Zero Dark Thirty

Although Arnie and Sly are trying to bring back that right wing flag-waving slant of the 80s, there's no escaping the fact that thrillers and action movies have been smarter than your average bear, post 9/11. Like Rendition and Green Zone before it, Oscar-nominated Zero Dark Thirty pockets the full-on patriotism for a more complex take.

A steely Jessica Chastain is a CIA analyst chasing down the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden since 2003. Working from the untrustworthy information given up by tortured prisoners, Chastain works her way up the chain of al-Qaeda operatives and believes that everyone is wrong; he’s not hiding in a cave. However, with each terrorist attack - the 2005 London bombing, the Marriot hotel bombing of 2008 - the powers that be get itchy for results.

There has been a media furore over the torture scenes and more to the point the justification of the torture - the victims give up information that eventually lead to the 'possible' location of bin Laden. What's significant is Chastain's disgust with it - she can’t look when Clarke waterboards a prisoner - and Clarke's inability to deal with the job, asking to be re-assigned home. The tortured Ammar (a wonderful Reda Kateb) is not your average American hater either - he's a human that’s become dehumanised by the lengthy interrogation. The ends justify the means but at what price, the film asks.

Bigelow cranks it back up for the final half hour with the assault on bin Laden's compound. Action fans, probably already disappointed with the talk-heavy two hours, aren’t treated to a gung-ho pay-off as Bigelow opts for tension and atmosphere over bullets and bodies. Playing out in what feels like real time, Bigelow's Call Of Duty-esque POV puts us right in the house with the marines and it’s exhilarating stuff.

In the instance of filmmaking, does it support the story of the film or does it get in the way? For me, the best visual effects are those that really don't draw attention to themselves. You might be creating something extraordinary and impossible to achieve in reality but you really want the viewer to just follow the story of the film and not go, "Oh wow, they spent a lot of money on the computer graphics." I'm lucky enough that I've worked with some fantastic filmmakers who understand that, particularly Christopher Nolan. He's a director who isn't interested in creating eye-candy. He wants to make the most compelling story possible but then he pushes me to create the most extraordinary images that I can put together, and then sell them with the absolute conviction of complete reality.

It totally depends on the filmmaker you're working with. The best directors are those who are collaborative and will actually invite you to bring your own ideas along. That's the great thing about working with Chris, for example: he is extremely collaborative and solicits our ideas. An intelligent filmmaker will always listen to what the visual effects people are actually saying because we are filmmakers too and want to make the best film we possibly can. At the same time, sometimes they say, "I want this," and you just go off and do it. And sometimes afterwards you say, "That didn't work," but I can think of lots of films I've worked on where there has been a questionable decision which turned out to be exactly the right call.

I remember a movie I worked on a long time ago called Hackers, which was one of Angelina Jolie's first films and was about hacking and the early Internet. The director [Iain Softley] was insistent that he didn't want to base any of the computer graphics we were creating for the film on existing computer technology. He didn't want it to look like any interface at the time. We thought, "This is just dumb, it doesn't look like a real computer". But I saw the film recently, and it hasn't aged as a result, the ideas behind it still work as they did nearly 20 years ago. Had we used Netscape 1995 as our computer interface, I think it would be showing its age terribly.

The one where we really got to come up with some cool ideas was the whole Limbo beach sequence, where at the end of the film Leo and Ellen was up on the surf and they're in this incredible crumbling city which is built within the conscious of Leo's character's mind. It's literally collapsing into the sea of the subconscious. That started out as some very abstract concepts: Chris wanted the idea of crumbling architecture, he wanted it to feel like a landform, like a glacier and he left us to it. We came up with some very cool technology to build that city. It's done through a process called procedural modelling. Instead of actually building things by hand and placing all the buildings, we created a piece of code that created the whole landform and the way the buildings crumble into the sea. That gave us something none of us had ever seen before and gave us a place we'd never been to. The team did an astonishing job making it look completely convincing: it's this surreal landscape presented with the conviction of absolute reality.

In Batman, the difference was that, whilst there is a similar use of visual effects, we are trying to create a world that is completely convincing: we want to present the world of the superheroes as if it is in our own world. It's very different to other superhero films. A lot of the stuff we did tends to pass below the level of perception because it's not meant to draw itself out. If you look at The Dark Knight, my favourite scene was the chase sequence where Batman is on his crazy motorcycle (the Batpod) and he's chasing the Joker in the truck. That was an amazing combination of full-scale, practical special effects that we did on location - flipping a truck end over end on a street in Chicago - but then some of the more outrageous manoeuvres of the Batpod - where it flattens down and goes under the truck, mounts the curb, flips up and over - those were done digitally. It's a seamless mixing of the original photography and completely computer-generated imagery. The whole screen is entirely CGI for quite a few of those shots, and I don't think anyone noticed.

I thought Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes was really interesting. There are little central sections of that film, where the apes are breaking out of the animal shelter, which are quite extraordinary. You had a whole sequence where the characters are entirely virtual, but they're being presented as real. So they're not cartoon characters, but they're doing something that could never be real. I thought there was some really new and interesting ways of filmmaking there. I would have loved to have been involved in that. Obviously you can look at something like Avatar, where you're creating an entire universe and presenting it as if you're just filming it.