Starring Ryan Reynolds as "Blue Shirt Guy," Free Guy was a unique film that brought popular gameplay to the big screen. In 1998, The Truman Show told the story of a man who learned he lives inside a TV series. 2021 saw the release of Shawn Levy's Free Guy, a film that feels like a spiritual successor to The Truman Show in that it imagines a man discovering he's an NPC in a computer game world.

Free Guy is a film with heart, with Ryan Reynolds' Blue Shirt Guy inspiring dramatic changes in the real world - including in the love life of Jodie Comer's Millie, the girl he's programmed to love and whose presence in the artificial world causes his programming to evolve. The film has been praised for its lavish special effects, with the VFX team creating an entire virtual world that's packed with Easter eggs and homages to classic computer games.

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Screen Rant had the opportunity to speak to three key figures in Free Guy's VFX team: the film's Visual Effects Supervisor Swen Gillberg, Scanline's Bryan Grill, and Digital Domain's Nikos Kalaitzidis. They discussed the collaboration that made Free Guy possible, how they created some of the film's most powerful scenes, and how they adapted to make Free Guy possible in the pandemic.

Screen Rant: For the benefit of our readers, would you be OK to start out just talking about your role in making Free Guy. Swen, could you start us off?

Swen Gillberg: I was with the production side, overall Visual Effects Supervisor, so I've been working with Bryan and Nikos for 25 years. My role is to begin the movie, and help realize the director's vision, and be the glue that ties all the members together. So there's ten vendors, my job was to talk to each vendor every day and try to help achieve Shawn's vision.

And Bryan, what was your role with Free Guy?

Bryan Grill: I was basically Visual Effects Supervisor for Scanline Visual Effects, and we worked on "Street Squeeze" and "Server Room" and the vast mansion, but primarily just good friends to Swen.

And Nikos, could you tell us a little about your role with Free Guy?

Nikos Kalaitzidis: I was one of the Visual Effects Vendors, I was Visual Effects Supervisor for Digital Domain, and we did a lot of different sequences - such as "Badass Opener," "Construction Site," "Gameplay" and a lot of different things in different sequences throughout the movie to help out Swen and Shawn, to carry on with their vision.

I've heard a lot of discussion about just how close the collaboration was between the Visual Effects teams and the rest of the production. Swen, how did you coordinate that so effectively?

Swen Gillberg: A lot of it's shorthand, I've known these two for literally 25 years so I have them both on speed-dial, and then these guys did a great job - as well as the other vendors - to actually reach out without me to exchange geometry and assets, just to keep it all moving. It's a big, moving machine, and we all gotta work together to make it look as good.

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I loved the world-building in Free Guy, and how it paid homage to the video game side of things. Could you give us an idea how you managed to get the balance so perfect with that world?

Swen Gillberg: It's an interesting question. In the beginning, Shawn literally asked me to hire some video game nerds to make sure we were gonna pay homage, it was purposefully in there, it was also written into the script. We had probably two main guys, one of my guys named Charlie Lemur who's a huge video game player and another guy named Micha who informed the script. We were constantly playing video games and calling Charlie - it was funny, it was a running joke on set and in post that a shot wasn't approved until Charlie approved it. He's, like, a 20-year-old, and it became a running joke that Charlie was in charge of the movie. All of us, the production designers, Shawn, myself, watched literally hundreds and hundreds of hours of Twitch feeds and Railpop - all the consoles - played as many games, and tried to put tons of Easter eggs in there that hopefully a lot of them you don't see until the second or third time you watch it, and that's on purpose. It's to make it fun and, like you said, pay homage to the gamers themselves.

Nikos Kalaitzidis: Shawn even put Charlie in the movie, right, Swen?

Swen Gillberg: Yeah, he's in a few scenes for sure. We're still making Charlie a stamp of approval - like, a giant stamp, APPROVED!

Bryan Grill: And I think that goes with all of us, on my team I searched out for anybody who was willing to give us information and, like, before I sent anything to Swen, it had to go through them first. Regardless, if they were a coordinator, a PA, it didn't matter, as long as they were the top technical adviser of gaming - they won.

Nikos Kalaitzidis: Yeah, I even have my Visual Effects Editor, who is a gamer, he was just... after hours, recording himself gaming and saying, this is how this glass would be in video games, this is the different styles between Fortnite and Grand Theft Auto and Apex, he'd give us collections the next morning. It'd be done at night, like, eight, nine o'clock, and the next morning there'd be all this different sort of reference that he'd collect and record.

Bryan Grill: Collaboration. Big collaboration.

It also sounds like it was a gamer's dream. Bryan, you mentioned the "Street Squeeze" scene, that was absolutely stunning. How did you manage to create that so effectively?

