How Ryan Reynolds and Shawn Levy Convinced Disney to Let Them Use a Lightsaber and Captain America’s Shield in ‘Free Guy’
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In the best visual effects Oscar race, the underdog is Shawn Levy’s “Free Guy.” Despite being set in a virtual world, the film was made for $100 million with an even smaller budget for VFX. But that didn’t prevent the film’s visual effects supervisor Swen Gillberg from delivering some of the best VFX sequences this year, as Ryan Reynold’s character Guy is thrust into the world of Free City, a “Grand Theft Auto”-inspired gaming world.
“Free Guy” is an easter egg treasure trove, but perhaps the biggest is the nod to Captain America, Star Wars and the Hulk. Levy explains that the idea behind the final fight, between Guy and his monstrous doppelgänger Dude, was that Guy would have access to weapons and upgrades as the characters level up.
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“We wrote a letter to Disney: ‘Dear Disney, this is Shawn Levy and Ryan Reynolds, could we use a lightsaber, or Cap’s shield or Hulk’s fist?’ I recollect that they said yes to all of them. Ryan recollected that maybe they said pick one or two? And we just decided to use all of them,” Levy said.
Adds Reynolds, “This is where it did get borderline lawless. I said, ‘I think this is the perfect opportunity to ask for forgiveness.’ I interpreted this as using all of them.” Reynolds says, “I do regret that we didn’t do something with Thor’s hammer.”
Disney loved what the pair did. Adds Reynolds, “At that point, they had already made a tiny little purchase of Fox Studios, so we were technically a Disney movie anyway.”
Courtesy of Disney Plus
To keep the Captain America surprise a secret, Gilberg says Cap’s shield was made of cardboard and painted gray. When Reynolds held it up in the movie, the iconic red, white and blue were digitally added in after the fact.
Levy points out that “Free Guy” is not a VFX action movie, but a humanist comedy. That meant Gilberg would have to accommodate changes made by Reynolds and Levy at a moment’s notice.
Says Reynolds, “Shawn and I tend to pivot quite quickly on an idea or a look of something or the context of a scene will completely change. The domino effect is that Sven, who is running the show VFX-wise, will have to adapt. We would always ask, ‘Is this possible?’ and he would say yes. I know now much more than I knew about this world and how this particular aspect of it works.”
Gilberg saying yes would mean in some instances, he and his crew would have to start from scratch on a piece of visual effects or redraft what had already been done. The scene at the beginning of the film where Guy gets hit by a car was planned as a multi-stunt sequence where the stuntman would get hit. Says Gilberg, “Ryan shows up that morning and says, ‘Let’s do it as a oner. That automatically makes it CG. I scrambled around and found car references. I went back to Ryan with three car crashes. One was the ‘Meet Joe Black’ car crash. Ryan said, ‘I always wanted to meet Joe Black, and that’s what we did.”
Gilberg points out he didn’t have the luxury to do the big changes in post. “We had a pretty solid edit two weeks after principle. We had a locked cut six weeks after principle, and that is unheard of.”
Adds Levy, “Visual effects is a category where you can throw money at the issue, or you can throw a lot of creativity and problem solving and inventiveness, Sven and his team truly did the latter.”
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