Jon Favreau Breaks Down The Lion King's Opening Scene

Hi I'm John Favreau and I'm the director of

the new Disney's The Lion King.

And this is Vanity Fair's Notes on a Scene.

♪ It's the circle of life... ♪

I had just finished working on the Jungle Book

for Disney and I had learned so much

about visual affects and directing animation.

It occurred to me that we could really

do something special with the movie The Lion King.

I spoke to the people at Disney and pitched them

on a vision of how we could present this

in a way that felt more in the style of a documentary

and is essentially gonna be like the Jungle Book

except let's pull out the one human character

and eliminate any need for photography,

or lights, or real cameras.

And instead we photographed everything in VR

and animated all of the performances

with key frame animation.

It was a bit daunting because so many people

have such a connection to the original film

and I knew that there were certain areas

that we had to stick very closely

to what was there already.

It was different than Jungle Book

because people know Jungle Book, but they don't know

Jungle Book like they know Lion King.

There's a whole generation that grew up

watching Lion King on a loop.

And it's an emotional film and we tend to remember

emotional stories more than we remember stories

that don't have that element.

What I tend to do is prioritize the scenes

that I remember the most.

So before I go back and watch the movie again,

I make a list of everything I remember from the movie.

And with Jungle Book there's probably about

six things, seven things I remembered

from watching it younger.

But with Lion King that list is pages long.

You know the Circle of Life, you remember all those shots,

you remember the stampede, you remember certain jokes,

you remember Hakuna Matata, Timon and Pumbaa.

The trick is to make people feel like

they saw the old movie when you show them the new one.

And if you show them the shots and the moments

that they remember and lines of dialogue or songs,

it kinda checks the boxes in their mind.

And then you have actually a lot of latitude

to depart from it when you get into areas

that people don't remember as clearly.

This particular sequence is almost shot for shot, though.

Here we have our cute little fella.

And in the old movie up here on the forehead

they're used to be like a fruit juice

creating a little mark on his head.

But in nature, that actual fruit is not filled

with red paint and we chose to have pigment

that comes from roots and that's how we have

that little splash of color there.

We really put a lot of attention into

the detail of the fur and much like a documentary

we chose to make it appear long lens.

'Cause with documentaries often you can't

get close enough to the subject.

And so as you see here's the subject in the foreground

and the background is all blurry.

On a shorter lens you could hold everything in focus

but here you had to choose.

And so this is a long lens shot.

So if you remember in the original movie

when Rafiki lifts up baby Simba,

you have sort of the plinth he's standing on

and he stands up, baby Simba's here,

he holds him up with his arms.

But unfortunately the center of gravity

would not work in the way the anatomy is

on our baboon friend Rafiki here.

In a drawing it looks good, but whenever

we posed Rafiki that way it always looked fake.

And physics is something that everybody's

an expert in whether they realize it consciously or not,

it feels wrong to them.

So this is one of those where we wanna make you think

you see exactly what was in the old movie,

but actually the cut happens, cleverly,

right as he gets lifted.

You get a little glimpse of it up here,

but it's obscured by the edge of the rock

so you never actually see that the center of gravity is off.

And then a lot of attention is paid

on the framing so you get just enough to see it

and then you're out of it.

♪...and it moves us all... ♪

Part of what makes the shot look so nice,

and this what's so good about having someone

like Caleb Deschanel as your cinematographer,

is the lighting.

And back light is something that works really well.

You'll see it used in really beautiful documentaries,

but also with visual affects it's a great way

to help make something look photo real.

Because when something's back lit, you kind of

read into the details.

What you don't see, your imagination fills in

and it feels more real than it is.

Now I also wanna point something out here.

We were able to pay tribute to a species

that unfortunately during the course of making this

we found out went extinct, the Northern White Rhino.

And hopefully having these images,

so realistic and for kids to see it for the first time,

they may develop a relationship and feel

a sense of responsibility to help protect this.

And the fact that technology can make it

look so photo real, it becomes harder and harder

to make a case that you need to

actually put animals in danger when making movies.

These are shots that are very reminiscent

of what was in the old version of the film.

You see the sun breaking through,

and the sun hits baby Simba.

And so you see the light change that takes place.

Again, it's a long lens and you see it on Simba too.

Part of what's so cool about working with

visual effects artists is they make it so convincing

by the way it interacts with the fur,

the rock face, and because the light

is kinda side lit, you don't get that flat lighting.

