Gran Turismo movie's David Harbour says filming with real cars and not green screens "heightened his performance"
"There's stakes to that. There's weight to that. There's risk."
Gran Turismo movie star David Harbour has revealed that by filming "real" racing sequences rather than relying on "green screen boxes" in the upcoming movie has enhanced his performance.
Talking to Sky News, Harbour – who plays Jack Salter in the movie – said that whilst it may be tempting and "cynical" to believe that most viewers wouldn't know the difference between CGI and real racing scenes, by having real cars racing at 150mph, it "heightened his performance because the stakes are real".
"This movie could've shot in green screen boxes – we could have done all this stuff – but there was something about putting together this team of people who are able to organise all these cars going at the same moment, stopping at the same moment, warming up the tires, all the technical elements," Harbour said, as transcribed by Eurogamer. "It feels like, as an actor, you're part of this big production.
"I now know what Tom Cruise is talking about in those Maverick interviews when he talks about it having to be real," Harbour added. "You know, there's a cynical piece of me when I would watch those things, and I'd go like, 'God, it could be a green screen, and we wouldn't know the difference'. But there's something about as a performer being in [real scenes] that just heightens your performance because the stakes are real.
"I mean, there are cars going by you at 150mph. There's stakes to that. There's weight to that. There's risk."
Sony's live-action Gran Turismo movie was announced in spring last year, as part of a string of reveals for upcoming PlayStation game adaptations, with others including a Horizon Zero Dawn series for Netflix and a God of War show for Amazon. Gran Turismo is out in UK cinemas from 11th August.
An update to Gran Turismo 7 will soon add in the Nissan GT-R Nismo GT3 '18 car as seen in the forthcoming Gran Turismo film.
