Speaker 1: Weird Being Way Media.
Speaker 2: Welcome to episode one hundred and fifty one of the
Speaker 2: Filmiamentories podcast. This is Me as usual, Jamie Benning here
Speaker 2: sitting in my little office at home with just my
Speaker 2: laptop and my microphone. And in this episode I chat
Speaker 2: with model maker, VFX supervisor and filmmaker Ian Hunter, a
Speaker 2: legend in the industry, about his career that spans some
Speaker 2: of the most technically ambitious and visually inventive films ever made.
Speaker 2: From the flooded reactor tanks of James Cameron's The Abyss
Speaker 2: to the surface of Mars in total recall. Ian grew
Speaker 2: up in Monrovia, California, and his parents would give him
Speaker 2: and his brother's model kits just to get them out
Speaker 2: of their hair, and inavertently launched at least one of
Speaker 2: those kids into a forty year career in Hollywood. We
Speaker 2: hear about stealing his dad's German black velvet to make
Speaker 2: a starfield in the garden shed after seeing Star Wars,
Speaker 2: making Super eight movies in high school, and the genuinely
Speaker 2: draw dropping story of walking into a Wells Fargo bank
Speaker 2: to fake Robert for a school film and coming face
Speaker 2: to face with a relation of another Hollywood legend. Ian
Speaker 2: talks about drifting away from an aerospace path at cow
Speaker 2: poly Pomona and stumbling into the movie business fire a
Speaker 2: classified ad, swapping one job involving plastics, chemicals, and toxic
Speaker 2: fumes for another, Landing on the ABYSS, working under the
Speaker 2: mentorship of the legendary model supervisor Mark Stets and the
Speaker 2: Boss Films, and the long road that would eventually take
Speaker 2: him to some of cinema's most celebrated practical effects sequences.
Speaker 2: It's been a long time coming this interview. I've been
Speaker 2: wanting to talk to Ian for some time now, and
Speaker 2: I'm really glad that we did it. It's such a
Speaker 2: cool guy to speak to. He's got a great attitude,
Speaker 2: he's very articulate. I think you're going to enjoy this one.
Speaker 2: So sit back, make a cup of tea, and here's
Speaker 2: my interview with Ian Hunter, and I'll be back at
Speaker 2: the end for a bit more jabbering on.
Speaker 3: Ian.
Speaker 4: Thanks so much for joining me. It's a pleasure to
Speaker 4: have you here.
Speaker 2: I always like to ask people like where it all
Speaker 2: be a I mean, were you building stuff as a kid,
Speaker 2: and do you remember the first time that you built something?
Speaker 2: And it really kind of clicked for you.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I was very fortunate looking back that I had
Speaker 3: parents who were artists. My father especially was an artist
Speaker 3: who was a trained interior decorator. He was a musician.
Speaker 3: He painted in oils and acrylics, he did pastel portraits.
Speaker 3: And I had two older brothers, and so he always
Speaker 3: encouraged us to do art and gave us things to
Speaker 3: do project wise, and I think at some point, which
Speaker 3: was very formative later on in my career, was we
Speaker 3: were doing art. I have these brothers who I always
Speaker 3: wanted to stick with them to do these hobbies. At
Speaker 3: some point my father gave us all model kits to build,
Speaker 3: and I think that was mainly to get us out
Speaker 3: of his hair. So I took to the model building
Speaker 3: right away at a very young age, and then encouraged
Speaker 3: to do drawing and building our you know stuff on
Speaker 3: her own. We're always you know, told, you know, to
Speaker 3: go out and play and you know, make things. And
Speaker 3: we'd steal my dad's paint STERI sticks and make Roman
Speaker 3: swords and stuff like that. And and then eventually he
Speaker 3: used to paint black velvet paintings, these beautiful black velvet paintings,
Speaker 3: not concase it ors fighting bulls, but usually like the
Speaker 3: head of Christ. That was his favorite thing was Maxiwan
Speaker 3: Seatau dying in Agony and and so so he had
Speaker 3: this expensive black velvet, and my my brother's older brothers
Speaker 3: and I watched Star Wars and one of them said,
Speaker 3: you know, I'm gonna do my own space opera. So
Speaker 3: we built some spaceship models and then we got my
Speaker 3: dad's really expensive German black velvet, hung it in the
Speaker 3: garden shed and punched holes in it and backled it
Speaker 3: to be a starfield. So it was a beautiful starfield,
Speaker 3: but it was useless to do any more painting on.
Speaker 3: But but my father and my mother likes saw that
Speaker 3: we had, you know, potential in terms of being creative kids,
Speaker 3: and sort of forgave us for ruining everything that they
Speaker 3: gave us. But yeah, that was the best thing, was
Speaker 3: to have a set of parents who were understanding and
Speaker 3: encouraging and kind of dropped us on. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I often sort of talk about how I think we're
Speaker 2: kids are all instinctively kind of creative and sometimes destructive,
Speaker 2: but then you learn about creating as well through that,
Speaker 2: I think, But sometimes that's kind of sort of bash
Speaker 2: out of us in school, particularly in secondary school, where
Speaker 2: people start to hone in what your skills are and
Speaker 2: what you need to do to achieve a career, and
Speaker 2: often the arts aren't kind of a popular choice in schools.
Speaker 2: It certainly wasn't the choice in my school particularly. Did
Speaker 2: you find that as you went, as you grew older,
Speaker 2: as you went to high school, that you were able
Speaker 2: to kind of continue these these hobbies and and sort
Speaker 2: of start to form them in your head in a
Speaker 2: way that could be an actual career in the future.
Speaker 3: Well, funny enough, I also had a great interest in
Speaker 3: aerospace aviation, so I always thought, you know, I took
Speaker 3: this sort of more advanced classes when I when I
Speaker 3: was going through it would be elementary school. Here. I
Speaker 3: took some tests and they're like, oh, these are IQ tests,
Speaker 3: aren't they? Like, yes, they are. So I was I
Speaker 3: was sort of pushed into the more advanced classes, and
Speaker 3: I thought I was going to go into aerospace more
Speaker 3: but near the end of that. So it sort of
Speaker 3: makes sense because you know, visual effects, you're doing a
Speaker 3: lot of sort of on the fly engineering and things,
Speaker 3: but aerospace would have been much more formative or restrictive.
Speaker 3: But one thing it did happen, which I thought was
Speaker 3: very funny, is for extra credit in some of these classes,
Speaker 3: we would make Super eight movies. That's how far back
Speaker 3: I'm going on Super eight film. And and so the
Speaker 3: teachers at our school also encouraged us to be creative,
Speaker 3: to like, you know, throw these things in there. So
Speaker 3: it was it was great growing up. I grew up
Speaker 3: in Monrovia, California, and it was great because not only
Speaker 3: were my parents supportive, but once we got to school,
Speaker 3: they were supportive also to let us do these things.
Speaker 3: And one interesting moment was this also affected my later
Speaker 3: desire to get into the movie business. Was we were
Speaker 3: making a movie trying to explain the Fourth Amendment of
Speaker 3: the Constitution of the United States, which is unlawful search
Speaker 3: and seizure. And so we went to We're high school kids,
Speaker 3: you know, pimply faced high school kids, and we went
Speaker 3: to the local Wells Fargo bank in Monrovia, and we
Speaker 3: were going to rob the bank that was part of
Speaker 3: the Super eight movie. And so we show up there
Speaker 3: and I said, you know, guys, we should probably tell
Speaker 3: them that we're just high school students and we're faking
Speaker 3: robbing the bank, not actually robbing the bank. They said,
Speaker 3: do you think that'd be a problem. They said, yeah,
Speaker 3: it could be a problem. They might not take ninely
Speaker 3: to us attempting to rob the bank, even though we're
Speaker 3: simulating it. So we go into the Wells Fargo and
Speaker 3: we go up to the teller and I'm of course
Speaker 3: they push me up because I'm the oldest looking one,
Speaker 3: and they say. I say to her, Hi, we're from
Speaker 3: the high school. We're making a little movie, super eight movie,
Speaker 3: and we're simulating a bank robbery, and so we just
Speaker 3: want to know if we have permission to rob your bank.
