Post-apocalyptic action thriller Elevation sees Captain America: Brave New World's Anthony Mackie play a single father forced to leave his mountain home and face off against monstrous creatures to save his son's life.
Most of the film's special effects are practical, but not all are high-tech or impressive.
"We can't talk about the tentacle thing," he laughs. "Let's just move on from the tentacle thing. For all intents and purposes, it looked like an alien's private part coming in, and at the very end of it, there was a piece that would poke toward your face."
"To get the reaction you had to get from us, we had to have something in our faces, and it became a whole thing trying to figure out what it was, and it so didn't look stupid," adds co-star Morena Baccarin. "At the end of the day, it was absolutely ridiculous, and a lot of special effects were done to make it look great. When we were shooting it, the three of us were on a stage in a makeshift mine, and a guy was poking us in the face, and we're trying not to laugh."
"George Nolfi, the director, was like, 'I will make you do it over and over again until we get it right,' and then we realized, 'Oh, that's not funny anymore.'"
Mackie continues, "He was so pissed at this alien penis that he took all the fun out of it. We were dying laughing, and he was like, 'What? Why do I have an alien penis in my movie?'"
In fact, the pair estimate that around 80 percent of the film's effects were practical. Elevation, which lands in theaters on Friday, November 8, 2024, was predominantly filmed in Boulder and Copper Mountain in Colorado, but some of it had to be shot on soundstages.
"We got there early to acclimate to the elevation. We did some training for that, and most of the film is about us huffing up a mountain for real. That really put us in the spot. The stuff in the mines? We were in a working teaching mine that was a mile underground," recalls Deadpool & Wolverine's Baccarin. "The stage work we did was mostly for safety reasons. The practical aspects of the stunt on the ski lift, and some of the close-up shots in the mine where you can't move walls to be able to get the shots you need like close-ups, but otherwise, it was very practical."
In terms of inspiration, Mackie turned to art, specifically the work of Romare Bearden, rather than films to find what he was looking for. "I feel like the way this movie was set up and the way George pitched it to me was it being almost a collage in effect, even the three-dimensional scope of color tones and the way he shot it and the patterns in which he shot it," the actor explains. "I thought they were we're going to be beautiful. When he talked about the chairlift sequence, I knew he would do something different, with different levels from beginning to end of that sequence." "Because of that, Romare Bearden was always in the was in the back of my mind. The look of it, the candor, the ability to have two or three people having reasons not to like each other, but at the same time, go past that for the overall good, appealed to me."
Elevation isn't the first time that Mackie and Nolfi have worked together. They met on the set of The Adjustment Bureau, which the filmmaker directed. The 2011 thriller starring Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, and Mackie was the first time they collaborated.
"On the set of that movie, we started talking about The Banker, and then on the set of The Banker, we started talking about this," the actor explains. "It was an idea. George just pitched it out there and left it. He was like, 'If you have a window, I don't know if I'm going to do it, but if it happens, you might get a call.' Six months later, I got a script, and we worked on the script for a few months, and it all came together. I feel like you get to a point in your career and age where you just want to be around people you like."
"I've known Morena for 20-some-odd years, so when we call Morena, I was like, 'No way she's going to do this movie.' He was like, 'Well, let's just throw it out there and see what happens,' but, 'I'm like, I know her.' He said, 'Well, text her,' but I didn't have her number. I told him to text her, put my name at the top, and say, 'Anthony Mackie says hello and to do this movie.' Sure enough, she was crazy enough to come and run up mountains with me in Colorado, so it was just the thing of putting together people that you liked."
"I had purely selfish reasons for doing this, which was that you don't often see female characters like Nina or Katie, Maddie Hasson's character, in a film like this," Baccarin adds. "Usually in post-apocalyptic films, the main female character is a sexy scientist, if she's a scientist at all, but I get to be drunk and irreverent and smart, but not together, and I love that."
Mackie continues, "All of our characters had selfish reasons for what we were doing, but in the end, it came together that we were all doing it for the same reason. My character was doing it for my son, but in the end, I realized I needed to support Morena's character and her wish, which saves me, so it's a really complex and grounded story. It's the apocalypse nicely done."
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Elevation, which is exclusively in theaters and not available to stream, does a lot of world-building and leaves the door open for other stories to be told. Would the Marvel stars, no stranger to such a thing, be down for that?
"That was always the conversation and the idea of building on the brand of the project. Hopefully, we'll be shooting one in the Bahamas," Mackie laughs. "I don't know. I feel like aliens go to islands, right? Aliens like jerk chicken."
Baccarin concludes with a smile, "I'm so down for that."