Ryuk watches in glee as Light Yagami plots the end of a criminal.
During the filming, Tatsuya Fujiwara had to act opposite a dummy, which was a stand-in for the CG-animated Ryuk.
FOR Tatsuya Fujiwara (Light Yagami), not speaking to Kenichi Matsuyama (L) was certainly far more easy to handle than acting opposite his other main co-star – a 2.5m-tall dummy complete with the gritty, punkish accessories the death god Ryuk is fond of.
The director created the stand-in figure for the CG (computer graphics)-animated shinigami due to the fact that conversations between Light and Ryuk are an essential part of the film.
“Ryuk’s physical structure is different from a human’s, so I had to drop the idea of someone getting inside a Ryuk costume,” explains director Shusuke Kaneko. “Yet, I wanted the audience to feel that someone was wearing a Ryuk costume and talking to Tatsuya Fujiwara. I might be asking for too much, but I wanted Ryuk to be seen as something more than a product of the latest CG technology.” (Ryuk was animated by CG company Digital Frontier which was responsible for Appleseed and Tokyo Zombie.)
“It was very hard to carry around, this Ryuk,” Shusuke laughs.
Adds Tatsuya: “CG Ryuk is so selfish and far more difficult to work with than a human.”
The actor had to shoot the same scenes in different angles in order for animators to make shadows and reflections of lights more realistic, which he found difficult. First, he had to act with the Ryuk dummy, then a greenscreen would be placed behind him and he’d have to re-act the scene.
That was, naturally, a time-consuming process.
Take the scenes where Light found the Death Note and met Ryuk for the first time. The crew filmed it on one snowy day in Aoyama, Tokyo, and had the Ryuk dummy come down from the sky via a crane and Tatsuya had to act with the dummy by his side on a lorry. The shoot lasted until midnight.
“I would be playing all these scenes for four or five takes, and eventually I asked the director: ‘Can’t something be done about it?’ He told me the animators absolutely needed all of those shots and said: ‘Nope, nothing can be done about it,’” Tatsuya recalls with a laugh.
He had to act that way most of the time for the movie as Light and Ryuk are together in many scenes. “I was jealous. Almost all of my scenes were with the CG Ryuk, so I didn’t really get to spend time with other actors,” he quips in mock frustration.
Kenichi sums it up perfectly when he notes that despite their rivalry and differing goals, Light and L are actually very alike. “They’re two people imbibed with a very strong sense of justice, and in that sense they’re extremely alike.”
Source: Star-ecentral.com