Speaker 3: And she gets all very weirded out, nervous and shakingly,
Speaker 3: grabs the phone and calls somebody, and then she says,
Speaker 3: the vice president of the bank's going to come over
Speaker 3: and talk to you. Like okay, So we all walk
Speaker 3: over to her in a big cluster of nervous looking
Speaker 3: kids looking down at the ground, and this woman comes
Speaker 3: up who is super excited. She's an older woman with
Speaker 3: glasses in her hair up and she's super excited. She's like,
Speaker 3: are you from the high school? Yeah, you guys are
Speaker 3: making a movie, like absolutely, yeah, yeah, what do you
Speaker 3: want to do? Well, we want to fake like we're
Speaker 3: robbing the bank. Oh that sounds really fun. Like she's
Speaker 3: enthusiastic about the whole thing. And I said, yeah, do
Speaker 3: you mind? He says, oh, no, I love. I love
Speaker 3: when kids make movies. You know, my son makes movies.
Speaker 3: I said, really, who's your son? And she said, oh,
Speaker 3: my son's Rick Baker. He does make up effects.
Speaker 4: And no way.
Speaker 3: And I was so on the floor. Come on, it
Speaker 3: was a hero of mine. Still A yeah, of course,
Speaker 3: so amazing. Uh, you know, you know, going from mom
Speaker 3: to the teachers. Now even the bank vice president of
Speaker 3: Wells Spargo encourages us to make movies. So that was
Speaker 3: a that was a great moment. We got extra credit
Speaker 3: and everything.
Speaker 4: That is crazy.
Speaker 2: I mean, what are the odds of those of your
Speaker 2: world crashing into.
Speaker 4: I mean, that's just bizarre, isn't it.
Speaker 2: But how wonderful that it all started to link up
Speaker 2: for you at this point. It sounds like you know,
Speaker 2: you've you've been through the kind of Star Wars phage
Speaker 2: and now into you make can your movies and making
Speaker 2: it on Super eight.
Speaker 4: You know, it's such a great way because.
Speaker 2: You've got the camera in your hand, you're responsible for
Speaker 2: the film, you've got to get it developed, so there's
Speaker 2: time to sort of percolate as well while you're waiting
Speaker 2: for it to be developed. Then when you get it back,
Speaker 2: you've got to edit it yourself, if you want to
Speaker 2: do that, or were you just doing it all in camera?
Speaker 3: We were trying to do in camera, but also when
Speaker 3: we came when it came back, of course, for the lasers,
Speaker 3: we had to get in there with magnifying glass and
Speaker 3: a pin and you know, scratch the scratch the image.
Speaker 3: And then we were doing things like we knew that
Speaker 3: if you overamped electric resistors, like if you had like
Speaker 3: a you know, say a twelve old resistor and you
Speaker 3: you end it with house current, it would explode. So
Speaker 3: we would often do our explosions by literally shooting resistors
Speaker 3: exploding and giving us, you know, explosions. I'm black that
Speaker 3: we could can't be it was it was, yeah, we
Speaker 3: were really trying anything we could just to make these
Speaker 3: things better.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that approach of being well, that sort
Speaker 2: of linear destructive approach and that nature of film having
Speaker 2: to you know, scratch it.
Speaker 4: On the film. Oh that scratch wasn't a great scratch.
Speaker 2: Well, we're stuck with it now, and I mean, it's
Speaker 2: it's kind of a great discipline and a great way
Speaker 2: to start.
Speaker 4: But I imagine, I'm sure we'll talk about it later
Speaker 4: when we get there.
Speaker 2: But I imagine in many ways, you do things in
Speaker 2: reverse in the real world. You you sort of designed
Speaker 2: the shot first and then reverse engineer, whereas you know,
Speaker 2: when you're starting out, of course, you just you're just
Speaker 2: using whatever you've got and you're you're sort of making
Speaker 2: it up on the fly. But did did you did
Speaker 2: that connection to to Rick go any further?
Speaker 3: Not until years and years later. I mean we we
Speaker 3: would work on movies that he worked on, but never together.
Speaker 3: My specialty was miniatures and it went off that direction
Speaker 3: and you know business of course creature effects. So yeah,
Speaker 3: well we worked on the same films, but but not
Speaker 3: not directly. The only in fact, the time when it
Speaker 3: finally happened was you know, Rick sort of retired and
Speaker 3: he and he closed down his studio and I still
Speaker 3: had a studio in Silmar, California at the time, so
Speaker 3: we needed a forklift, so went over and bought his forklift.
Speaker 3: So for a while I was using his forklift. That's
Speaker 3: hopefully some magic was coming off of that.
Speaker 4: Did you ever have the opportunity to say you met
Speaker 4: his mum once?
Speaker 3: Oh? Absolutely, I took care to tell them the whole story.
Speaker 3: Something else. I hate going off on a tagent about Rick.
Speaker 3: But years ago this also sort of got me into
Speaker 3: the business. Was or or drove me to be in
Speaker 3: the business. Was There was a moving museum exhibit of
Speaker 3: special effects that was at our local Los Angeles Museum
Speaker 3: of Science and Industry, and it traveled around the country
Speaker 3: and they had different displayed models. They had some stuff
Speaker 3: from Masters of the Universe, and they had the makeups
Speaker 3: from Masters Universe. And the other thing that really impressed
Speaker 3: me was a matte painting from the Birds that Albert
Speaker 3: Whitlock had done, and it was nice, very small. My
Speaker 3: dad had been a painter, so to look at that
Speaker 3: and sort of see what the approach he took. He
Speaker 3: actually painted the it in different focuses, so where the
Speaker 3: where the live action was going to be composited in
Speaker 3: that was in focus, but as you got further back
Speaker 3: it got softer and more out of focus. H and
Speaker 3: just amazing stuff. And so I'm looking at the makeups
Speaker 3: for Masters Universe and they were nice, and I'm not
Speaker 3: you know, I'm not gonna knock them, but but they
Speaker 3: looked like makeups you would find in a in a movie. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And then sort of often a corner in the dark,
Speaker 3: like not really part of the central display was a case,
Speaker 3: and I'm like, what is in there? So I walked
Speaker 3: over the case and it was the back was to
Speaker 3: us as we walked up, and I came around the
Speaker 3: corner and in the case was Rick Baker's head from
Speaker 3: American Werewolf in London. And this didn't look like a makeup.
Speaker 3: This looked like a taxidermied animal. I mean the quality
Speaker 3: that the difference between what had gone into making this
Speaker 3: rubber monster with yak hair or whatever look real and
Speaker 3: look believable and look, you know, even static look frightening.
Speaker 3: Just there's just the the world of difference in terms
Speaker 3: of of of the input of the artist to you know,
Speaker 3: to create this piece. I mean, he get you know,
Speaker 3: used the same techniques, use this same you know methods
Speaker 3: a lot of times you use the same people. But
Speaker 3: the but the quality, the sort of personal input that
Speaker 3: he put exhibited and that well really impressed me. And
Speaker 3: it was the kind of thing that my father, growing
Speaker 3: up again with my brothers. You know, we're all artists.
Speaker 3: You know. He always said that you should be your
Speaker 3: own worst critic. Like other people will tell you how
Speaker 3: bad you are. But if you're harder on yourself, if
Speaker 3: you if you strive to like do better the next
Speaker 3: time than you did the last time, you know, no
Speaker 3: one can get to you because you're always going to
Speaker 3: be judging your own work and trying to to do better.
Speaker 3: And so I I was just so impressed by his
Speaker 3: work and always wanted to sort of like know that
Speaker 3: if I'm going to make the effort, I might as
Speaker 3: well try to put the best effort out and and
Speaker 3: and have something that's gonna, you know, sort of last
Speaker 3: if you will.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, Now that is an amazing sequence
Speaker 2: in that movie. I mean, it sort of still scares
Speaker 2: me to this day. I think I've talked about it
Speaker 2: before on this podcast, but I watched it in circumstances
Speaker 2: where I shouldn't have been watching it as a kid.
Speaker 2: I'd me and my sister had recorded it off the TV.
Speaker 2: My dad was out washing the car, so there was
Speaker 2: like this double scariness, double jeopardy going on.
Speaker 3: But what.
Speaker 2: Was the kind of shift from Okay, so this could
Speaker 2: be a career. Then, and how did you go and
Speaker 2: finally enter the industry.
Speaker 3: Well, so I remember back I wanted to be an
Speaker 3: aerospace guy. So I yeah, actually attended cal poly Pomona,
Speaker 3: which is a technical school in lot in California, and
Speaker 3: was taking aerospace and long and short of it was,
Speaker 3: I ended up dropping out of school. I had financial difficulties,
Speaker 3: I had difficulty getting my core classes, and so it
Speaker 3: was just not really working out. Attended for about a
Speaker 3: year and a half, but it but it wasn't working out.
