Kurt Russell Gave Guardians Of The Galaxy's CGI Team Some Constructive Criticism
De-aging CGI has come a long way since the prologue to 2006's "X-Men: The Last Stand" turned Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen into abominations out of a Robert Zemeckis motion-capture nightmare. 2023's "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny," for example, allowed an octogenarian Harrison Ford to shed several decades in a generally convincing manner for its own extended opening flashback. Yet, no matter how much the tech improves, this approach is always going to be hampered by the fact that our brains intuitively seek our flaws once we know something has been digitally-rendered (hence the uncanny valley effect). Going to the opposite extreme isn't necessarily the solution either, as practical makeup and effects aren't without similar limitations.
To quote one of the sacred texts of the internet: Why not both? That's exactly what "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2" did for the opening scene in which the younger version of Kurt Russell's character — the oh-so-humbly named living planet and ancient Celestial Ego — woos Meredith Quill (Laura Haddock), the eventual mother of Guardians leader Peter Jason Quill aka Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), to the intonations of Looking Glass' "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)." As Russell told /Film's Ben Pearson at the time of the film's release in 2017, he and his trusted makeup artist Dennis Liddiard convinced director James Gunn and his fellow creatives they could help whittle the actor's age down through practical methods.
He later ran into the film's head of CGI, telling her, "'I thought it was great, but it's my understanding you didn't have to do a whole lot.' And she said, 'We didn't. He really pulled some s**t there. There's a lot going on there.' And I said, 'Yeah, we wanted to do it old school.' I think it provides a more natural look."
Guardians 2 still used CGI to de-age Russell
As Russell noted, young Ego wasn't purely a practical creation. Too often, cineastes cling to an all-or-nothing position when it comes to utilizing practical effects or CGI, but the truth is that they're both vital instruments in the filmmaker's toolkit. When it comes to the de-aging process, what really matters is that you avoid hitting that uncomfortable spot where the audience spends the entire time recoiling in horror at this monstrosity you've concocted.
Russell apparently mentioned this during his conversation with the "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2" CGI head. "I said to her, 'You know, this is what makes it, I think, look more natural because there's not that creep factor to it. You know what I mean? It doesn't have that,'" he told Vanity Fair in 2017. "I come from a time when we just did the stuff, you know what I mean? It adds a sense of credibility."
Speaking to Yahoo! a few months later for the film's digital release, production visual effects supervisor Christopher Townsend emphasized that young Ego still required a good deal of CGI tinkering. Using actor Aaron Schwartz as facial reference for "what 30-year-old skin looks like in that particular environment," Townsend and his team took the cumulative raw footage to the VFX company Lola ("the go-to company for this sort of de-aging for many years") to assemble the various pieces together. "So the make-up that was done on set was great, but it got you 20 percent of the way there, and then we had to do an awful lot of work digitally to make it a final image," he added. The results speak for themselves, which just goes to prove my point: There's no reason not to use every item in your VFX toolbox.