Interview that originally appeared in the online entertainment blog 30 Ninjas

Do the Robot! The Man Behind the Surrogates' Funky Movement
posted 09-23-09 by craigmacnee

Lorin Eric Salm studied under the world-renowned master of mime Marcel Marceau at his Ecole Internationale de
Mimodrame de Paris. So what in the name of a white-face clown stuck in a cube was he doing working on Bruce
Willis's dystopian action flick, Surrogates?

Surrogates Are Not Created Equal: Some Got The Moves, Some Don't

30 NINJAS: With regards to Surrogates, what was your role?

LORIN ERIC SALM: The first thing was to work with the director Jonathan Mostow to really define the way that the
Surrogates were going to move to fit his vision of the film. He wanted them to have a certain look. And because
there are so many actors in the film that have to do this movement, we had to find a way that we could
communicate this to everyone, from the principal performers to the background performers. But also it was a
matter of finding a way they could move that would give you a certain feeling about the fact that they are not
quite human in spite of the fact that they look very human. But also in the film there are different kinds of
Surrogates. And some of them are more sophisticated than others. So the ones that are less sophisticated move
more mechanically than the ones that aren't. And there were certain actors that had to play some of these less
sophisticated surrogates. So more coaching was involved in showing them how to accomplish the movement that
was appropriate for their type of Surrogate.

30 NINJAS: And the ones that were sophisticated and close to humanlike, what were the subtle touches that
made them appear slightly nonhuman?

LORIN ERIC SALM: Well, it's a little hard to explain in words. There is a certain way of holding the body and
altering movements just a little bit so that they look mostly natural but they have sort of a heightened quality to
them. They look ... I wanna say larger than life. There is just something slightly unnatural about it that makes it
look just a little bit more refined than normal human movement. And that was the basic thing we applied to all of
the Surrogates.

Coaching Cartoons To Move

30 NINJAS: You also do quite a lot of work with animation. Can you explain what you do exactly on animated
films?

LES: Well, they have voice actors to provide the voices for the characters, and then the animators are
responsible tor everything the character does physically. Everything the character expresses about their
personality, and what they are thinking and what they are feeling is the responsibility of the animator. So in a
sense that's mime. The animator has to know how to communicate those things with the body of the character.
So I use certain concepts from mime and I do workshops with the animators where I actually get them on their
feet and teach them these skills about how characters express [themselves] physically, and they actually try it
out with their own bodies so then they can translate that into their animation. And that's something I've done with
Disney, DreamWorks, and Sony Image Works.

Mime Control: The Future of Film

30 NINJAS: With the coming release of James Cameron's movie Avatar, I'd be interested to know what you
thought of 3-D movies, and whether you think there is going to be more of this kind of coaching work needed
because you are portraying things in three dimensions?

LES: I think that depends on what they choose to portray rather than the technology itself. There are certain
ways of moving that would take advantage more of the 3-D aspect. Because there is actually a mime technique
that uses the body in very three dimensional ways, in fact, but exactly how you would use that on screen would
depend on what exactly they are trying to achieve, what they want to portray. But I think between 3-D becoming
more popular, increased use of motion capture, and all of these other technologies I think mime and the kind of
movement that I teach will become more and more useful.

30 NINJAS: I have read lots of interviews with lots of actors, and one of the first ways they often get into a role is
deciding how the character walks, and it's fascinating to think how much that can convey of the inner character
as well.

LES: Absolutely, because everyone has a particular way that they move — everything from walking to every
other kind of movement they do — that's an expression of that person's own personality and their psychology,
their history, and when you play a role your character has their own history and their own psychology and there
is no reason to think that that character would move exactly the same way that the actor portraying the character
would move. So yeah, it is a good place to start.