One of the most anticipated elements of Zack Snyder’s upcoming zombie heist movie “Army of the Dead” is seeing comedian Tig Notaro playing a badass supporting character in the mix.
Notaro famously wasn’t involved until months after the film wrapped production and Snyder decided to remove comedian Chris D’Elia from the film and replace him with Notaro. D’Elia was accused of sexual misconduct in March 2020.
Of course, the pandemic kicked off around the same time, preventing the cast from getting together to reshoot select scenes. This meant that D’Elia had to be digitally removed from the movie and Notaro had to be swapped in.
Vulture has done a new feature piece on what was involved in this swap and how complicated it ended up being. Notaro had to film almost all of her scenes in front of a green screen, and Snyder’s team would then edit it into existing footage.
There were complications – Notaro couldn’t be pasted over D’Elia, their movement and more importantly their sizes were too different. Snyder says:
“I had to do this incredibly technical experiment, re-creating every scene, shot for shot. My visual-effects supervisor, Marcus Taormina, did the work of taking Chris completely out of the movie so Tig could have freedom [to move] within the scenes.”
Snyder and the VFX team also replicated the physical spaces and camera angles of the original scenes at a studio in Simi Valley and used greened-out props, laser pointers, and tennis balls to approximate the eyelines. Snyder says some of the trickiest shots were when she’s walking in the group.
There could be no ad-libbing: her dialogue had to sync with the other character reactions. Notaro did manage to share a scene with Ana de la Reguera for a half-day shoot, and did all her scenes in September last year.
Any scene where her character touches another character were “pantomimed or filmed with her assistant, Patrick McDonald, wearing a green suit.” In the cases where footage of Notaro did not sync up to the existing footage, a CG scan was made of Notaro’s body to create a fully digital version of her they could insert into scenes.
How much the swap cost isn’t clear, though Snyder says it costs less than creating the film’s zombie tiger seen in the adverts. “Army of the Dead” opens in select cinemas on Friday and then on Netflix worldwide a week later on May 21st.
