Filming
Principal photography began at Longcross Studios, England, in January 2010 and ended in Kanab, Utah, in July. Other locations in Utah included Lake Powell and Grand, Wayne, and Kane counties. Cinematographer Dan Mindel believed that the entire movie should have been shot in the Four Corners region of the southwestern U.S., the only place on Earth he felt could convincingly pass for Mars. "A lot of the studio work that we had done was so compromised because of the choice of studio, the size of the stages, the fact that it was all inside when it should have been outside, all that kind of stuff".
Mindel had taken the job in order to learn how to make a movie with many effects shots. He worked with more restraint than he had been used to. Normally he kept the camera rolling even after the director said "Cut!", a lesson he learned from Jackie Chan while making Shanghai Noon. However, for John Carter, Stanton had planned the shots in such great detail before filming began as to leave little room for improvisation.
Stanton went for a look for the movie's costuming different from what had been planned by Rodriguez and Frazetta when they were attached to the project several years earlier. Stanton felt that Frazetta's look was "very sexist and it's very male, fanboy dominated". While conceding the sex appeal at the heart of the characters, he believed they still had to seem realistic. "I want anything, whether it's a fish or a robot or a toy or a human being, I want them to be seen as dimensional as possible and be seen as somebody with thoughts and opinions and surprise in how they may react to something, and contradictions".
Throughout production there had been arguments from some of Stanton's friends in Pixar's Braintrust that it would be better for the movie to begin with Carter finding himself on Mars than through the narrative device of having Burroughs, supposedly his nephew, find his late uncle's written account of his time there following his death and then flashing back to it. Stanton in response considered that "lazy". He told them "If I do that, then thirty minutes in I'm going to have to stop the film to explain the war, and Dejah, and who everyone is, and we're going to have even bigger problems". They compromised by beginning the movie with the battle on Mars, and then the Zondangans getting the nanofoam gun from the Therns. That shift necessitated 18 new scenes, for which Disney agreed to a reshoot.
The film was shot in the Panavision anamorphic format on Kodak 35 mm film stock. "I try very hard to persuade whomever I'm working with to allow me to shoot on film, and to shoot anamorphically," Mindel told ICG, the magazine of the International Cinematographers Guild. "It's the most pure, high-definition way of capturing a scene, short of Showscan or IMAX".
But Mindel also liked the flaws in that process. Older Panavision lenses have imperfections and aberrations, and "At a purely organic level, the light does unmanageable things when it hits an aberration", he said. "An unquantifiable magic happens, and I love that!" That unpredictability, and the effect on the film's texture and grain, gave Mindel images he hoped would "[feel] inherently realistic in spite of the fantastical creatures and the extensive digital-visual-effects technology behind them". For John Carter he used Panavision's Primo and C-Series anamorphic lenses and ATZ and AWZ zoom lenses, with Kodak's Vision3 500T Color Negative 5219 and 200T 5213 stock.
Shooting with a 3D release in mind was considered but dropped over a year before principal photography. The camera crew and effects specialists viewed Disney's Alice in Wonderland, where space on the set was planned with the 3D release in mind. They realized that the processes used for that film would be outdated before they could expect that they would start John Carter, so there was no point in planning for 3D; Stanton also believed that would be too much to deal with while shooting in any event. Mindel said that was "a huge relief".
Work on the visual effects had begun earlier, in 2009, before the release of Avatar, which revolutionized the field. The effects team doing proof-of-process tests realized when that movie came out that John Carter would require extensive use of all the techniques that Avatar had pioneered, and would go where that film had not with many more interactions between human actors and CGI characters. Peter Chiang, the film's visual effects supervisor at Double Negative in London, wrote a production bible for the latter that described how each character should be composed and framed. Bruce McCleery, the second unit's director of photography, said that bible was especially useful for scenes blending humans and CGI characters. "Working that out was much more complex than it sounds".
Shooting the airship battle on a London soundstage required extensive preproduction work. Mindel and the lighting crew started work designing the lighting rig for that scene long before shooting started. They shared their work with the effects teams, which used Lidar to map it, as it did for every set. The sets housed the full 110-foot (34 m) airship models, mounted on gimbals with green screen on all sides. Ultimately, to stage an aerial battle with light-based weapons where the ships maneuver to block the sunlight that powers their opponents' craft, the lighting crew used 120 Spacelights, 15 Dino light banks, flashing lights and a crane mounted with soft lights and green screens that could fill in ambient light from the film's sky.
Once production moved to the Utah desert, the weather added its own challenges. Heavy winds brought frequent sandstorms, forcing many on location to work while wearing goggles and sometimes burnooses. Mindel wanted the film to take advantage of these conditions as much as possible, although he had to tone it down slightly so the effects teams could do their job. "All the uncontrollable natural phenomena did give the film a visceral, unpredictable quality, and contributed to its unique, idiosyncratic texture," McCleery said.
Before the formal reshoot, which took place throughout September in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Playa Vista, Stanton told The New Yorker he had done some smaller-scale reshooting focusing on additional dialogue for some characters in order to address the issues the preview had raised. In London, he shot scenes where West, as Sab Than, clarified the Therns' goals. Back in Los Angeles, Kitsch and Collins filmed Carter's proposal scene. Then Stanton went back to London to film Strong's side of the conversation with Sab Than. Stanton denied assertions that he had gone over budget and stated that he had been allowed a longer reshoot because he had stayed on budget and on time.
Stanton reshot much of the movie twice, far more than was common in live action filmmaking at that time. He attributed that to his animation background. "The thing I had to explain to Disney was, 'You're asking a guy who's only known how to do it this way to suddenly do it with one reshoot.'" he explained later. "I said, 'I'm not gonna get it right the first time, I'll tell you that right now.'" Stanton often sought advice from people he had worked with at Pixar on animated films (known as the Braintrust) instead of those with live-action experience working with him.
Stanton also was quoted as saying, "Is it just me, or do we actually know how to do this better than live-action crews do?" Rich Ross, Disney's chairman, successor to Dick Cook, who had originally approved the film for production, came from a television background and had no experience with feature films. The studio's new top marketing and production executives had little more.
The New Yorker writer Tad Friend visited the set during the reshoot and wrote an article about it, noting that it was "unusually extensive (and expensive)". Collins and Kitsch both made comments on the record about the reshoot that seemed defensive; Stanton told Friend not only that if it had been up to him he would have insisted on a second reshoot but that reshoots should be "mandatory". It has subsequently been suggested that this article began the media narrative that John Carter was in serious trouble, as conventional Hollywood wisdom held that any reshoot was an indicator of a troubled production.
Collins believes that the reshoot was detrimental for her character. Originally filmed as a strong, independent warrior, the scenes added, such as those with her father, made her seem more vulnerable; and scenes like those in which she had slapped Carter were cut. She believes the studio wanted a softer take on Thoris and was reduced to asking Stanton every day what would work with that and just doing it.
After the reshoot, considerable work remained in post-production on Stanton's first cut, reportedly almost three hours long. There were many effects and CGI shots to finish. Stanton recalls that "[t]here were more animated shots in what was left to do on Carter than an entire animated feature". Animating the Tharks, especially in large numbers during battle scenes, proved particularly challenging; the software had to be upgraded for it, and as one animator recalls, work scenes sometimes took three hours to open. Many of those working on the CGI were particularly appreciative of Stanton, since due to his background he had considerable expertise in the area and made himself more available than directors of such films usually are.
