Namit Malhotra is India’s man of the hour at the 2022 Oscars and for good reason. The third generation of a filmmaking family, Malhotra is the Chairman and CEO of DNEG, the VFX pro behind the two Oscar-nominated films at the 94th Academy Awards, which is slated to take place on March 27 at 8 PM EST (March 28, 5:30 AM IST) at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.
DNEG has received nominations in the Best Visual Effects category for its incredible work on director Denis Villeneuve’s acclaimed film ‘Dune’ and Daniel Craig-starrer ‘No Time to Die’. The other films up for nominations in the same category include Free Guy, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and Spider-Man: No Way Home.
“It’s a great feeling. It’s the first James Bond movie to get a nomination in this particular category in many, many years. Dune, on the other hand, is the new benchmark of visual effects in storytelling,” Malhotra tells us over the phone from Los Angeles.
DNEG’s VFX work has previously won six Academy Awards for ‘Best Visual Effects’ – including Tenet (2021), First Man (2019), Blade Runner 2049 (2018), Ex Machina (2016), Interstellar (2015), and Inception (2011).
Talking about the challenges that his team faced while working on ‘Dune’ and ‘No Time To Die,’ Malhotra says, “No Time to Die was sort of just finishing when the pandemic hit. Bond had its own complexities just by the virtue of its scale and quality because the promise of a James Bond movie is that it’s got to look absolutely real. When you go and watch a Bond movie, you expect that all of this is filmed and done with meticulous planning, and ensuring everything that has been captured is absolutely seamless. The audience should say, ‘Oh wow, how did they shoot this?’ So, delivering that photoreal and 100 per cent authenticity in the constraints of time, Bond had its unique challenges from that standpoint including delivering a very seamless vision, which is what you see today. You can’t actually differentiate what’s been shot and what’s been done digitally. Fortunately, people were still in their offices at the time so they worked together and it was a little easier.”
Malhotra continued, “By the time Dune came to us, the pandemic had struck and we were in the critical phase of putting the film together globally across all our different offices. But we ended up bringing a very different vision. When you see Bond or any of the other big films, there are always these wow moments when you look at a particular shot or a scene. Whereas in Dune, it’s not necessarily driven to create a wow moment but the whole film is a wow. From the start to the end, it’s the most seamless rendition of a very genuine, consistent vision that is playing out organically. And, to achieve that level of excellence across an entire movie is very different than creating these wow moments. Dune is a new standard in filmmaking because the filmmaker is not trying to say, ‘Look at this scene, it’s so cool.’ You never feel like you’ve been taken out of the movie because everything is so seamlessly integrated.”
So what makes DNEG the go-to choice for mega filmmakers for visual effects and in what ways it is pushing the envelope by doing something different with every project? Malhotra says, “We have got more creative artistes all over the world with a very strong technology structure. At the core, there’s a very strong passion for creativity and flexibility. Despite being a big powerhouse in terms of infrastructure and knowing how to execute complex skilled work, the leadership of the company is driven by the passion of delivering very specific outcomes of filmmakers- whether it’s a small film like Ex Machina which got an Oscar a few years ago, it was a very light budget movie in terms of visual effects, or when we are doing Dune or No Time to Die, we are able to adapt ourselves very specifically in the framework of what filmmaker is expecting.”