Speaker 3: And this is the this is the funniest thing, because
Speaker 3: so I never thought I'd actually be able to get
Speaker 3: into the business. But I was working at a place
Speaker 3: where I was making out of plastic acid baths. If
Speaker 3: you imagine, you know, you're doing photochemical etching on circuit boards, okay,
Speaker 3: and that acid has to go into a chemical resistant bath.
Speaker 3: So the tubs that we that they're made from polyethylene plastics.
Speaker 3: So I'm working in plastics, I'm working in chemicals. I'm
Speaker 3: working and like welding all this stuff together, toxic fumes everywhere,
Speaker 3: and I just couldn't stand like working with plastics, chemicals
Speaker 3: and toxic fumes. So I said, I got to get
Speaker 3: out of here. I got to find, you know, a
Speaker 3: way to get out of this job. So I actually
Speaker 3: got a newspaper and there was a small ad in
Speaker 3: the in the classified sections looking for model makers. And
Speaker 3: I had done some model making. I've been monitoring all
Speaker 3: model making all my life. And so I called the
Speaker 3: phone number and they said, oh, yeah, come on down,
Speaker 3: you know, interview We're we're desperately looking for model makers.
Speaker 3: So I quit the acid bath factory that day and
Speaker 3: drove down to get interviewed, and the guy's like, oh,
Speaker 3: you know, what have you done. I showed him my resume,
Speaker 3: which wasn't very impressive, and I showed him some pictures
Speaker 3: of some models I made, and he said, great, you're
Speaker 3: you're you can start tomorrow. So I'm like so excited.
Speaker 3: I was going to work in the movies now building models.
Speaker 3: And of course I traded working with plastics, chemicals and
Speaker 3: toxic fumes to work in a place that has plastics,
Speaker 3: chemicals and toxic fumes. So but it was but it
Speaker 3: was exciting stuff. And so I'm working away and the
Speaker 3: guy next to or this girl next to me, she's
Speaker 3: working and I said you know, I'm a model maker.
Speaker 3: What do you do? And she says, I'm a student
Speaker 3: at cal Arts, which is a local school that trains
Speaker 3: animators and filmmakers. That's nice, you know, not necessarily professional
Speaker 3: momo maker, but at least a student. And then the
Speaker 3: guy next to me has got blonde hair and blue eyes,
Speaker 3: and I said, I'm a model maker. What have you done?
Speaker 3: What have you been as a model maker? And he says,
Speaker 3: I'm Dmitri. I'm a ballet nswer from Russia and I've
Speaker 3: just landed here and they were hiring anyone off the street.
Speaker 3: It turns out, so I was not very special. So
Speaker 3: I sort of like felt crestfallen because I'm like, oh man,
Speaker 3: you know, I'm just anybody. But it was fortunate because
Speaker 3: the movie that I was working on, I was building
Speaker 3: what we call wet for wet models, and it was
Speaker 3: for the movie The Abyss. So yes, my first big
Speaker 3: feature happened to be Jane Scammeron's The Abyss, which is
Speaker 3: like a great movie in my opinion. Yeah, yeah, it's
Speaker 3: a fine film.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it doesn't get much.
Speaker 2: There's not much talk about The Abyss these days from
Speaker 2: maybe from a sort of visual effects perspective in as
Speaker 2: much as you know, you've got the water snake thing,
Speaker 2: and it's sort of a precursor to terminate it to
Speaker 2: and therefore Jurassic Park. But there's some great work in
Speaker 2: that film in terms of effects, and some really good
Speaker 2: performances as well. I remember getting that on VHS and
Speaker 2: then finding like the director's cut on laser disc, and
Speaker 2: I love that film. Yeah, that's a great film.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I agree.
Speaker 2: So what what what we're working on? Specifically on the Abyss.
Speaker 3: So, so the company I was working for was called
Speaker 3: wonder Works, which was run by a guy named Brick Price,
Speaker 3: and we were working on the wet for wet models,
Speaker 3: which meant that any model that was actually going to
Speaker 3: be put in the water, we were working on that.
Speaker 3: And I specifically built at the beginning of the movie,
Speaker 3: the Montana, the Ohio class submarine you know, hits the
Speaker 3: rocks and floods, and so me and one other model
Speaker 3: maker named Jim mcgeechee built the engine room which gets flooded.
Speaker 3: And that was the thing, and that was, you know,
Speaker 3: that was my introduction to the movie business. And I
Speaker 3: remember to this day. The instructions were very simple. It
Speaker 3: was directly from James Caermon, and he said, it's fit scale.
Speaker 3: It's ten feet long, five feet wide, three feet tall,
Speaker 3: nuclear submarine engine room, and there has to be a
Speaker 3: path down the middle that looks like people could run out.
Speaker 3: And that was the instruction. So I drew the thing.
Speaker 3: I designed it. I looked up and it was very
Speaker 3: hard back then because the internet wasn't as robust as
Speaker 3: it is today. You know, pictures of what the atomic
Speaker 3: engine looks like in aular submarine, and kind of finagled
Speaker 3: that into the space and Jim and I built that
Speaker 3: and we got pretty much no direction other than that
Speaker 3: description I gave you. And built it and then we
Speaker 3: shipped it out to South Carolina where they shot the
Speaker 3: movie in a abandoned atomic reactor, if I remember.
Speaker 4: Correctly, Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And what's funny is that I used to work
Speaker 3: at a hobby shop in Pasadena, California. It was a
Speaker 3: train store called the Original whistle Stop, and occasionally people
Speaker 3: would come in and this one guy named Jim, older
Speaker 3: guy would talk to me about how he's proud about
Speaker 3: his son because his son was a model maker and
Speaker 3: he worked in the movies, and he'd described all the
Speaker 3: things he worked on, and eventually I found out that
Speaker 3: Jim's son was a guy named Pat McClung. And Pat
Speaker 3: McClung was a model builder and model and supervisor and
Speaker 3: he actually worked on aliens and then he was the
Speaker 3: he was the guy at the other end in South
Speaker 3: Carolina that I was sending the model to that was
Speaker 3: running in the shop for the ABYSS. And so later
Speaker 3: when Pat became a supervisor, we were able to work together.
Speaker 3: But it was kind of fun to sort of hear
Speaker 3: about Pat from Jim when I was just a clerk
Speaker 3: at a hobby shop and then eventually make that connection
Speaker 3: again professionally.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's a great model maker, isn't he Pat. He's
Speaker 2: done some wonderful stuff over the years. So, yeah, you're
Speaker 2: in the industry then, like you've made it in by
Speaker 2: this point. I mean, what was kind of striking to
Speaker 2: you in terms of what you had to achieve or
Speaker 2: maybe even the speed at which you had to achieve it.
Speaker 2: I mean, was there anything that really sticks out to
Speaker 2: you that you know you're in there. Obviously you're enthusiastic
Speaker 2: and you're no doubt putting in the hours, but was
Speaker 2: there anything that really struck you that was different to
Speaker 2: your expectations.
Speaker 3: Well, actually, back to the Abyss for a moment. The
Speaker 3: thing that was right away the lesson was you come
Speaker 3: in running. You know, it's like you get here's the instructions,
Speaker 3: go oh, where's my bench? You got to build it,
Speaker 3: so you know, it's sort of a you just have
Speaker 3: to like make do and figure it out as you go,
Speaker 3: which was goes back to our Super eight days and
Speaker 3: playing with my brothers and trying to figure out things
Speaker 3: on the fly. So the success and there's also success
Speaker 3: and tragedy at the same time, and that success was
Speaker 3: building this engine room, shipping it off, and then finding
Speaker 3: out a year or so later from Pat like oh yeah,
Speaker 3: that was a good model where we really liked it
Speaker 3: and that really worked well. But on the flip side,
Speaker 3: that same movie, there was this notorious crane. I don't
Speaker 3: know if you about that know about that, but there's
Speaker 3: a scene where the crane gets pulled off of the
Speaker 3: Benthic Explorer the ship and it goes into the water
Speaker 3: and there was another group building the crane and the
Speaker 3: guy decided he would make it out of wax so
Speaker 3: it could crush. It's like, yeah, we can make out
Speaker 3: a wax and it can crush. And the aforementioned Jimmygeechee
Speaker 3: was on that team and the guy was going to
Speaker 3: build the thing out of wax, and Jim said, I'm quitting.
Speaker 3: I'm going to go work at Disney, because Jim said,
Speaker 3: wax floats, so you can't like expect this crane to
Speaker 3: go into the water and just not up to the surface.
