Gary Ross's comments on CGI for The Hunger Games (Interview With SFX Magazine).
What were your thoughts about how much to shoot practically on location versus how much to shoot with CGI environments?
Gary Ross: “I think I’m one of those people that always likes to shoot as much practically as I can because when I am in the midst of the process keeping things more real makes for better movies. But I always make movies with a lot of challenges too, like my first movie Pleasantville. I didn’t actually get that storyline evolved until a year later when I could adequately separate the black and white from the colour. Pre-imagining a movie and figuring out how to interface the CG with practical elements is really the job. I think maybe because I was a writer only for so long and I was used to outlining and seeing different iterations finally arrive to the screen, it’s never felt like an antiseptic process for me. In some ways the real creative process comes through with the blank canvas. Whether you paint that canvas with practical elements you are imagining, or find the CGI elements that will finish them, it’s all in the imagination before you can shoot. You really are painting the movie and the actual application doesn’t matter because you are just mining elements to make it real. It’s an alchemy of a lot of different parts that go to make a whole and if all of that has been adequately pre-imagined than it doesn’t really matter. I prefer the practical but I’m just as comfortable with the digital.”