Paul is the next collaboration between Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, and the director of the film Greg Mottola, has been talking about the main character and the challenges he faces in bringing the film to life.

The biggest challenge appears to be in the requirements for CGI, and the problem that the main character just doesn't exist.

Talking about the film he said that:

“That movie is a far more technically challenging movie than Adventureland was because one of the main characters is a fully non-existent creature...He’s basically an alien who may be, let’s say, 70% CGI and the big challenge is that he needs to be a very funny, comedic method actor...He just doesn’t exist”

Paul is the story of two comic book writers who head on a trek across America to a West coast comic book convention and Area 51 and have an encounter with a rather strange creature called Paul, a creature who doesn't actually exist. Sounds very strange but is it really that much of a challenge.

Greg Mottola's comments come from the Sundance audiocast through Total Film go on to reveal that the CGI element might be posing a problem for them.

“It’s not the kind of CGI character where we people to say ‘Oh wow, look what they did, that’s so cool’ it’s actually the kind of CGI character where we want people to just treat like another actor in the film, and he should be fully believable and multi-faceted and has to give a great performance, he just doesn’t exist.”

Now that sounds much harder than the opening statement, to make it utterly believable to the audience is really going to stretch the capabilities of the effects team, as well as the imagination of the audience, for the audience can be fierce when it comes to believable effects. However, is it so hard to achieve these days? Perhaps not if you've got a blockbuster budget.

Right not Mottola says that they are working on making that character believable and are developing tests at the moment, that indeed does sound like it's becoming more of a challenge than they first thought.