Speaker 3: So sort of like a car accident where people are
Speaker 3: you know, pumping on the chest of the victim trying
Speaker 3: to get to revive them. I got kind of drawn
Speaker 3: into the crane fiasco and had to help finish this
Speaker 3: crane model to get it out the door. So I
Speaker 3: had my head hand involved in this crane which we
Speaker 3: all know knew was not going to work, but got
Speaker 3: it out the door. So at the same time I'm
Speaker 3: doing the engine room, which was, you know, sort of
Speaker 3: a success, I'm also working on the crane, which was
Speaker 3: not a success and had to be replaced eventually. That
Speaker 3: was a great lesson on like humility, I guess, but
Speaker 3: also also sort of like standing up a little bit
Speaker 3: and and and calling things out that aren't going to work.
Speaker 3: And I think I found throughout my career. I'm not
Speaker 3: necessarily good. I'm not necessarily the guy that knows the
Speaker 3: right thing to do. But if somebody tells me the
Speaker 3: wrong thing, I'll pick that out like I can. That's
Speaker 3: my my mutant power. Like everybody has like a you know,
Speaker 3: like a useless X men mutant power, my mutant power
Speaker 3: is is to sniff out the mistakes and and eventually,
Speaker 3: if something doesn't sound wrong to me, I guess that
Speaker 3: that's the right thing. So that's that's that's been useful
Speaker 3: throughout my career to sort of make sure that we're
Speaker 3: uh steered in the right direction by identifying the mistakes.
Speaker 2: And talking of sort of steering in the right direction.
Speaker 2: I'm always wondering some of these earlier movies, were you
Speaker 2: kind of privy to seeing some of the on set
Speaker 2: footage from principal photography whilst you were working on these effects,
Speaker 2: so that you could hopefully kind of match the look
Speaker 2: and make it make it.
Speaker 4: A sort of cohesive thing.
Speaker 2: Because I often have spoken to people that worked in
Speaker 2: the effects and they're sort of isolated sometimes from from
Speaker 2: the bigger picture. They're just so focused on their one
Speaker 2: shot or their one sequence, but on the Abyss for instance,
Speaker 2: did you have the chance to see some of the photography.
Speaker 3: Not on the abyss again, as you know, very junior
Speaker 3: model maker at the time, Yes, and just got the
Speaker 3: thing done and shipped out and never really heard until
Speaker 3: later I talked to Pat about how it went at
Speaker 3: the other end. But fortunately for me, after I got
Speaker 3: the engine room done and after the crane went out
Speaker 3: the door. And I'm always very adamant about like making
Speaker 3: sure to complete the thing I'm working on, you know,
Speaker 3: because I feel for the people that I'm working for,
Speaker 3: you know, at least I can I can complete this task.
Speaker 3: I'm not going to quit in the middle of a job,
Speaker 3: despite the pain of the of the of the crane.
Speaker 3: But then a friend of mine said, oh, you got
Speaker 3: to come over to Boss. They've got a project going
Speaker 3: and they're and they're paying better. So this is Boss Film,
Speaker 3: which is in Maria del Ray, California at the time,
Speaker 3: and that was Richard Edlin's company, And so I went
Speaker 3: over and interviewed and was very fortunate that I was
Speaker 3: again hired on the spot to work on a commercial.
Speaker 3: And uh, the late Dave Jones was was running the
Speaker 3: shop at the time, and Boss had been run by
Speaker 3: a guy named Mark Stetson for a while, and uh,
Speaker 3: he had worked at eeg'd worked on Star Trek and
Speaker 3: Blade Runner and these other you know shows, and saw
Speaker 3: can sort of an awe of him a bit. But
Speaker 3: he was transitioning out. He was going to start his
Speaker 3: own company. So I was working at Boss. I got
Speaker 3: hired and at some point and this really worked out
Speaker 3: in my favor, I was working on this project. It
Speaker 3: was the abandoned Back to the Future film that Boss
Speaker 3: was working on, and Mark came over with David Jones's
Speaker 3: permission and asked if I had worked for him for
Speaker 3: a week on a music video, and that one week
Speaker 3: turned into six years. So I lucked out, sort of
Speaker 3: fell over backwards into the abyss and then I've sort
Speaker 3: of got taken by under Mark Swing to work with him,
Speaker 3: and that's where things started changing in terms of like
Speaker 3: being a little bit more responsibility and going back to
Speaker 3: your point about seeing the footage, you know, getting to
Speaker 3: work with Mark and go to set and see live
Speaker 3: action and talk directly to the director about what he
Speaker 3: wanted to see in his vision, and really getting much
Speaker 3: more cognizant of how much you need to match what
Speaker 3: is being shot live action and with the miniature, so
Speaker 3: that our work becomes just more shots in the movie,
Speaker 3: you know, more storytelling and less spectacle, if that makes sense, yes, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: And then working with direct or directors of photography who
Speaker 3: specialize in miniature work, who are you know, it's a
Speaker 3: very that's a very difficult position because you have to
Speaker 3: be able to match the lighting of live action but
Speaker 3: in our specialized manners because we're shooting a high speed
Speaker 3: you know, it has to boost the light levels. We
Speaker 3: have to like stop down, et cetera, et cetera. And
Speaker 3: so to see that level of you know, sort of
Speaker 3: concentration commitment to get it right again sort of impressed
Speaker 3: upon me the need to up my game a little bit,
Speaker 3: to work better, not just build nice, nice models, but
Speaker 3: to actually create scenes and create shots that are telling story.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Just going back one minute, did you say an
Speaker 2: abandoned Back to the Future film?
Speaker 4: Why don't I know about that?
Speaker 3: That's the part we cut out. No, this is true. So,
Speaker 3: so Boss was doing a film for Universal and it
Speaker 3: was the Back of the Future ride and it was big,
Speaker 3: I think it was a sixty five millimere large format
Speaker 3: work and we built a cave. We had a t Rex.
Speaker 3: The camera was a Snorkel lens that was supposed to
Speaker 3: be the point of view from the inside the Dolorean
Speaker 3: flying in different time zone. So there you go, like
Speaker 3: very quickly from.
Speaker 4: Time you go, you go, remember the ride the world, yeah.
Speaker 3: For the ride, and then you end up like an alternate,
Speaker 3: alternate future where there's like dirigibles and things like that
Speaker 3: and a ton of work done, just everything. And then
Speaker 3: I think eventually, though conceptually, I think the Universal folks
Speaker 3: were like, it's not we don't want to do this
Speaker 3: time jumping things so much as much as we want
Speaker 3: to just sort of have you flying through the twenty
Speaker 3: fifteen version of you know, of the future. Yeah, So
Speaker 3: so eventually that was that was abandoned. And mass Illusion,
Speaker 3: which was I think it was Mass Illusion, which was
Speaker 3: Doug Trumple's company back East, ended up doing the actual
Speaker 3: ride film that you see in the in the theme park.
Speaker 3: So yeah, so that was other lesson. It's like you
Speaker 3: can go down this route and you can spend all
Speaker 3: this time and effort, and you know, none of us
Speaker 3: were not putting our best effort forward to build and shoot,
Speaker 3: and then your creative folks decide, you know, well let's
Speaker 3: let's abandon this and let's go with something else entirely.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, there is a hell of a lesson to take, yes,
Speaker 2: because you realize, right, and it's and it's difficult then
Speaker 2: to have well for some people, I'm sure it would
Speaker 2: be difficult to then have enthusiasm for the next job,
Speaker 2: you know, but you have to kind of pick yourself
Speaker 2: up and brush yourself off and start again.
Speaker 3: I mean, we're all, you know, as much as we
Speaker 3: you know, uh, chronologically are adults. You know, we're all
Speaker 3: still little kids at heart, you know, drawing little you know,
Speaker 3: crayon pictures or whatever, and you know, we want to
Speaker 3: be padded on the head. And when you pick pick
Speaker 3: that up and you crumple it up and throw it away,
Speaker 3: that's how you feel emotionally that your your best efforts
Speaker 3: are being wasted and it's hard to get that enthusiasm again.
Speaker 3: But fortunately for me, I was Mark took me from
Speaker 3: that that projects and I did a really terrible music
Speaker 3: video with him. It was really awful. And but then
Speaker 3: the next job, this is what enticed me to go
Speaker 3: work for his Mark. I went to over his house
Speaker 3: and he's at his desk and he's like, you look
Speaker 3: at this, and he opens the drawer and there were
Speaker 3: these amazing Steve Bird drawings of Mars from from Total Recall.
