Doctor Strange Director Talks Dormammu’s Look

For any comic book film, the biggest challenge is to accurately, or somewhat accurately, depict the characters from the comic pages and put them on the big screen. Now, whether it be Marvel or DC Comics, there is creative license to where they can alter a look to suit the film better. This was the case with Doctor Strange, who showed off the legendary villain Dormammu in a very different way than he’s presented in Marvel Comics. Visual effects supervisor Stephane Ceretti talked to IGN about this, and the decision to go away from what was established:

“We didn’t want to do that because it had been done before. The whole idea is he’s a character that lives in-between dimensions. He can also take whatever shapes he wants to take. But in order to talk to Strange at the end of the film, he’s taking that shape [and] you can feel all these ripples in his face and all that stuff… these kind of opening windows to other dimensions, and all the reflective qualities of it. We really wanted to add the evocation of that fire, but we didn’t want to do fire so we went for [a] multicolored approach to try and keep the psychedelic [look] of the entire space. [That] was pretty difficult because when you start putting too many colors together it becomes very, very muddy and kind of painterly very fast. We had to find the right balance of colors within the lighting of Benedict when he was on our stage and trying to find the best way to kind of make it all work together, which is actually not very easy.”

Marve’s Doctor Strange is out now in theaters.