While Elizabeth Olsen is best known for her work in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as the Scarlet Witch, she has been an important part of Hollywood long before that. With her specialty lying in indie films, she has been a part of some very critically acclaimed films over the years, establishing herself as not only successful but also talented.
Naturally, acting as a profession is not easy, and one must go through various challenges when filming a movie. During an interview, the actress was asked what the most difficult part of filming 2014’s Godzilla was. It would seem that she only had two main obstacles that became a cause for concern for Olsen.
Did Elizabeth Olsen’s Past Make It Difficult for Her to Star In Godzilla?
Around the release of Godzilla, Elizabeth Olsen gave an interview with ScreenRant, where she went into great detail about the film. She was specially asked if her past in indie films made it difficult for her to star in a big-budget film. When it comes to indie movies, they famously have lesser budgets, which makes them a lot more restrictive.
Actors are rarely allowed to do more than three takes, and have to be in character and ready as soon as the camera is on. However, films with bigger budgets do not have this problem and can do as many takes of the same scene as they want. Olsen was asked if this aspect made working on the 2014 film difficult or new for how.
Actually, we didn’t do so many takes. I think we did, you know, you have the luxury of time to do lots of angles. But, I don’t know, Gareth comes from the same kind of background understanding as I do, so I actually never felt that odd or out of place.
While many would assume that she would agree, she mentioned that since the director, Gareth Edwards, also came from the same background as her, there wasn’t much difference. At the same time, she voiced the things that actually became challenging for her when she was working on the movie.
I think my two biggest challenges: one was working with a kid.
The actress mentioned that there were two main challenges, the first of which was acting with a child actor. Children are naturally more difficult to work with on movie sets, so it is not surprising that Olsen found it to be somewhat challenging. However, the second obstacle is quite ironic for the actress.
Visual Effects Are Not Easy to Work With
Elizabeth Olsen then went on to reveal the second challenge that she found when she was working on Godzilla. Since the movie followed a fictitious monster, a majority of its biggest scenes were full of visual effects. When one is working with so much CGI, it can often be complicated to act with that, and Olsen was no different in this.
And then the other was the technical aspects of when your working with special effects—the timing and the camera movement, but finding the freedom in that. So I think those were the two things I learned on the job.
The actress mentioned that figuring out the camera movement and the timing of what she was supposed to be doing was quite difficult for her since most of the scene was fake and covered in green screens. She had to learn how to turn it from a weakness into a strength and understand how to find freedom in the camera movements.
This is quite ironic considering how a year after the release of Godzilla, Olsen went on to join the Marvel Universe and play a character who is magical, can move things with her mind, and is in love with a robot.
Godzilla is available for streaming on Max.
