The process of filming underwater has advanced drastically over the past decade. Massive blockbusters from Avatar: The Way of Water to Black Panther: Wakanda Forever have refined the techniques available to visual artists to capture action that’s meant to take place underwater. And those visual tricks can only benefit such upcoming DC movies as the anticipated sequel Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. So many of those movies can trace their techniques back to Zack Snyder’s work on Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which had to capture Jason Momoa underwater when they gave fans the first look at Arthur Curry. And according to Snyder, it was a learning process, for sure.
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During a recent screening of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice in Pasadena as part of SnyderCin 2023, Zack Snyder and his creative collaborators sat for a Q-and-A that I was lucky enough to moderate (which you can watch here). One of the questions that I asked visual effects supervisor John “D.J.” Des Jardin involved the approach that the team took to realizing the powers of the Justice League team members – many of which we were seeing on screen for the very first time. Des Jardin revealed that the very first thing that they shot for Batman v Superman was Ezra Miller’s Barry Allen breaking up a convenience store robbery, and said that the effects were relatively simple because it just involved lightning streaks.
But when he got around to explaining Aquaman for the movie, D.J. Des Jardin said:
Aquaman proved our dry-for-wet theory, because we shot it wet, and it was a pain in the ass.
It has been interesting watching the evolution of Arthur Curry in Zack Snyder’s DC films. By the time we got to Justice League, Arthur (Jason Momoa) and Mera (Amber Heard) would create air pockets in which to speak. And eventually, James Wan figured out how to present action “underwater” with the help of visual effects. But in the original Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Momoa was literally underwater. It looked like this:
Even Snyder admitted that, while he was so excited about it at the time, once they started to film it, he quickly realized it was a mistake. As he told the audience:
I remember we were like, ‘Oh yeah, let’s just shoot it underwater! That’s so cool!’ And then we were like, ‘That is not cool…’ We shot it in like a weird swimming pool in Detroit. And I remember that when Jason showed up, we had to put all the tattoos on him. He was basically half naked, and everyone was like participating. Suddenly everybody showed up and wanted to put on the tattoos! I was like, ‘Where were you guys five minutes ago?’ … But it was such a weird – we had a green screen in the pool. It was not… that was a mistake.
But you learn on the job. And that technology likely will only improve in time, as James Cameron keeps working on Avatar movies, and Wan continues to refine the process in his Aquaman sequel, due in theaters in December. We got to see some footage from that sequel during CinemaCon in Las Vegas, and weighed in on how it looked. It’s one of several movies coming to theaters in 2023 that we have on our radar.
