Robert Rodriguez’s Alita: Battle Angel is sure to be a technical marvel, blending motion-capture performance with live action to create an immersive, detailed world set 300 years in the future. Based on the beloved cyberpunk manga Battle Angel Alita by Yukito Kishiro, the story follows Alita (Rosa Salazar), a female cyborg who awakens with no memory in a post-apocalyptic world. She’s discovered by Dr. Ido (Christoph Waltz), who gives her a new body and helps uncover her extraordinary past. 20th Century Fox sent Nerdist’s Hector Navarro to Wellington, New Zealand to visit the set of Alita: Battle Angel, where he went behind the scenes with Weta Digital to find out how the film will honor the original manga while also crafting an exciting new story.
Once there, Hector interviewed the cast, crew, and Robert Rodriguez himself, and even got to don a motion capture suit to create his own killer cyborg. Check it out in the video above!
After getting some context about the film from producer Jon Landau and stars Salazar and Waltz, Hector suited up in performance capture gear, where he acted out a scene just like an actor in a big-budget film would. To make things even more in-the-moment, Rodriguez was on set with his guitar, scoring the scene live. Talk about immersive!
Time will tell if Alita: Battle Angel is able to fill the shoes of the beloved manga, but we can’t deny how much care and fun is being put into the production. We’ll know soon, when Alita: Battle Angel arrives in theaters on February 14, 2019.
Images: 20th Century Fox
