NYT Interview part 1-why he decided on Digital for BFG

Q. Was the melding of technology and human beings part of your interest?

Not really, because at first I thought we would do it with actors — “Darby O’Gill and the Little People” with forced perspective, staging, actors with false eye-lines. But then I realized if I shot the movie that way it would be no different from “Tom Thumb,” “Thumbelina,” “Jack and the Beanstalk” — it wouldn’t be magical. And I thought that the most important thing I could contribute was to try to create real cinematic magic. Not magic as a result of an audience’s experience but physical, literal alchemy on the screen that was somehow similar to things we’ve seen before but somehow also very different.

To do that, I thought, I need all the giants to be creatures. Now, I could certainly make them creatures through prosthetic makeup. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had complete freedom that the creatures were done digitally? I felt like we were just on the cusp of inventing soul. That we could really infuse actual, human, God-given soul [into] an animated character. They had gotten close to it on several movies like “Avatar” and even “Planet of the Apes.”

I didn’t want the technology to subvert Mark’s honest performance. And that was the big risk we took. Would they be able to get Mark’s soul into BFG’s face and body? Mark is 100 percent responsible for his performance. The technology of motion capture with the suit he wears and the dots on his face delivered 80 percent of pure, soulful performance to the animators and the video cameras that recorded his performance from six different angles gave the animators the next 20 percent.