You get kind of a side and back light at Rafiki,

which is slightly cheated actually,

'cause you see it, you want it to be

on the front of Simba but Rafiki really benefits

from the side light.

Again, when you have flat frontal light,

it kind of revels imperfections in the CG characters.

And back light and side light is always

beautiful photographically, whether you're doing

a documentary or a CG shot.

Lighting is big part of what makes

the effects convincing here.

In order to keep it feeling a bit more

like a documentary and more like something

that was natural and to try to fool people

into thinking they were seeing something that

was live action, we had to communicate a lot

of the emotion by their body movement.

You know you could do anything, you could have

an animal do anything if you're animating it,

and oftentimes in films like Madagascar

you exaggerate the movements of the animals

that are inspired by the animals,

but you exaggerate it for comedic effect.

In this case, we wanted to hold ourselves

to the standard of what you would do

as though this were a live action shot

that had to fit into a live action film.

And how you would do that is, you would just look at

all this great reference.

I know when they made Bambi, Walt would bring in

animals for the animators to sketch.

But now, thanks to the internet, you have libraries

and libraries of footage of animals.

So you have all the reference you could ever want.

For example, if we wanted a bowing giraffe,

it would start with pencil drawings

to indicate what the action should be,

and then we would go through the library

of reference video and then we would include thumbnails

of ones that seemed like it might work within this.

And the animators would then hand animate

the characters that we've designed

to be as photo real as possible.

So what we did is we took natural movements

that they might do, like bow their head,

but we coordinated it in a way where it looks like

they're all doing it together.

So individually these actions are very natural

and there's not a lot of expression change on their face.

And here you have that beautiful side light and back light

that we talked about before to help really sell it.

So hopefully it has the aesthetic of real animals.

To get authenticity, part of it was with scouting.

After the initial scout we'd send crews in

to take still photographs for photogrammetry.

Photogrammetry is something that you do to get

the specific textures of real rocks and such

so that you can take that and texture map it

onto the 3D geometric assets that were used

to create the 3D set for us to scout in VR,

set cameras, and ultimately render in Maya.

Here we come to another iconic moment

from the end of the sequence from the original.

And so here we see Sarabi and Mufasa.

We see the silhouette in the distance

of Rafiki holding the baby.

We see, once again, back lit animals

to make it look beautiful.

We have a side lit, contoured Pride Rock.

And something that I like to do,

is I like to keep the skies very simple.

Because you have to get very lucky

to have a beautiful sky when you're really photographing.

But in CG you could put in whatever sky you want

and often CG artists are tempted to make

the skies beautiful, 'cause why not.

It costs the same amount, it's just as easy to do.

But I find when I watch a movie with a lot

of beautiful skies one after the other,

I'm like, that's too lucky for real photography.

And to me, there's something beautiful about naturalism.

And so this is one of the prettier skies in the movie,

but you can see that we showed a lot of restraint

and didn't put like billowing clouds.

It looks kinda simple.

The sun is just scraping the animals

and the grass to add some contour and some separation.

All of this imagery is important,

but the most important thing is the music,

'cause that's what we really remember.

♪...in the circle... ♪

We always knew we wanted to use

the original songs wherever we could.

We wanted to re-record them.

Also Hans Zimmer wanted an opportunity

to really to get in there and finish it.

Because the original, it was something

where they had a schedule and a budget.

There was a lot of digital instruments in that orchestra.

And here was an opportunity for him to re-record it

and to update it to, as they said,

to help match the new visuals.

I think part of why Lion King still holds up

is that the story is so timeless and enduring,

and the myths are so clear,

and the archetypes are so specific.

Stories that repeat themselves with these

same characters in these same situations

all the way back to ancient Egypt.

I think part of what makes it timeless

and part of what makes a Disney classic

is combining the old stories with the new technology.

And that combination makes it memorable,

but also is part of what I think Walt Disney

brought to his style of storytelling.

Trying to tell stories that aren't just

locked into our time frame,

but ones that have endured over many generations,

but presenting it with new tools.

In his time, he was dealing with things like

rotoscope and with locking picture to sound

for the first time in Steamboat Willie.

Audio animatronics in Disneyland.

So he was always looking for the new tech

to help breath the magic into these old stories.

It's that combination of old and new

that I think has made, not just Lion King,

but the entire Disney library so relevant.

[lion roaring]