Speaker 3: And that's what I said, Okay, he says, you want
Speaker 3: to work on this. I said, yeah, I do so,
Speaker 3: so he drew me in and we got to work
Speaker 3: on Total Recall, which off and on was over a
Speaker 3: year's worth of work. Really well, because they were shooting
Speaker 3: in Mexico and there's this one scene where they needed
Speaker 3: background plates they needed they were still doing a rear
Speaker 3: projection at the time, and so we had to build
Speaker 3: a miniature and shoot the background for these background plates
Speaker 3: so they could have them on set while they were
Speaker 3: shooting live action. So we did that, and then we
Speaker 3: took a break from Total Recall and we did I
Speaker 3: think Dick Tracy and some other movies in there, and
Speaker 3: then we came back to Total Recall to do all
Speaker 3: the exteriors. So that was like a very busy period
Speaker 3: and you know, like again it's like, oh, I just
Speaker 3: happened to be working on this Total Recall and Dick
Speaker 3: Tracy and all these other shows that Mark was able
Speaker 3: to run with us. So I was very felt again
Speaker 3: very fortunate that he took me under his wing and
Speaker 3: he gave me a lot of responsibility, and I sort
Speaker 3: of quickly moved up from being just a junior model
Speaker 3: maker to like a lead model maker, and then eventually
Speaker 3: to actually what we called a crew chief, which was
Speaker 3: a guy that ran the particular project. So while I
Speaker 3: was just a model maker on Total Reach Call, I
Speaker 3: actually it was the lead model maker on the bridge
Speaker 3: for Dick Tracy. And then eventually they started giving me
Speaker 3: full projects to run, which meant I would be the
Speaker 3: lead model maker, but I'd have a team of people
Speaker 3: below me to run the project.
Speaker 2: I would imagine doing all of this the kind of
Speaker 2: early work like you mentioned total recall there, am I
Speaker 2: Is this a bad memory of mine? Or do do
Speaker 2: I have a memory deep embedded in from a commentary
Speaker 2: or an article that I read about using coke cans?
Speaker 3: I knew it would come up?
Speaker 2: Is this is this one? Is this one that that
Speaker 2: comes up all the time? Because I've definitely heard this. Listen,
Speaker 2: we don't have to cover it.
Speaker 3: No, no, no, I wanted to. I want to talk. I
Speaker 3: want to I want to confess about the cocte. So
Speaker 3: we're working on, like I said, off and on over
Speaker 3: a year working on total recall. We're building all these
Speaker 3: amazing models. It's like very hard work to build these
Speaker 3: canyons and these miniatures, and there were really small scale
Speaker 3: miniatures to get this vastness of Mars out there. And
Speaker 3: after all this time, we had a model and it
Speaker 3: was kind of a goofy shot. So it's one of
Speaker 3: the last shots we did, and it's when the atmosphere
Speaker 3: has come over Mars and the people walk out for
Speaker 3: the first time and take a breath in the new
Speaker 3: air of Mars. And so we built this miniature, and
Speaker 3: somehow along the way, the communication was that we were
Speaker 3: building a quarter inch to the foot, which is forty
Speaker 3: eighth scale, and somehow they thought they were getting a
Speaker 3: quarter scale model, which would be much bigger, much much bigger.
Speaker 3: So to sort of scramble to make it slightly bigger,
Speaker 3: we took these models, which are all spaceship or space
Speaker 3: building models, and we started gluing on bigger scale like
Speaker 3: doors and windows and railings that were whatever to them
Speaker 3: to make to boost their scale appearance on camera without
Speaker 3: actually physically making bigger models, if that makes sense. And
Speaker 3: remember the shot because they were using RP again. So
Speaker 3: they've got a window that's blown out, and people walk
Speaker 3: out and take a breath, and it's all rear projection
Speaker 3: inside of our miniature. And we kept shooting it, and
Speaker 3: we'd do it like three or four times, and I'm
Speaker 3: again just a model maker, but they kept getting the
Speaker 3: scale of the people wrong because as soon as the
Speaker 3: second person walked out, it looked like their head was
Speaker 3: hitting the top of the window. So they keep shooting
Speaker 3: it and keep getting the wrong scale, and finally I
Speaker 3: had to mention this to them, you know, raise my
Speaker 3: voice and I said, you do know the first person
Speaker 3: walking out is a little person, like what it's like, Well,
Speaker 3: you know in the movie there's a there's a there's
Speaker 3: a prostitute, and she's a little person. So she's she's
Speaker 3: she's not normal height. She's like, oh, she's shorter. And
Speaker 3: they said, oh right, So you're scaling the projection the
Speaker 3: wrong scale based on the first appearance, which is this
Speaker 3: little person walk out. So they finally adjusted the scale
Speaker 3: of the projection to match her height, and that you know,
Speaker 3: worked out from there anyway, back to the coke can.
Speaker 3: So we built these things and I'm scrambling to like,
Speaker 3: you know, we're going to shoot an hour, so I'm
Speaker 3: scrambling to put some detail on there. And I finally
Speaker 3: took some coke cans and I made like a series
Speaker 3: of propane tanks on the top of a model building.
Speaker 3: But from the front I detailed with hatches and ladders
Speaker 3: and rivets and everything, so it looked completely legitimate from
Speaker 3: the front, but from the back you could tell there
Speaker 3: were cokecans. You can see where you'd cook your drink from.
Speaker 3: And after a year working on this movie, that's the
Speaker 3: day that they sent an electronic press kit, a camera
Speaker 3: and this woman to interview us about building models for
Speaker 3: this movie. And here we are, you know, scrambling get
Speaker 3: this thing done. She walks in. The first thing she
Speaker 3: sees is the back of these coke cans with where
Speaker 3: you take your drink. It's like, oh, so are every
Speaker 3: one of these models made like from coke cans and
Speaker 3: popsicle sticks and egg cartons? Like Jesus, lady, this is artwork.
Speaker 4: You just joined time.
Speaker 3: Again, you know, cressball, like you know, wind knocked it
Speaker 3: out of me and just horrible feeling. So the last
Speaker 3: shot we're doing is where Arnold says to Rachel Ticket
Speaker 3: and like you'll kiss me before I wake up, and
Speaker 3: you see the vastness of Mars, And I just literally
Speaker 3: took a coke can, hit it with some gray auto
Speaker 3: primer and stuck it in the middle of the set,
Speaker 3: right out right out broad daylight. If you will on set,
Speaker 3: and if you watch the movie to this day, if
Speaker 3: you know where to look, which is to the right
Speaker 3: of screenwright of our old tip, it's there. And since
Speaker 3: then I've been I always try to put you know,
Speaker 3: quote unquote easter eggs into the movies, and the coke
Speaker 3: can became a very popular one. There's a coke can
Speaker 3: in water World, there's a coke can in Inception, there's
Speaker 3: a water or there's a coke can in Interstellar.
Speaker 4: Sounds like you should have got yourself some sponsorship.
Speaker 3: He Well, the trick is you can't actually tell it's
Speaker 3: a coke cane. That's that's became a challenge was how
Speaker 3: to integrate this shape of this detail without being obvious.
Speaker 3: But the thing is, it's like somehow that got around,
Speaker 3: maybe because I was boasting too much about it. But
Speaker 3: we went to work on Alien Romulus and Fetti Alvarez,
Speaker 3: the director, came to meet with me, and he had
Speaker 3: talked to Pat McClung, and the first thing he said
Speaker 3: was like, so, where are you gonna put the coke can? Like, ah,
Speaker 3: they know, they know my trick.
Speaker 4: Now I feel bad bringing it up.
Speaker 3: No, it's great, It is great.
Speaker 4: It's such a great little story.
Speaker 3: It's a really it's a stress reliever because you're here,
Speaker 3: we are trying to do this like serious stuff and
Speaker 3: trying to be good at what we're doing, and and
Speaker 3: you know, a commitment to storytelling. But sometimes at the
Speaker 3: end of the day, you just gotta you know, relieve
Speaker 3: a little bit, so you gotta throw some jokes in
Speaker 3: there so you know, like its famously I think in
Speaker 3: the Star Wars Rebel blockhead Runner, if you look in
Speaker 3: the cockpit, there's like a pin up, you know. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And and the other one I think of is Ken
Speaker 2: Ralston putting the potato in the asteroid field and right
Speaker 2: put putting a Nike sneaker in the battle in Return
Speaker 2: of the Jedi, because it was just like nobody's going
Speaker 2: to see it, and it's a lot quicker than building
Speaker 2: another model. That's part of your job is to know
Speaker 2: shortcuts as well. Right is to know what the camera
Speaker 2: is able to perceive and the audience is able to perceive.
