10 Recent Movie Effects You Thought Were CGI (But Weren't)
3. The Recurring Man On Fire - Free Guy
With its $125 million budget and fantastical setting inside of a video game, Free Guy of course makes no attempt at all to hide how pervasively it uses CGI effects. Given the digital nature of its world, it's entirely appropriate.
Almost every shot of the movie contains some sort of VFX element, and during the more chaotic moments inside Free City, it's fair to assume that a lot of the NPCs in the background were simply added to the scene in post-production.
But there's one background character who appears throughout the film in numerous scenes, and rather than simply create him in post, an actual human being was present on set to do it all for real.
We're talking about the flaming man who can be seen fleetingly in many scenes, always on fire. Director Shawn Levy confirmed that the part was performed in-camera every time by a stuntman:
"An NPC was on fire the whole movie... The whole movie he's just running around on fire. We decided early on - like a lot of the effects - we wanted to do it for real. We have this man on fire who just runs through the background of frames half a dozen times in the movie... That guy has to be lit on fire to the second. Put out within a certain number of seconds, or it gets very dangerous... But there's something so fun about seeing real people do real things."
No lies detected, Mr. Levy.