How They Made the Movie References Pop in ‘Ready Player One’

The dream of the ‘80s (and also the ‘90s) is alive in “Ready Player One.”

Steven Spielberg’s game-ified look at the future spends a lot of visual moments in the pop culture past. The film, based on Ernest Cline’s novel, is set in a dystopian 2045. Wade Watts (who goes by the avatar Parzival) and his friends pass the time plugged into the Oasis, the virtual reality universe where the Hotel Overlook from “The Shining” and the Iron Giant exist side by side. Spielberg relied on a frequent visual effects partner, Industrial Light & Magic, to help bring the Oasis to life.

Video game references make up a big part of that world, but movie references also give fans plenty to parse, whether it’s the DeLorean from “Back to the Future,” the monster from “Alien” or the evil doll in “Chucky.”

“The asset list on this film was daunting, insanely long and super complicated,” the visual effects supervisor Grady Cofer said, referring to the list of effects needed. “But for pop culture fans, it was this dream come true. And from the very beginning, what started happening was, artists would request to work on things. Someone would say, ‘I would love to model the Iron Giant,’ or ‘I love “Gremlins"’ or whatever.” Cofer realized the production would be fueled by passion.

Here is a look at some key moments and figures that appear in the film, with Cofer explaining how ILM made them work.

The creator of the Oasis, James Halliday (Mark Rylance), has embedded a series of challenges in it that will give the winner control of that universe. The first involves a giant race through the streets of Manhattan.

The production designer Adam Stockhausen (who won an Oscar for his work on “The Grand Budapest Hotel”) had a large folder of images of New York City. But instead of archival views of the city itself, they were shots from well-known films like “The French Connection,” “Taxi Driver” and “Wall Street,” which pictured New York in a heightened, cinematic way.

“So we set out to create this idealized Manhattan, the one that we know and love through movies,” Cofer said. King Kong appears as an obstacle in the race, and rather than pattern him after more recent film versions of the giant ape, the team decided to emulate the 1933 stop-motion puppet from the classic RKO film, using the latest digital technology.

“All of the hairs on his body are hand-groomed, hand-placed,” Cofer said about his artists’ work on the creature. “In a way, it’s similar to the way the original puppet was made.”

Racers also come across a stomping T. rex in the middle of Chinatown. Cofer said that Spielberg was hesitant to include major references to his own films, but this was an exception.

As it happened, ILM worked on the 1993 “Jurassic Park,” where that T. rex romped. So the “Ready Player One” team scanned the original dinosaur model their colleagues created back then and used that as their base.

The figure from Brad Bird’s 1999 beloved animated tale appears first as a project being assembled in a workshop by Parzival’s best friend, Aech. Later, we see the giant more fully operational. The visual effects team got surprisingly detailed as it discussed how to take the 2-D robot into a more tactile, digital space.

“We had to figure out the material qualities of his iron plating,” Cofer said. “We also had a conversations about whether or not he, as a mechanical creature, should leak oil. The answer was yes.”

Since you can see inside this Iron Giant, they referenced old factory mechanics like gears and flywheels as they hashed out his interiors. Even when he is powered up for the final battle he’s still under construction. So the artists put written labels on him and added fresh weld lines along his seams to convey a sense of a work in progress.

In a particularly meta sequence, Parzival and his friends find themselves inside scenes from “The Shining,” Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1980 horror film. But Aech hasn’t seen the movie and keeps inadvertently heading into some of the scariest moments: the twin girls, that pesky elevator.

The use of “The Shining” was an addition specifically for the film, and Cofer said that it was Spielberg’s idea to use the scene (though the director preferred not to comment about its creation).

For this sequence, Cofer’s team scanned footage from the original, covering many different scenes.

“Then we started recreating every detail of it bit by bit in the computer,” he said. “We even simulated the film grain so you felt like these virtual characters were actually inside of a movie print.”

There are also real elements fused with virtual ones. For instance, they recreated the hallway digitally, but they actually cast look-alikes for the twins and shot them on a partial set. “When they said the line, ‘Come play with us,’ they could say it in absolute unison and it was chilling,” Cofer said.

During one of the climactic battle scenes, the evil doll Chucky from “Child’s Play” becomes a weapon used by Parzival. The idea of using Chucky came up spontaneously during the motion-capture shoot of the scene. The production designer had on set a “pop culture bible,” in which he had collected pages of iconic ‘80s characters. What incarnation this weapon would take hadn’t been decided. Spielberg flipped through the book, saw an image of Chucky and decided to go with it. The scene was shot using a ball as a stand-in for Chucky, then in postproduction the effects team recreated the killer doll based on the 1988 film in which he first appears. They made models for each of his expressions.

“We even created specific movie lighting that would maximize his evil menace,” Cofer said. “And it traveled with him. Chucky carries this scary movie lighting everywhere he goes.”