Speaker 2: And you've got to work to time, you've got work
Speaker 2: to budget, and no doubt, there are many other things
Speaker 2: that should have been simple and end up getting incredibly
Speaker 2: complex and eating through your your schedule. So you do
Speaker 2: have to be able to adapt, don't you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and Mark taught me a couple of you know,
Speaker 3: not hard and fast rules, but he said, you know, basically,
Speaker 3: ninety percent of what we do doesn't end up on
Speaker 3: screen in terms of like being perceived. But if we
Speaker 3: don't do it, you're going to tell that it's not there.
Speaker 3: And it's I like to call it the connective tissue.
Speaker 3: Like we did a shot for this movie called The Shadow,
Speaker 3: and we build a bunch of city streets and we're
Speaker 3: lighting it and setting it up, and we're going in
Speaker 3: on taking soapy water and I'm spraying the street to
Speaker 3: get it weted down. And then he went outside into
Speaker 3: the parking lot and he comes back and he's got
Speaker 3: a coffee cup full of just gravel and dirt that
Speaker 3: was in the parking lot, and he starts throwing it
Speaker 3: into the gutters and brushing it in with a little brush,
Speaker 3: and he gives me the copy. He says, you know,
Speaker 3: do this because it's the thing. You know, you don't
Speaker 3: perceive a lot of trash and destrous and the imperfection
Speaker 3: of the world because we just sort of take it
Speaker 3: for granted. But if we don't put it into the movie,
Speaker 3: we don't put it in the model, we don't put
Speaker 3: it in the dressing, then your mind subconsciously knows there's
Speaker 3: something missing, something not quite right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's a feeling, isn't there. You can't put your
Speaker 4: finger on, but it just isn't right. Yeah. Yeah, when
Speaker 4: you're working.
Speaker 2: For a director like let's say, is a bit of
Speaker 2: a flight going on in the background there.
Speaker 3: Yes, there is, By the way, I have pet pigs.
Speaker 4: All right, well, it just adds a bit of ambiance.
Speaker 3: It's all good.
Speaker 2: No, no, all good? What was I going to say?
Speaker 2: Let me just gather my thoughts.
Speaker 3: Yeah, let me see walk outside it maybe.
Speaker 2: The moment, good sound effects going on here? Tell me
Speaker 2: when you're happy?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, we're good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So tell me what it's like working for a
Speaker 2: director like Tim Burton, who has a you know, he
Speaker 2: has a certain a particular understanding of miniatures and animation
Speaker 2: and what looks good on film, and was he somebody
Speaker 2: who would come in and kind of scrutinize your work.
Speaker 2: Did he have his hands on on all of that film,
Speaker 2: the live action as well as the model stuff.
Speaker 3: So yeah, he very much is involved in all aspects
Speaker 3: in terms of the design and look of the movie.
Speaker 3: In this particular case, I worked on Batman Returns and
Speaker 3: then also Edwards Scissorhands, and Edwards His MS for Me
Speaker 3: is one of my favorites. Actually. I liked the movie
Speaker 3: a lot, and we actually built not only just a suburb,
Speaker 3: but the most mundane, boring suburb you could have possibly imagine.
Speaker 3: They actually made the houses more bland than they really
Speaker 3: were in real life. So we got to duplicate the
Speaker 3: suburb that they've had in Florida in miniature, and it
Speaker 3: was fun for me to to sort of make something
Speaker 3: interesting out of something so boring. And I think that
Speaker 3: was you know, I could see his you know, upbringing
Speaker 3: and the desire and like seeing seeing the world that
Speaker 3: he must have lived in, because you know, he's a
Speaker 3: local kid too, to soun California and trying to find
Speaker 3: something more mysterious and interesting, which is you know, the
Speaker 3: Scissorhands castle. So I didn't work on the castle model
Speaker 3: that was a guy named Dana Yursitcher worked on that.
Speaker 3: But but but we built the neighborhood and that was
Speaker 3: that was a lot of fun and sort of one
Speaker 3: of my again prouder shots I was involved with was
Speaker 3: in the movie Went on a Rider as a as
Speaker 3: an older woman. She's a grandma and she's talking to
Speaker 3: her grandchild about Scissorhands and it's snowing outside and we
Speaker 3: know that's Edward up up at the house and you
Speaker 3: go through the bedroom window and out over the neighborhood
Speaker 3: and that's an in camera shot. That's our twenty four
Speaker 3: scale model outside the window of the set with real
Speaker 3: you know, snowshakers doing it. And again it's this very simple,
Speaker 3: straightforward technique but very effective and kind of charming that
Speaker 3: we could pull that off. But he, you know, we
Speaker 3: Rick Heinrich is our director and they were I guess
Speaker 3: friends at cal Arts again, so Rick, we were actually
Speaker 3: directly talking to Rick more often about the work and
Speaker 3: with Bo Welch on Batman returns, Uh, Tim wouldn't come
Speaker 3: down personally to see what we were doing. But certainly
Speaker 3: his hand is in the Zoo for Batman Returns, which
Speaker 3: I got to build and had a lot of fun
Speaker 3: doing nothing, nothing like building something and then blowing it up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but do you know what always worries me about that?
Speaker 2: It's not I mean, it's one thing to spend all
Speaker 2: this time on something and blow it up and see
Speaker 2: it destroyed. Which you know that there's you know, if
Speaker 2: if it works, great, my concern would be what if
Speaker 2: it doesn't blow up?
Speaker 4: Quite right?
Speaker 3: Ah? Yeah, So that actually happened to us, strangely enough.
Speaker 3: So we were building that model and and people say,
Speaker 3: you know, don't you feel bad about building all this
Speaker 3: model for all this time and all the effort these
Speaker 3: guys put in, and then you're gonna destroy it? And
Speaker 3: I said, well, but it's a piece of performance art. Really,
Speaker 3: I mean we're intending to blow it up. I feel
Speaker 3: bad if we don't destroy it. I mean, it's reason
Speaker 3: to exist was to get white doubt. So on on
Speaker 3: the Zoo model, there was a polar bear on top
Speaker 3: of the penguin enclosure and we did a test and oh,
Speaker 3: by the way, I got one of the greatest compliments
Speaker 3: from Tim Burton, I have to say, let me talk
Speaker 3: about myself.
Speaker 4: We did it.
Speaker 3: We did a test because we wanted to show the explosions,
Speaker 3: and so we took a some steel decks and we
Speaker 3: set up a snowy field and we put tree models
Speaker 3: that we built and we planted these mortars inside, and
Speaker 3: we shot it at high speed, showing explosions going off
Speaker 3: as if the penguin rockets are hitting the zoo and
Speaker 3: blowing it up. And we got done, and we sent
Speaker 3: the test in for them to review to make sure
Speaker 3: they were going in the right direction. And Tim Burton's
Speaker 3: response was, where did you shoot this? Not the bottle
Speaker 3: looks good or those weren't really well in scale, just
Speaker 3: where did you shoot this? And I said, okay, we've
Speaker 3: done our job, because he thinks looking at a real shot.
Speaker 3: So we moved, you know, we move on there. So anyway,
Speaker 3: we're building the the penguin layer, and we got this
Speaker 3: polar bear on top. This guy named Tully Summers sculpted
Speaker 3: this beautiful polar bear with its claws out, looking really scary,
Speaker 3: and it's made of a plastic resin and the late
Speaker 3: Jovis Gosol was doing our pyro and he put a
Speaker 3: bomb inside of it for a test. We put a
Speaker 3: bomb inside it, and it was going to explode. It
Speaker 3: was going to blow up and shatter in a million pieces.
Speaker 3: So we rolled a camera, high speed camera, hit the button.
Speaker 3: The bomb doesn't go off, just the little pack of
Speaker 3: like for the flames. So instead of it blowing up
Speaker 3: into a thousand pieces, it just stupidly fell over and
Speaker 3: flames came out in the back of its feet. Right,
Speaker 3: So we're thinking, oh, that's a failure. Oh Christ, well,
Speaker 3: we'll do it again tomorrow. We'll do it again. Fail
Speaker 3: pular bear falls over, flame came out its feet. Tim
Speaker 3: Burton loved it. He said, oh, that looks fantastic, that's
Speaker 3: really funny. Do it again. And suddenly we had to
Speaker 3: figure out how to recreate the why it went wrong? Right,
Speaker 3: what do we do? Like, so it was actually a
Speaker 3: much bigger engineering issue to figure out how to make
Speaker 3: it fall over and the flames come out its feet
Speaker 3: and you know, do a forensic evaluation of what we
Speaker 3: did to sort of recreate the mistake over and over again.
