Vū Las Vegas Studio Shines in Feature Film 'Sympathy for the Devil' Starring Nicolas Cage and Joel Kinnaman

Vū Technologies, North America’s fastest growing network of virtual production studios for the TV commercial, episodic and feature film industry, reveals it played a key role in the production of the upcoming movie 'Sympathy for the Devil', starring Nicolas Cage and Joel Kinnaman.

“This studio is gorgeous. It’s state-of-the-art,” said Cage of the Vū Las Vegas studio.

The film, introduced during this year's Toronto International Film Festival, is a psychological thriller produced by Hammerstone Studios, Signature and Capstone and directed by acclaimed filmmaker Yuval Adler. Allan Ungar produces alongside Capstone’s Mercuri, Stuart Manashil and Signature Films’ Marc Goldberg. Lebovici serves as executive producer alongside David Haring, David Sullivan, Jason Soto, Tim Moore, Courtney Chenn and Waylen Lin.

Approximately half of the film was shot at the Vū Vegas 40,000 square-foot virtual production studio, giving the production team next-generation content rendering capabilities by shooting photo-realistic virtual environments in the LED studio instead of having to travel on location, saving both substantial costs and time.

“We wouldn’t be able to do this film without this amazing LED setup. In this short of time and with this budget,” said the film’s director, Yuval Adler.

Vū’s capabilities allowed for production to capture higher-quality and more dynamic footage at a fraction of the cost compared to traditional, on-location shooting.

Tim Moore, CEO of Vū, and Jason Soto, Vū’s general manager of the Las Vegas studio, are two of the film’s executive producers.

“Typically a feature film shoots an average of three to five pages of script per day when filming on location, however when shooting in Virtual Production, we’ve seen several productions triple that output at Vū. This makes a huge difference for the production timeline and budget,” said Moore. “We were thrilled to host such a talented cast and crew for what will be a very captivating and entertaining film!”

Written by Luke Paradise, “Sympathy for the Devil” follows The Driver, played by Kinnaman, as he finds himself in a high-stakes game of cat and mouse after being forced to drive a mysterious man known as The Passenger, played by Cage. That sets things up for a white-knuckle ride. 

“Coming in here is very turnkey. It gets the actors into a position where they don’t have to worry too much about the environment,” said producer Allan Ungar of the Vū Vegas campus. “They can come into this environment…it feels safe and quiet and they can do what they need to do without interference. It’s been incredible.”

Vū and Hammerstone worked with several key partners in producing “Sympathy for the Devil,” including the Nevada Film Office. Sony’s Venice II was the camera of choice for shooting the film, allowing for a superior image and consistency for blending virtual locations with their physical counterparts, and Aputure lighting was used throughout the film to provide advanced special effects lighting on-location and in-studio.

Vū owns and operates advanced virtual production soundstages utilizing proprietary, patent-pending technologies that empower directors to shoot their talent in photorealistic LED volumes. Vū has rapidly become the largest and quickest growing network of virtual studios in North America, with studios in Tampa, Nashville, Las Vegas and Orlando.

Vū has substantially invested in R&D, integrating camera tracking and real-time rendering applications to create immersive virtual environments for actors to perform in geographically diverse studios in real-time. Vū’s unique tech integrations with Mo-Sys camera tracking, Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, Mark Roberts Motion Control, NVIDIA GPUs and other technology partner systems allow effectively realistic backgrounds to be generated in real-time, rendered from the point of view of the moving camera to achieve a photo realistic background on the LED Display.

In addition to feature film work, Vū has worked with commercial enterprise clients such as Amazon, Mercedes, Apple, The Mill, Disney, ESPN, WWE and many more.