Netflix 'Leave the World Behind': VFX supervisor reveals secrets behind creating the deer

Sam Esmail's movie Leave the World Behind, starring Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Mahershela Ali and Myha'la, has been the most popular film on Netflix for the past week, and features the impressive talent of Vancouver-based visual effects supervisor Chris Harvey.

Having worked on films including Chappie, Zero Dark Thirty, Tron: Legacy and Watchmen, Harvey's interest in working on Leave the World Behind (with Barack and Michelle Obama as executive producers), was really established in his first meeting with Esmail.

Watch Leave the World Behind

"He was just a super interesting guy, he had a very clear vision for his story," Harvey said. "Sam's got a style to him. He's a very deliberate filmmaker and he seemed like he was going to be very creatively collaborative, which for me is a big thing."

"Sam is very hungry to be involved at all aspects of his film, ... every single thing in the film has a purpose and a choice, ... like pictures on the wall that are subtly changing over time across the film that most people may not pick up on, but there's so many little things he's doing, and the visual effects was no different."

What is 'Leave the World Behind' about

Leave the World Behind is based on the novel by Rumaan Alam.

It begins when Amanda (Roberts) and her husband Clay (Hawke) decide to rent a vacation home to spend a weekend away with their kids.

While at the house, G.H. (Ali) and his daughter Ruth (Myha’la) show up, saying that it's actually their home and they've return after a cyberattack caused a blackout. As the film progresses, this attack creates widespread disaster through this apocalyptical thriller.

Throughout the film, Harvey highlighted that there are several scenes that required a lot of "tight collaboration" between a number of different departments.

"A good example is the Tesla car crash, it's what is referred to as a oner, it looks like a single take in the final film, where you're in the car, the camera's spinning around, they're driving away," Harvey explained. "The technical challenge of pulling that shot off was very complicated and involved many different departments, and it's made up of probably 16 different plates that are all put back together with a bunch of VFX and [CGI] as well, to make it look totally seamless."

'You couldn't get anywhere near a deer'

One significant moment in the film, something that had been highly anticipated since the trailer was released, was the eerie standoff Amanda and Ruth have with deer.

"First they have to be photorealistic," Harvey explained. "We went and shot hours of footage of real deer, and textures and photographs, and ... spent a lot of time with real deer to try to collect as much for reference we could."

Watch Leave the World Behind

But filming in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic created a bit of a unique challenge when it came to actually getting access to real deer to have those reference points.

"There was actually some story of a case in Canada where supposedly someone caught COVID from deer, and so most petting zoos were closed, you couldn't get anywhere near a deer," Harvey recalled. "We found one place that would let us in."

"We shot tons of footage of these things, I printed up actual full-sized deer heads, we had those on set for people to act to, for cameras to frame up to, for us to light. We bought a couple of mounted deer heads and we'd have those as well, just so that we could get proper lighting reference of fur and things like that. Then it just came down to a lot of attention to detail by the the visual effects vendors that were working on them, hours and hours and hours of meticulous detail of fur and how the eyes were shaded, the eyelashes and the nostrils."

One phone call set off an impressive visual effects career

In terms of how Harvey got his start in VFX, it was actually all quite accidental, at least at the beginning.

"I was double majoring in university for theatre and biology, which are two very odd things to double major in, but those are the two things I liked to do," Harvey said. "The university I was at made some errors and it kind of screwed up my second year, and I was going to have to retake a whole bunch of stuff."

"So I was like, I'm not going to spend more money on university. This is crazy. So I was looking for something else to do and I found an ad for a game programming school. ... I called them and when I called them they asked if I was calling about the game program, or if I was calling about the animation program. ... I was like, oh that's what I'm calling about, which wasn't at all what I was calling about, but it sounded better than programming, and so I took that."

With his relatively unconventional start to his profession, Harvey also identified that his knowledge in biology and theatre were very complementary to his VFX work.

"I personally really like doing creatures in visual effects, I guess it was my first love, and the acting background and the biology background kind of work hand-in-hand for doing digital characters and creatures," Harvey said.

Looking back at all the impressive projects he's worked on, he loves different ones for various elements, but a few stand out.

"Chappie was a big one for me, to be able to pull off arguably the lead character in the film and it's entirely synthetic, was pretty cool," Harvey said.

"I also really enjoyed working on Zero Dark Thirty because it was sort of on the other end of the spectrum, in some ways more like [Leave the World Behind], where a lot of the stuff we did was invisible visual effects. Like no one would know mostly what we even did there, but that's also rewarding in a kind of a different way."

In terms of advice Harvey would give someone hoping to have a career in VFX, he stressed that "hard work" is a must.

"There's so much material out there to learn from and really it does come down to, you just have to have some tenacity and some grit, and get in there and do it," he said. "It's not going to fall on your lap. It's going take hard work. There's no fast-food, quick fix. ... Just work hard and you can get there."