters”2016 What is it? “The School for Good and Evil”In terms of practicality and scale, how does it stack up?
Ghostbusters was actually a group that did a lot of practical stuff, including augmenting ghosts. You can see that these are actually stuntmen in costumes who were doing this at Big Time Square. We gave them the glow and added backgrounds.
What was nice about this — Ghostbusters was very kind of segmented in where we did special effects. We would need to augment because it was the real world and then the ghosts.
This world, there’s so many things we had to augment, because it’s constant. If you watch this movie, there’s just constant things that are special effects, from blood magic to finger glows, which, even the finger gloves are practical, but we had to put these big extensions on people’s fingers. So, they glowed for light interaction, but then we had to go in and digitally make their fingers not gigantic because it looked like they hit ‘em with a hammer.
It was the sheer number of effects that needed to be added. Certain sets we had to modify, like the whole theater of tales we shot in this big cathedral, which looked great, but it didn’t have enough texture. So we kind of went in and augmented some of it with just different kinds of light shafts and adding like, chandeliers that we didn’t have. This is what it was. It was augmenting things that we had, and just kind of really doing more effects than I’ve ever done before, but really loving how we kind of seamlessly put them in so people don’t really know they’re effects.
Well, you mentioned Hester’s demon — did you really want to set it on fire?
We had a fire version! These pipes were used to build this exoskeleton. We shot the fire bar when Hester had it up behind her. After that, we painted the effect. So it’s all about light interaction. You want to have, you know, if you don’t have the light interaction, it starts to look fake, it looks more like like CG, you know what I mean? If people have objects that interact with their faces in this way, it will change everything.
Our flame bars lit the entire battle scene. We had these flame bars that she used to make big fireballs when she began doing them. John Schwartzman was my DP. He said: ‘I like the way this looks,’Like ‘I don’t want to augment this, let’s just have that going.’ So we had, I mean, weeks of these fireball coming out, lighting everybody up. That’s why you see everybody’s, you know, the light’s constantly changing of people’s faces. It just gives us so much depth and texture.
Before I leave you, I do want to ask: you’ve directed so many movies with great female pairings. Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick were in “A Simple Favor,” Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy in “The Heat,”Sofia Wylie and Sophia Anne Caruso are in, naturally. “The School for Good and Evil.”Who are you next to? What are you looking to do next?
(laughs). Oh, man. The project is what tells me the pairing will be, honestly. Honestly, I’ve never gone into a project going like, oh, this is this, I want to do this for somebody, you know,? Either I write the script, or if I find it comes to me, it’s like, OK, let’s get this right. Let’s make this character make sense. Then it becomes, “Who would be right to do this?” It’s kind of like that. Because I think when you build it the other way, sometimes, you’re gonna cut off a dimensionality to the character, because you’re just kind of fitting it to somebody, if that makes any sense. Before we can make characters real in the real world, I think it is necessary to be very hard on them. Because their internal logic must be correct. So at least that’s how I work.
“The School for Good and Evil”Netflix now has it streaming.