How ‘VisionQuest’ Set Paul Bettany Ablaze And Got James Spader To Say “LMAO” — The Process

Of all the things showrunner Terry Matalas asked James Spader to say as Ultron on VisionQuest, there was one he figured the prestige actor might skip. It was four letters long and tucked in an email to the vengeful mercenary Paladin (Todd Stashwick). “Hearing James Spader say ‘LMAO’ is the thing I’m most proud of,” Matalas explains on Deadline’s The Process. “Then [VFX] added the emoji, it was even better.”

Getting Spader and Stashwick to read their characters’ emails aloud was part of a pitch Matalas made to Marvel early on. He wanted to stage an episode as a black box play, which served as a cost-effective measure for the VFX budget and showcased the two actors playing against each other in a dynamic way.

As for how the footage looked when it first came in? “It was a little High School Musical,” VFX supervisor John Haley says jokingly. In post, the team gave the exchange the black-and-white look of an old CRT monitor, keeping the AIs and their emails in color. Scan lines helped sell the idea that viewers were watching surveillance footage. “But you can fix it in post, gang,” Matalas adds with a laugh.

For a man on fire, Paul Bettany had a curious thing following him around the set of VisionQuest — a battery on a skateboard. The actor was pulling double duty as Vision and Jim Hammond, the Synthetic Man, in a scene where the two come face-to-face. Playing opposite himself was part of the appeal, at least as far as Matalas was concerned. “I always knew there was no one better to play [the origin character] than Paul Bettany, mostly because I needed Paul to play against his favorite actor, Paul Bettany,” he says.

Filming at England’s historic Hatfield House presented an interesting series of challenges when trying to depict the flames the Synthetic Man engulfs himself in. During the encounter, which takes place deep in Vision’s source code, which he discovers is also inside Hammond, Bettany had to appear fully aflame in a room hung with centuries-old paintings. Haley asked the lighting department to rig the Synthetic Man costume with LEDs. That battery trailing Bettany powered the lights, so even before the artists added a single digital flame, the glow on the walls followed him wherever he went. “[We needed] all of that interactive light spilling from them because they’re the light source within the room,” Haley says.

Then there’s the matter of VFX complexity in Vision’s fight with Jocasta (T’Nia Miller) during the gala scene in episode 4. As various screens, broken lights and other visual displays flickered and were destroyed, Matalas and Haley had to ensure authenticity didn’t get lost in the fray.

“It just had to look great, or you would lose the audience forever,” Matalas says, explaining his worry about how the gala lights would reflect off Jocasta’s body, only to find that the theatrical lighting gave her precisely the sheen the scene needed. At Pinewood, the team captured the performers’ movements and used head-mounted cameras to record their expressions. For the artists at Industrial Light & Magic, one reference came straight from the comics. An image showing Jocasta’s face split between human and synthetic gave the team a way to picture her caught between forms as she glitches during the fight. “It was great; they brought in all sorts of bits of robotic arms and these industrial robots,” Haley says.

To learn more about how Matalas and Haley brought VisionQuest to life, check out the video above.