Bryan Grill: Well, thank you. It was a great idea to be able to work on. The first thing you think of is, OK, I'm taking the city block and squeezing all the things that go with that. The cool thing was that we wanted to try to keep it as realistic and physically real as possible, so what really ended up happening is because our technology - and we have such great artists... Some Senior Artists developed a way of taking all the assets, all the animation, putting it all together in one scene, and he would definitely be the guy who was driving all the shots. He was in control of over 25 shots, because there was this machine that we took a lot of time to build, that we called the "Street Squeeze World Machine," and then it would go through render, and then there was also the ability to change timings on stuff, so if we felt a tree was not falling when it should we could go in back and change it... I think just having that control, and then really just paying attention to the real world, how the city really looks, and try to make it fun, and as close to photo-real as you can knowing that a city street would never do that. But I think everybody just enjoyed what they were doing, and I think it came out on the screen.

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Nikos, could you tell us about a scene that you worked on that you were particularly proud of?

Nikos Kalaitzidis: One of the shots that we did, we call it the "Frozen Moment" where Taika Waititi's character reboots the game, so Guy's memory is reset. Guy's inside the Multiplayer lounge, and he notices things are kind of frozen because the machine's being rebooted, so we had to come up with an idea of, "What the heck does this look like, if you're inside a video game and somebody reboots it?" Bryan was working on the end sequence which had a lot of glitching, and we didn't want the same sort of look, we wanted something a bit more unique. Especially as this is more or less a one-off shot. And so Guy walks outside and he sees everyone's frozen, and then there's glitching until it goes into a white room and dots out. There was a lot of inspiration from old 1980s Atari videogames being pixelated, and we wanted that on steroids, and we called something that we came up with called "Data Moshing." It was inspired by this AI exhibit that I saw in Manhattan, how they took a lot of photography and came up with a simulation of different architecture in the city, something that melds together - we wanted that sort of pixelation that happens as everything disappears. So that was a fun shot that we really took time and we just wanted to make it look right, yeah.

Swen Gillberg: I've got a fun little note to go with that, Nikos' team with Digital Domain pre-vised that shot, and it wasn't really written in the script. And... we looked at it on Thursday on set, and said, "Oh, we're shooting it tomorrow, I need two trucks and so on..." So it was literally - we came up with it and shot it the very next day, I believe.

Nikos Kalaitzidis: I'm so glad you did, it turned out well. I feel like that happened quite a bit with Shawn, even when we were doing mo-cap for gameplay, they were just coming up with ideas of what else we could go in there with, and we started doing all these wrestling moves, all these different sort of stunts that it seems like Shawn  was coming up with at the last second, and they ended up being in the movie.

It really does sound like it was a tremendous collaboration. Now, I think the most commented-upon scene was the one where Guy summons things like Captain America's shield, the Hulk's fist. Swen, how easy was it to get permission to add those visual effects?

Swen Gillberg: I've wanted for years to do that, and usually it is impossible. The only way is it possible is Shawn and Ryan's relationship with big Hollywood people. So, we would be - a few days before shooting, and Ryan would be texting Feige and whoever else they needed, and it's just personal relationships.

Nikos Kalaitzidis: Chris Evans.

Swen Gillberg: Exactly.

Nikos Kalaitzidis: But I think it came in the climate of Fox being bought out by Disney as well, the permissions may have opened up for that as well as the relationships that Shawn had.

I believe a lot of this production came together through the pandemic times. How easy was it for all of you to coordinate given all the disruption that was going on?

Swen Gillberg: It was a challenge, to say the least. We were told to shut down, but I fought real hard to keep it going because it kept 800 people employed throughout the pandemic when a lot of people were getting laid off. So it was an absolute pain in the ***, we moved all 800 people home, and once it got going it was really smooth.

Bryan Grill: I mean, for us at Scanline - literally seven days, we shipped out monitors and boxes, setups, to all the people all around the world, and those seven days calling IT, reading the instructions, making sure your WiFi speed is working, making sure the phones work... It was a big undertaking. But that's what Visual Effects is set up for, to be honest with you. We had no problem - to say seven days to completely not miss a beat in a production schedule? It took longer for us to get accustomed to working at home, because we're not used to it. You know, having your home office or sharing it, a one-bedroom house, with other people that are working? I think life was more challenging than the technical aspect, because that's what Visual Effects do. We're always on the bleeding edge of technology, so I think it was actually a good fit.

Nikos Kalaitzidis: Yeah, totally. As weird as this may sound, but the pandemic couldn't have hit at a better time for visual effects. We couldn't have done this, maybe, three years ago. I mean, now the internet speeds were faster, we had zero-clients we could deploy to the artists around the world that connect to our servers, that's something that we couldn't have done before this sort of time. So fortunately we've reached a time technologically that we were able to do this, and boy it worked and it had to work. As Swen actually mentioned, there was a lot of people unemployed at that time and there was a lot of confusion, but fortunately Visual Effects kept going. We were one of those industries that we could go, and I was glad that we could do it. It was really unusual, though, because then we finished the movie, and the movie was on hold for a while because we were waiting for it to come out at the theaters.

Bryan Grill: On top of that, studios were coming to us and asking us how we were gonna shoot our next film during COVID, how do we do crowds? So not only were we finishing a movie, we were trying to come up with ideas of how to keep production going as well.

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