How Ryan Reynolds hit Free Guy got the video- game look of Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto

Shawn Levy turned down Free Guy the first time he was approached to direct it.

The film, which stars Ryan Reynolds as Guy, a nonplayable video game character who discovers a new zest for life after falling for a gamer named Molotov Girl (Killing Eve star Jodie Comer), takes place mostly in Free City, a place not unlike the lawless, hyper-violent San Andreas of the Grand Theft Auto games.

“I think I read about a third of the script and said, ‘You know what? This should probably be some hardcore gamer that you get to direct it,’” says Levy over Zoom. “And I moved on.”

Years later, Ryan Reynolds reached out to the Night at the Museum director after he received the script, without knowing Levy had previously been considered to direct it.

“I didn’t tell Ryan that I had already read it,” Levy recalls. “I said, ‘Why are you calling me? I’m not a hardcore gamer.’ Ryan says ‘[Let’s] take a video-game premise but make a movie that is not just for gamers. Let’s make a new Truman Show, a movie about personal awareness and empowerment and the very relatable notion that you can live in the background or you can step forward to be seen and effect change.’”

Levy agreed, and enlisted production designer Ethan Tobman and VFX supervisor Swen Gillberg to help fill in the gaps in his knowledge. The gameplay “was the hardest”, says Levy. “We did a lot of variations. Whereas the movie might be more GTA-inspired, the look of the gameplay is closer to Fortnite in its aesthetic and level of stylisation than any other video-game reference.”

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Gillberg explains that they initially started out very photoreal but found that they couldn’t separate what was on the monitor from the live action. “So we went in a very different direction and made the gameplay very cartoony at times,” he says. “But we found that the audience didn’t have empathy for Guy, so we then scaled it back to a more realistic but stylistic look, similar to Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty.”

“Those were kind of the main components of what we would call the look bible,” Levy says. “And I’m pretty pleased that no matter how many times you screen the movie, there’s never any confusion what world you’re watching. I think that’s our visual rules doing the work for us.”

During pre-production, the crew formed a think tank shooting out ideas, playing “tons” of video games and referencing several movies before coming to a decision on the look of Free City.

“I’m a gamer anyway, but I ended up playing video games really differently in prep,” says Tobman. “I wanted to see what was happening in the deep background, following nonplayable characters for the whole game. I’d avoid the main plot and go right for the subplot. But I also started going crazy on YouTube, looking at mistakes and video bloopers.”

Levy spent time watching video games on YouTube and Twitch, including more obscure experiential games, with video game designer and code writer Mike Mika, who had been a consultant on Ready Player One.

“They’re what’s called fishbowl games where the goal is not to kill, level up or acquire vehicles and weaponry but to watch the digital world evolve,” he says. He also leaned heavily on Charlie Lehmer, a “big adorable gaming nerd” on the visual effects team.

Seattle, Seoul, Tokyo, Pittsburgh and even Christopher Nolan’s rendering of Gotham City in The Dark Knight all served as inspiration for the real world look of the film. “I’ve noticed a trend where video games have really been informed by movies and movies are now being informed by video games,” Tobman says.

“When you play Red Dead Redemption or Shadow of the Colossus, you’re seeing some of the great Western film noirs or Ridley Scott sci-fis. There’s enormous creativity and world-building that goes into these. They’re using the same technology and software and even some of the same people [to make them].”

“There’s this fascinating strand of game design that is so clearly cinematic in its inspiration,” says Levy. “As a result, there’s not really a one-upmanship between the two mediums but a cross-pollination of ideas that have made both better.”

Tobman says his favourite set is Molotov Girl’s stash house, a set made entirely out of fabric, which was also the most technically difficult to achieve. “How do you light that? How do you film that?” says Tobman. “There’s no wood, metal or structure.”

Instead, the production design team built model renderings out of tracing paper and laser-cut 300 pieces of panelling in slightly different shapes to resemble stalagmites. “We essentially built a cave out of fabric,” Tobman explains.

The set, which was made using a parachute-like material, took three months to make. It features a white Plexiglas floor that mirrored everything “so you can’t have a single blemish” and required an “army” of people to stretch, steam, tighten and light it with a white lightbox. “So the whole thing looks like it’s breathing,” says Tobman. “It looks like you’re inside the belly of a whale.”

The filmmakers were careful to bury plenty of Easter eggs for eagle-eyed fans. “These are people who are trapped in a city and don’t know it so there are travel agencies advertising trips to nowhere where you don’t get off the plane, for prices that you can’t afford,” says Tobman.

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“There’s sales on department store windows that say ‘Sale tomorrow, and the day after that’ and they appear every day. There are fast food restaurants with happy meals that include grenades and nunchucks and machine rifles. We’re playing with the idea of a satire where we’re commenting on the world we know today: it’s hyper-violent, hypersexual and excessive.”

Guy’s apartment is another space that’s laden with Easter eggs. Because he’s a video-game character, his apartment is intentionally half-developed. “The [game designers] literally economised the amount of gigabytes they want to give to his house,” says Tobman.

“So his front door has five deadbolts and no knob, his calendar is missing a day and his cabinet has a bowl and a spoon but no fork or knife because he only eats cereal. So that was an incredibly fun set to bury Easter eggs in. That apartment is really Guy’s predicament personified and externalised.”

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