Elizabeth Olsen Wants You To Know That Green Screens Are 'Dumb' But Hard

By Andrew Sanford | Celebrity | September 26, 2024 |

By Andrew Sanford | Celebrity | September 26, 2024 |

Pre-production is an important part of any filmmaking process. It is one of several times that a crew is making the movie. The script is getting polished or finished (or in some terrible cases, conceived). Locations are being scouted to ensure filming occurs in the most appropriate settings. The movie is getting storyboarded, mapping out as many shots as possible to avoid wasting time on set. Ideally, all these things happen during pre-production on a film!

However, things are rarely ideal when making a movie. Problems occur before, during, and after production. Positive and negative changes can occur smack dab in the middle of a shoot day. Even with the best-laid plans, a film shoot can be chaotic. Still, a thorough and detailed pre-production period can help alleviate a lot of unnecessary stress and cut down on things like reshoots. However, some films are made on the fly and reshot to the point that the finished product may barely resemble what was originally conceived.

The MCU is notorious for having such shooting schedules. Movies are greenlit, developed, changed, remixed, changed again, shot, reshot, edited, reshot again, and eventually make their way to big and small screens. Actors who were not hired initially are brought in to play seemingly important characters well after a movie is “finished.” Yes, the movies are successful and have plenty of fans, but the product can sometimes look lackluster at best.

I saw Deadpool & Wolverine in IMAX this summer. That ended up being a mistake. With a screen that big, every imperfection was glaring. Rushed and/or unfinished-looking shots, questionable CGI, and abhorrent greenscreen fired into my eyes (but, ya know, I had fun). Plenty of that may be smoothed out before the film hits home release but it also may not. My Spider-Man: No Way Home Blu-ray still has plenty of “outdoor” scenes that look like they were shot secretly in an underground bunker (because they were).

Making movies is hard! It’s even harder when things are rushed or thrown together haphazardly. Poor planning can lead to an overreliance on green screen. Poor judgment can also lead to an overreliance on green screen. Basically, unless you have the post-production time and budget of an Avatar movie, you probably shouldn’t be using green screen too much. But if a production does, Elizabeth Olsen wants to make sure you aren’t blaming the actors.

Olsen is a full-fledged member of the MCU. She has done a lot of green screen acting in those films, and she wants to make it clear that it isn’t easy. “You really have to embrace this dumb point of view, where you feel like a 7-year-old playing make-believe,” the WandaVision actor told The Hollywood Reporter. “I do believe that at some point they should release a full version of one of the movies, without any of the special effects so people can see how hard it is.”

I get where Olsen is coming from! Acting against nothing is hard work. It once caused Ian Mckellan to break down in tears on the set of The Hobbit. However, I think everyone knows that to be the case. People aren’t ragging on green screen-laden pictures because they think the actors aren’t working hard. They’re giving them guff because an overabundance of green screens implies that worse things are going on behind the scenes.