Speaker 3: But that was that, you know, that's a happy accident
Speaker 3: we sort of call them, which is where you do
Speaker 3: something like that and it doesn't work, but it actually
Speaker 3: results with something that was better than you had intended.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's so that's a really key part of what
Speaker 2: love about practical effects, I think is those accidents and
Speaker 2: those things you discover by accident which don't necessarily happen
Speaker 2: in the computer. I mean, I'm sure they sometimes do,
Speaker 2: because you'll get a rendering issue or something.
Speaker 4: But with practical you're sort.
Speaker 2: Of, you know, in the world of physics and chemistry,
Speaker 2: and sometimes that is unpredictable and you just have to
Speaker 2: kind of adapt. I think that's what I've always loved
Speaker 2: about that side of movie making.
Speaker 3: Yeah, with the working with Chris Nolan in the past,
Speaker 3: you know, it is often the case where we're building
Speaker 3: a you I want to call it a sandbox, but
Speaker 3: we're building a simulation, and so we're gonna we're gonna
Speaker 3: try to build most of the of the conditions that
Speaker 3: will cause the simulation occur. But it's a real simulation.
Speaker 3: It's an actual physical event going on. And then we
Speaker 3: become more like documentarians. We're setting up cameras, we're shooting this.
Speaker 3: We have an intention in general of what's going to happen,
Speaker 3: but there are things that are going to happen just
Speaker 3: by the nature of the explosions and the physics like
Speaker 3: you described, and so we're going to record that and
Speaker 3: we're going to get those results that are just by
Speaker 3: their nature, you know, much more realistic and much more dramatic,
Speaker 3: if you will. But you're right, people working in you know,
Speaker 3: digital animation, it takes a lot of thinking and a
Speaker 3: lot of planning and a lot of forethought to design
Speaker 3: that randomness, if you will, into the animation and be
Speaker 3: cognizant of it. In the physical world, you know, that
Speaker 3: comes naturally. So I think, you know, there's a lot
Speaker 3: of people that say, oh, CG these days isn't as good,
Speaker 3: you know as it was back and whatever, And I'm like, no,
Speaker 3: it's actually great. But bad CG is bad CG. You know,
Speaker 3: it's like good CG is like in in this decipherable
Speaker 3: from real life if it's really good. Yeah, and bad
Speaker 3: CG is bad. But you know, bad physical effects still
Speaker 3: are are there's still something to them. It's still a
Speaker 3: real thing you're seeing. So yeah, I don't you know,
Speaker 3: I'm not a I'm not a much of a PRACTI
Speaker 3: practitioner in CG, but I'm not a guy who knocks CG.
Speaker 3: I knowin the fact that digital effects in terms of compositing,
Speaker 3: in terms of smoothing, in terms of you know, using
Speaker 3: morphing tools to correct uh, in terms of ad doing augmentation.
Speaker 3: I think, you know, from a physical guy like, oh
Speaker 3: my god, Cg's great. You know you can you can
Speaker 3: you know, leave the rods in and paint them out.
Speaker 3: You know, just yes, those are the pluses. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, like you said, you only really notice CG
Speaker 2: bad CG when it is bad. You don't notice when
Speaker 2: it's good. You just, you know, you just buy. I mean,
Speaker 2: there are so many films now that have obviously but
Speaker 2: digital effec that people wouldn't even know was a digital effect.
Speaker 2: You know, maybe there's just one thing that stood out
Speaker 2: to them on a character or something, because those are
Speaker 2: the things that we look at every day.
Speaker 4: We look at people, we look.
Speaker 2: At animals, and I think people are very good at,
Speaker 2: you know, identifying when something kind of feels fake. Although
Speaker 2: I've been to the cinema with some of my friends
Speaker 2: and I've said, wow, I didn't quite buy that X
Speaker 2: y Z and They're like, really, why, you know, they
Speaker 2: don't see it, So, you know, there are people like
Speaker 2: me who do pick over these things a bit more,
Speaker 2: and obviously people like you who have a have an
Speaker 2: eye for its part of your your well, it's part
Speaker 2: of your X Men super skills.
Speaker 4: They're your superhero skills.
Speaker 2: But what do you think, like going back to some
Speaker 2: of those early movies that you worked on, what do
Speaker 2: you think really kind of separated the good from the
Speaker 2: bad at that time? Because there are some of those
Speaker 2: movies that still really stand up and there are others
Speaker 2: that really don't. And obviously that could be for budgetary
Speaker 2: and scheduling and for time reasons whatever, But was there
Speaker 2: anything that you kind of really honed in on which
Speaker 2: could really sell the miniature that you were building.
Speaker 3: Yeah. It's funny a lot of model makers that come
Speaker 3: to us and they show us their work and they
Speaker 3: were very proud of like an X Wing they may
Speaker 3: have built, or they you know, here's a studio scale model.
Speaker 3: By the way, I can studio scale. I hate it
Speaker 3: because we actually build things to a scale. So we're
Speaker 3: you know, like we're gonna build this in six We're
Speaker 3: gonna build this in twenty fourth or whatever. And so
Speaker 3: when people say studio scales, like no, we actually make
Speaker 3: them a specific size. But yeah, right. But one of
Speaker 3: the things we always emphasize to them is it's like,
Speaker 3: stop looking at someone else's version of real life, and
Speaker 3: you'll stop looking at like pictures of models built for movies,
Speaker 3: which can be fantastic, but you should go to the source.
Speaker 3: You should go to the prototype, which is real life.
Speaker 3: So we did a movie called Pitch Black, and my
Speaker 3: partner Matthew Grats and design the spaceship, and I storyboarded
Speaker 3: this crash sequence at the beginning of the movie. But
Speaker 3: for the spaceship, we you know, referenced freight trains and
Speaker 3: see one thirty hercules, transport planes and items like that
Speaker 3: to look for the kind of detail, the kind of
Speaker 3: discoloration and age that you would expect to find on
Speaker 3: an industrial piece of machinery and apply that real world
Speaker 3: analog to the miniatures that we were building to give
Speaker 3: them that real world feel. And again, sort of another
Speaker 3: backhanded compliment we got was we worked on the on
Speaker 3: the X Files movie and that was one of my
Speaker 3: favorite projects we ever did. And there's a near the
Speaker 3: beginning of the movie, there's a federal building that explodes
Speaker 3: and blows up as a bomb inside the basement and
Speaker 3: it collapses. And so we built the model. There wasn't
Speaker 3: a huge budget for it, so we had to be
Speaker 3: very careful figuring out how to shoot it, which was
Speaker 3: shoot it in the sequence that was going to be
Speaker 3: destroyed because it actually it's predisastered. It's already got damage.
Speaker 4: To it, pre disasted.
Speaker 3: So the wall is already missing, the wall, the floors
Speaker 3: are already damaged and everything. But the way it's cut
Speaker 3: together is you go from a live action shot of
Speaker 3: a fireball going off, and then you cut to a
Speaker 3: miniature insert of the wall collapsing, and then you cut
Speaker 3: to the wide shot and the wall is sort of
Speaker 3: already fallen and the fireballs come up, exposing this predisastered
Speaker 3: building that's on fine. So by being very careful in
Speaker 3: the edit, we were able to pull this off and
Speaker 3: fool people into thinking they'd actually seen the whole building collapse,
Speaker 3: when in fact it's just done very cleverly in the edit.
Speaker 3: But we referenced the Oklahoma City bombing photographs in quite
Speaker 3: a bit in terms of like the detail on the
Speaker 3: walls and the floors and everything that sort of showed
Speaker 3: how it came down and the late Roger Ebert, in
Speaker 3: his review of the movie said the scene with the
Speaker 3: exploding federal building should have been left out of the
Speaker 3: movie because it was so reminiscent of what happened in
Speaker 3: Oklahoma City. And again, he's not saying this effect, he's
Speaker 3: not saying the model. He's saying that scene. So we've
Speaker 3: gotten past the technique and we've gotten into the emotion.
Speaker 3: And you know, that's the thing that we're always trying
Speaker 3: to do, is what is going to get to the audience.
Speaker 3: You know, when I read a script, I'll pick out shots,
Speaker 3: So this is going to go on the trailer. This
Speaker 3: is going to go on the trailer. And of course
Speaker 3: it's a lot of stuff that we get to work on.
Speaker 3: We never see any of the money, but I can
Speaker 3: usually pick out like, oh, this this shot is going
Speaker 3: to be in the trailer because that's what they're going
Speaker 3: to use to sell people to get to the movie
Speaker 3: to see it. Yeah, But but trying to trying to
Speaker 3: trying to figure out what that that emotional element is
Speaker 3: that's going to sell it and going to get to people,
Speaker 3: I think is an important thing. I mean, I had
Speaker 3: nothing to do with it, but it was impressed me.
