“Roland is a director who has a big vision,” says Weighart. “And even though Anonymous is a smaller drama than, say, 2012 he wanted that vision and he wanted Elizabethan England to look and feel authentic.
“And that meant that we had to create our own London Bridge, hundreds of churches, thousands of houses and so we decided to build those in the computer. One of the reasons is that the locations that we wanted simply don’t exist anymore.”
Emmerich and his team pioneered the technique on 2012 and it paid off handsomely with Anonymous. “With 2012 we shot plates all over the world and then used them as the basis for our CGI and I thought that this was the way to do it with Anonymous,” says the director.