10 Movies That Put INSANE Effort Into Tiny Details
2. Using A Hand-Painted Background For One Scene - Tenet
Even accepting Christopher Nolan's commitment to doing things the hard, practical way, this story about an early scene in Tenet is absolutely wild. You'd never know it from watching, but in the scene where the Protagonist (John David Washington) meets up with scientist Barbara (Clémence Poésy), the corridor behind the pair is actually a painting.
A behind-the-scenes featurette reveals that, for whatever reason, the decision was made to blend the practical set with a painting to give the illusion that the corridor extends much further back than it actually does.
A painter was flown in from England to create the photorealistic painting, and even more impressively, they did the whole thing freehand. The end result is absolutely mind-boggling, perfectly blending in with the actual set, though likely aided somewhat by the scene's relatively shallow depth-of-field.
Though the overwhelming majority of filmmakers today would use a green screen to extend a set, Nolan instead opted for a more old-school in-camera trick that's impressively invisible - if arguably a ludicrous amount of effort for something nobody's paying attention to anyway.