I wanted to design the film around a strong female character.
Michelle Rodriguez’s performance in her break-out role, Girlfight was the character that first came to mind when I was planning the story. It’s an incredible performance and as a fan of boxing, it’s a perfect film. I first watched the film in late 2000 but her charisma is something that I was drawn to, I hope to craft a character in the same vein as her.
Red Smoke, at its core, is a homage to all the films I’ve enjoyed over the years, so I pulled on all my favourite female performances and picked the ones I felt had the same tenacity as Nico. Nico essentially battles a constant threat and never gives up. The previs I designed is how I would go about getting a director engaged in his or her film, working out how things could be done and what may or may not look, well, cool. I was the director here, so I knew what I wanted, I just had to make my hero and the film, match the vision that lived in my imagination.
I approached Red Smoke as if it was a real film. My description of Nico was she was strong, diverse with a will to survive. After seeing Kali Reis’s performance in the latest season of True Detective I thought she could bring what I wanted to Nico. Funnily enough, after I researched her, I found out she used to be a professional boxer, somewhat serendipous.
I read a little about Reis and found this quote “NEVER given a thing, fought my way proved my way n figured it out mostly on my own.” That’s the Nico I was trying to design.
I kept on collecting references of performances I’ve just loved over the years, Finn Carter’s supporting role in Tremors is just great, she is the brains of the trio and that film has some overlap with how I wanted to approach the Bug Menace. Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, is perhaps one of cinema’s top, strong female characters, and she was directed by a true filmmaker in Cameron. A film and a performance that is often overlooked is Kidman’s tenacious role in Destroyer - her character beats everyone while dealing with her downward spiral - Nico needed to feel like all three.
Viola Davis
Janelle Monae
Tessa Thompson
Megan Good
Lupita Nyong’o
Danai Gurira
This film is a personal project and I have an unlimited budget. I just collected images. It’s a mood board of inspiration.
Demolition Man, not only gave us Snipes's best performance as the delightfully evil Simon Phoenix but also a hugely memorable costuming - I wanted something as striking as that for Nico. I experimented with my interpretation of the look using Epic’s MetaHuman creator.
Nancy Allen playing Anne Lewis in Robocop, another fabulous Verhoeven 80’s flick. Her character is such an inspiration for Nico, the soft face hidden beneath the large helmet and body armour. She’s also super resourceful throughout and a much-needed female presence in an otherwise male-dominated world.
A couple of renders of how Nico looked in the final stages of the previs. Her face barely changed but her body went through revisions but I feel these two shots draw on Allen’s look in Robocop. It’s something we should all be doing in vis, collect inspiration, and make folder dumps of performances, actors, and sets, just keep collecting and you’ll feel much more capable when doing previs professionally.