He praised both Salazar’s nuanced and emotional performance and the digital effects teams whose work allows the actress’ portrayal to come through so vibrantly. “As an actress, she has a laser-like focus and is incredibly dedicated, has trained relentlessly, but also as a person, she embodied that spirit of Alita from the moment she walked into the room.” “She has so much life force coming out of her,” he said by phone as the cast and filmmakers headed to New Zealand to visit Weta Digital, who handled much of the “Alita” VFX. Rodriguez describes being blown away by Salazar from start. Instead, Rodriguez told Salazar, “‘I really wanted to work with you … which is why I’m so excited that I will be on set with you.'” She was so overcome with joy, “I threw my arms around this parking meter attendant and held up the ticket, like, ‘I know exactly where I was, what time it was, when I got this movie – Thank you!’ And she was like, ‘OK. So when she returned that missed call from the director, she was steeled for bad news – and as she crossed the street, she spotted a parking attendant giving her a ticket. But “you never want to get ahead of your expectations,” she said. ![]() In later meetings, he showed her concept art of Alita that had been created with her face. And she was pretty sure she’d nailed it, moving Rodriguez to tears while reading the film’s most emotional scene. So she had marched confidently into her “Alita” audition knowing the role was hers to lose. Unlike Salazar, most of those other “Alita” hopefuls probably didn’t hunt out-of-print copies of Kishiro’s 1990 source manga “Gunnm” on eBay or devour the two-part anime, seeing themselves in the character’s scrappy and tough but never less than heart-forward journey. (She’s also not one to wait around between auditioning for “Alita” and getting the role, Salazar wrote, directed and starred in her first short, “Good Crazy,” which played in Sundance competition in 2017.) “They saw every actress in the world for this thing,” she said. But some time had passed, and Salazar has never been one to hang her hopes on others. Like every actress in town, she jokes, she had auditioned for Cameron’s long-gestating passion project (which he first announced in 2003 and publicly handed to Rodriguez in 2015). She was a working actor walking out of yet another audition near Hollywood and Vine one day in 2016 when she missed a call from Rodriguez. Roles on TV’s “Parenthood,” “American Horror Story” and “Man Seeking Women,” in the indie “Night Owls” and entries in the “Divergent” and “Maze Runner” YA franchises have highlighted her steadily growing filmography. Salazar, who lives in Los Angeles, is candid when it comes to the hard work it takes to find success in Hollywood. “It’s a hero’s journey, and that’s what I love about it.” “It’s this beautiful story,” said Salazar. Meanwhile, Motorball fixers Vector (Mahershala Ali) and Chiren (Jennifer Connelly) have dark designs of their own on the young woman. Ido (Christoph Waltz), she also adventures with her new human friend, Hugo (Keean Johnson), and tangles with cybernetically enhanced bounty hunter Zapan (Ed Skrein). There’s a capable edge to her naivete, a nerviness that draws her to Motorball – the arena sport that keeps the cyber-enhanced working-class citizens of Iron City too distracted to rebel against the class disparity separating them from the elites who live in Zalem, a city in the sky.Īnd as Alita learns more about the world from her rescuer and father figure, robotics surgeon Dr. Scripted by Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis, based on the manga series created by Yukito Kishiro, she’s also a complex young heroine with plenty to do and something to say.įrom the moment she awakens in the futuristic Iron City (built on elaborately designed, multiculturally influenced sets at Rodriguez’s Troublemaker Studios in Austin, Texas, and lensed by “The Matrix” cinematographer Bill Pope), Alita is on a mission – not just to remember her past and figure out why she knows the deadly martial art known as Panzer Kunst, but to figure out the woman she wants to become. Her Alita is a technical revelation to behold, created with breathtaking VFX so crisp and lifelike she seems to be a wholly new life form, alive within the liminal space of the screen. ![]() The actress’ appeal radiates through layers of state-of-the-art effects, blended on top of her fierce and expressive motion-captured performance to create a dazzling character unlike any audiences have seen before. Subscribe - Holiday Gift Subscriptions Sign In My Account Logout Primary Menu ☰ X
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