Zathura (film) - Production

Production

Director Jon Favreau preferred to use practical effects instead of CGI in the film. "...it's so fun to actually shoot real spaceships or have a real robot running around on the set, or real Zorgons built by Stan Winston. It gives the actors, especially young actors, so much to work off of," he said. Dax Shepard, who plays the astronaut in the film, said that he would not have been interested in doing the film if the effects had been "CGI based". Actress Kristen Stewart enjoyed the on-set effects, saying that, "When we harpooned walls and ripped them out, we were really doing it. When there was a fire on set, there was really fire," and that, "The only green screen I was ever involved with was for getting sucked out into the black hole." Miniature models were used to create the spaceships, and Favreau enjoyed going back to techniques used in many earlier films such as the original Star Wars trilogy. However, in some shots the Zorgon ships were computer-generated, and digital effects were used in many other shots, such as to create meteors and planets, to add computer-generated legs and arms to the robot suit built by Stan Winston Studios, to digitally augment the Zorgon suits (which were constructed so that the head came out of the front of the suit where the actor's chest was and the actor wore a blue screen hood over his own head), and to create an entirely computer-generated Zorgon for one shot. According to Pete Travers, Visual Effects Supervisor on the film for Sony Pictures Imageworks, retaining the stylized "1950s sci-fi look" from Van Allsburg's book "was a very important aspect of the effects".

Favreau discouraged the notion that the film is a sequel to the earlier Jumanji, having not particularly liked that film. Both he and author Chris Van Allsburg (who also wrote the book of the same name upon which Jumanji is based) stated that Zathura is very different from Jumanji.

The soundtrack to the film is an original score by John Debney and is available on CD.