Tim Miller’s wild animated horror anthology Love, Death and Robots just returned for Season 4 and it is, if we do say so ourselves, bigger and better than ever. In an exclusive behind-the-scenes featurette, director David Fincher discussed working on the season opener, which features the iconic Red Hot Chili Peppers as motion-captured marionettes made with computer-generated effects — and here’s the kicker: the episode takes place at one of their massive concerts, so the entire crowd is marionettes too. That means they had a lot of strings to take care of.
“I always wanted to do super marionation in CG,” the Social Network filmmaker revealed. “So I started talking to Tim about that and he was like, ‘Yeah, it can be done. So it’s just the band members?’ And I said, ‘No, it’s also the crowd.’ He sort of looked at me and said, ‘How many people are in the crowd?’ And I said, ‘12, 13 thousand.’ And he said, ‘How many wires per person?’ And I said, ‘Five [or] six.’ And when he regained consciousness, we decided that was kind of the direction we were gonna go in.”
Fincher also explained that everything about motion-capture and marionette work is a bit at odds, but something they were able to use to their advantage was the very specific way the members of the Chili Peppers — Anthony Kiedis, Flea, Chad Smith, and John Frusciante — move and interact with each other.
“One of the things that’s interesting about mo-capping something that’s supposed to be a marionette is that it behaves very differently,” the director added. “Everything in a marionette is suspension. There’s a lot of that kind of work. Like, well, should this swing or does the hand move in a way that has real determination, or is a byproduct of moving the puppet across the stage? There’s a very specific way that they [the band] move and a very specific way that they interact.”
Ultimately, Fincher just loves the unlimited possibilities of what this show can be, which is basically how this idea — one of his own that he’d been wanting to do for 30 years — was able to come alive. “Part of what’s attractive to me about Love, Death and Robots is the fact that it can be anything,” he said.
Fincher produces on the series, which was created by Miller. It premiered on Netflix in March 2019 after spending a whopping 11 years in development hell, where it started as a reboot of the 1981 sci-fi animated film Heavy Metal and eventually morphed into the show it is today.
Love, Death and Robots Volume 4 is available to stream on Netflix now.
Lex Briscuso is a film and television critic and a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikonamerica.
