‘I’m a Virgo’: How an Early Meeting at Industrial Light and Magic Led to the Low-Budget Special Effects

Eric Kohn
·6 min read

In “I’m a Virgo,” Jharrel Jerome plays a 13-foot-tall teenager in Oakland named Cootie raised by his aunt and uncle (Carmen Ejogo and Mike Epps) in secret. Over the course of the show’s first season, Cootie comes out of hiding, makes friends, and contends with media obsession over his height. Like Riley’s first feature “Sorry to Bother You,” the series develops its own internal logic as it transforms into a scathing indictment of capitalism from some very unexpected directions.

None of that would hold up without its central conceit, which proved challenging, given that Jerome is actually five feet and eight inches. Riley made the show with Amazon on a relatively modest $53 million budget (around the same time that its first season of “Lord of the Rings” cost a reported $1 billion). However, the minimal effects budget wasn’t the only reason he turned to puppets and forced perspective to create the illusion of Cootie’s size.

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“For me, it’s not really about whether it looks good or not,” he said in an interview. “It’s more about the choices things force you to make. If can do anything, you kind of end up doing everything, and it doesn’t feel so motivated.” He has landed on a rather vivid image to underscore his commitment to practical effects: “Right now, you can have a CGI skyscraper walk over and take a shit and it wouldn’t be amazing.”

Riley’s path to this realization was a circuitous one. The memorable practical effects on “Sorry to Bother You,” which included the horrific human-horse creatures of its finale, were necessitated by its miniscule $3.2 million budget. However, the opportunity to do “I’m a Virgo” on a larger scale eventually led Riley to take a meeting with Industrial Light & Magic, even though he wanted to stick to practical effects.

To prepare, Riley reached out to ILM legend and “Star Wars” VFX artist Dennis Muren, who had previously met with Riley about an animated feature he has been developing as one of his next projects. “I emailed Dennis and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got this meeting with meeting at ILM tomorrow, and I want to do it practically. Who’s there I can meet with? He said, ‘I’ll be there,’ but I didn’t know that he hasn’t been showing up at ILM meetings for the past 10 years.” The 76-year-old Muren arrived alongside other ILM employees when Riley got there, catching them off-guard. “They’re all, like, nervous,” Riley said. “They’re asking me, ‘Hey, why is Dennis coming to your meeting?’”

Muren’s presence led another high-level effects artist to show up, John Knoll, whose credits range from “The Abyss” to “Rogue One.” Suddenly, Riley was surrounded by veterans who dominated the room. “Dennis is like, ‘Look, doing this is easy! All you need is a big version of everything and a little version of everything. Then you just line it up and shoot it!’ The rest of ILM was like ‘What the fuck?’ They’re used to working with Steven Spielberg and just doing whatever he says with a lot of money.”

The meeting ended with Knoll signing on as VFX supervisor, and concluded that they would have to plan out their shots with storyboarding to make it work with the budget. “They had a crazy low number for it, and I didn’t get an answer back for months and months,” Riley said. ILM was left in limbo waiting for an answer from Amazon, and ultimately had to move on. Riley said the waiting game left him frustrated — over the processes, not ILM itself. “That’s not the way you get things done,” he said. “We had to be planning for this.” Later, he spoke to stop-motion legend Phil Tippett, another close advisor on a future project. “He said, ‘Look, most VFX people aren’t filmmakers,’” Riley said. “That’s the problem. As a filmmaker, you’re trying to find out how to get the most bang for your buck, and you make different choices.”

Riley ultimately hired John McLeod, the special effects coordinator on movies like “Grindhouse” and “Sin City,” as well as VFX supervisor Todd Perry, to plot out a unique approach that required most of the scenes to be shot twice with two different setups — once with Cootie on a set to scale, and again with the actors who shared a scene with him. The sets were half-scale for Jerome and twice the size for his scene partners; Riley often had the camera running in both places at once, so that the actors could still interact for their scenes even though they were both looking at puppets. “We had to storyboard 90 percent of the show before even prep,” Riley said. “We were like, ‘OK, we’re only going to get X amount of shots.’ It made me choose certain things.”

While Cootie bonds with his new friends and even scores a girlfriend (Olivia Washington), Jerome had to develop chemistry with a cast even though they never shared scenes together. Over the course of the 56-day shoot, most of which took place in New Orleans due to a tax incentive, the cast bonded in between takes. “The actors were hanging out with each other all the time,” Riley said. “Nobody was hiding in their trailer. They got hyped through their excitement. They’re away from home. It was like theater camp. They’re all dancing and practicing things. They became really good friends.”

The approach created a unique challenge in one of the show’s more playful moments, when Cootie and Washington’s character have sex for the first time. It’s a prolonged 11-minute sequence that veers into slapstick as the pair figure out the mechanics of their intimacy. “We had an intimacy coordinator even though they weren’t touching,” Riley said. “The visceral aspect of it was very important to me. That’s something you can’t do with CGI.”

CGI did eventually enter the equation for compositing, and to fill in the details of the outlandish world, which included a mobile skyscraper (though it doesn’t, fortunately, defecate), and a dizzying green-screen vision in the climax. Savvy viewers may be able to detect the boundaries between practical and digital effects on the show, but Riley embraced the visibility of the seams. “I wanted to be able to hear the distortion of it,” he said. “I wanted it to be an imperfect mix.”

“I’m a Virgo” is now streaming on Amazon Prime.

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