Like the warrior princess she plays in “Avatar,” the sci-fi epic hit movie, Saldana becomes visibly agitated when she doesn’t like something. She’s tired of being asked whether people will recognize her as Neytiri, a 10-foot-tall alien with radiant blue skin, flirtatious feline ears and a level of cinematic detail unseen in previous computer-generated characters.
“It’s me,” Saldana said, with more than a hint of annoyance. “I don’t know how else to answer that. I put everything in there.”
If Neytiri is Saldana, she’s also a lot more, she is an extreme specimen of computer animation distilled from a live-action performance.
To create the aliens in “Avatar,” the cast acted on a bare stage while wired into performance-capture suits and headgear. Prior performance-capture films have left audiences underwhelmed.
But “Avatar” represents a great leap forward for the technology and the viewer’s experience, enhanced by jaw-dropping 3-D visuals. The idea of pushing the envelope, Saldana says, is part of what made filming “Avatar” worth the extra effort.
“It was hard at first,” she said of the suits and helmets, “but once we understood the technology and got used to the physicality of it, it was the most liberating thing. I almost feel like this technology is going to challenge the way we view films and the way we view actors.”
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