Speaker 3: Quite a bit in the dark night when they flipped
Speaker 3: that truck over. And to see that in imax, you know,
Speaker 3: five stories tall and the truck flipping over it is
Speaker 3: it's an amazing shot and it's it's very strict for
Speaker 3: a very simple but but it's very impactful. M hmm.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean you're all filmmakers at the end of the day, right,
Speaker 2: You've all got to think like a filmmaker, but you've
Speaker 2: also got to think as the audience and what would
Speaker 2: the audience want to see, and would they buy and.
Speaker 4: All of those things.
Speaker 2: But well, working for Chris Nolan, I would imagine that
Speaker 2: that took things to another level in many ways because
Speaker 2: he's a very particular filmmak. His his ethos of course,
Speaker 2: is you know, if you can do it in camera,
Speaker 2: then do it in the camera. Was that something that
Speaker 2: kind of delighted you as a prospect when you first
Speaker 2: worked for him?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I think it was. You know, it
Speaker 3: was a long We've been working a long time and
Speaker 3: our part my partner Matthew and Shannon Gan's you know,
Speaker 3: been doing a lot of movies and we're always trying
Speaker 3: to do a good job because Matthew would say, you know,
Speaker 3: the money goes away, but we're always going to be
Speaker 3: what's going to be left is the work we did.
Speaker 3: So we just you know, always tried to go in
Speaker 3: on the day to do the best work. And working
Speaker 3: with Chris, Chris is how to put it, he's collaborative
Speaker 3: and then he wants to hear from you how to
Speaker 3: do something and what you might want to do. But
Speaker 3: he's also a director because at the at the end
Speaker 3: of the conversation he will then tell you what he
Speaker 3: wants to do. And for my guys, we've you know,
Speaker 3: my guys that my my crew, the crew that I've
Speaker 3: had in the past, you know, we kind of hone
Speaker 3: down to the to the specific guys who are sort
Speaker 3: of in the same thought process and work ethic that
Speaker 3: we are, which is try you do your best job
Speaker 3: or try to like bring your your A team, your
Speaker 3: a game, if you will. And and for them it
Speaker 3: was great too, because now they've got somebody who really
Speaker 3: appreciates what they're doing. You know, that was really they
Speaker 3: felt more inclined to put more effort in and try
Speaker 3: to do it right knowing that they have a director
Speaker 3: who's appreciating that effort. So for all of us. You know.
Speaker 3: My again, my other partner, Shannon Gans would say, at
Speaker 3: the beginning of a job, we'd have a little prep
Speaker 3: rally or prep talk pep talk, and she would say,
Speaker 3: you know, bring your a game, because he does and
Speaker 3: he's trusting us to do the best job that we
Speaker 3: can and we've got to like do it, and we've
Speaker 3: got to respect someone who is believing in this, you know,
Speaker 3: especially believes in doing it physically, when there's a world
Speaker 3: of people just sort of deflecting to CG. And again,
Speaker 3: like I said, I like CG. I'm not knocking CG,
Speaker 3: but there's a laziness sometimes to filmmakers who just likes eh,
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 4: We'll just see it as a fix.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well I don't know what I want
Speaker 3: back there, so we'll just put a green stream up
Speaker 3: and eventually we'll figure it out. Versus somebody who's like
Speaker 3: clearly understands what how this all works and clearly can
Speaker 3: can tell you what he wants to see and knows that.
Speaker 3: That's the other thing about him is that when we
Speaker 3: would shoot any of these scenes, any of these shots,
Speaker 3: they're a full length you know, the car, the batmobile
Speaker 3: hitting the garbage truck is all a full length a
Speaker 3: series of shots. Or the hospital collapsing in inception, you know,
Speaker 3: is you know, from beginning to end is the whole
Speaker 3: sequence because he cuts, he edits these miniature of visual
Speaker 3: effect shots into his movie as he would edit any
Speaker 3: other shot. You know, he picks the moments, or he
Speaker 3: cuts back to it, whatever he wants to do. He
Speaker 3: doesn't want to be restricted by us just shooting inserts.
Speaker 3: He wants a full sequence so that he has the
Speaker 3: flexibility to cut it in as if he was shooting
Speaker 3: at live action. And that's something too, which is now
Speaker 3: we have to make sure that the work, you know,
Speaker 3: the shot works beginning to end on inception. You know,
Speaker 3: we had I think four cameras and or actually five
Speaker 3: he had he added another camera, and that whole sequence
Speaker 3: of explosions in real time was five it was like
Speaker 3: five seconds, but we were shooting sixty fps, so we're getting,
Speaker 3: you know, fifteen seconds of running footage that he's able
Speaker 3: to cut as as needed. So that's something that it
Speaker 3: raises the bar for us to be able to make
Speaker 3: sure that our work is able to sustain itself for
Speaker 3: that amount of time. And there's always something happening, and
Speaker 3: it's you know, not screwing up at some point in
Speaker 3: the middle of the sequence or whatever. Yeah, but really
Speaker 3: refreshing to have someone who's who who knows what we're doing,
Speaker 3: you know, he and I would discuss frame rates. You know,
Speaker 3: most directors have no clue as to what speed you
Speaker 3: should a miniature at, but based on the scale, you know,
Speaker 3: you want to go to particular frame rates. So it
Speaker 3: was great to converse with somebody who knows the business,
Speaker 3: knows the particulars in and outs of this particular niche
Speaker 3: of effects, and then is able to give you really
Speaker 3: direct answers as to what he wants to see.
Speaker 2: M and how on those Nolan movies. I mean I
Speaker 2: spoke to Nathan Crowley on this podcast a couple of
Speaker 2: years ago. Do you have much interaction with Nathan as
Speaker 2: production designer when you're when you're doing work on the
Speaker 2: Mayland movies.
Speaker 3: Uh, yeah, quite a bit. Nathan and I have worked
Speaker 3: also on First Man, and and he's he's very involved
Speaker 3: again not just doing the live action, but but uh
Speaker 3: involved in the miniature effects also because that's going to
Speaker 3: be part of this movie. And uh, fortunately for for me,
Speaker 3: I think, you know, having worked with them a few times,
Speaker 3: there's a certain level like of trust and shorthand we
Speaker 3: were able to meet and go over things, and he's
Speaker 3: able to sort of hand some of that off to me,
Speaker 3: and as long as I keep checking in with him
Speaker 3: and make sure it's it's up to his standards, we're
Speaker 3: able to move along. And again that's one of those
Speaker 3: things you know, for the conceptions of For instance, they
Speaker 3: built the big set in Calgary, Canada of the Fortress Hospital.
Speaker 3: It wasn't the full hospital, but it was like the
Speaker 3: tower and a couple of floors. So I went up
Speaker 3: there and photograph the heck out of it and use
Speaker 3: that information to build a miniature so that we were
Speaker 3: matching the paint color and the aging and texture and
Speaker 3: everything else. And we actually calculated the sun angle on
Speaker 3: the day that we did our photography so that we
Speaker 3: would match the lighting that was in Canada on that day,
Speaker 3: so that it was set up in our parking lot
Speaker 3: in a very weird skewed angle. But that was very specific,
Speaker 3: so that we could shoot a specific time of day
Speaker 3: on a specific date just to get the lighting to match.
Speaker 3: And that's the kind of attention to detail and care
Speaker 3: that we wanted to apply so that our shots interact
Speaker 3: with the live actions. And then that's another sequence where
Speaker 3: they started with a live action explosion, then they cut
Speaker 3: to the wide shots, which is our miniature, and we
Speaker 3: just want to make sure that it's a good match
Speaker 3: so that the audience isn't taken out of the movie,
Speaker 3: but it's just caught up in the in the drama.
Speaker 2: It's so important to have that kind of crossover between
Speaker 2: the arments just to better each other's work. But I
Speaker 2: mean that obviously wasn't always the case. You know, sometimes
Speaker 2: you're just hunkered down essentially in a dark room and
Speaker 2: just doing your bit. But what what does it take
Speaker 2: for that to happen? And is that a transition you
Speaker 2: felt that has happened in more recent years where people
Speaker 2: begin to understand what tools are best for what shot
Speaker 2: and that they all interact together. Does it take somebody
Speaker 2: like Chris Nolan to kind of push that or Damian
Speaker 2: Chazelle or does it feel like, yeah, does it feel
Speaker 2: like there was a transition at some point in terms
Speaker 2: of your career where that was more more prevalence.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's I think the you know, I would say
Speaker 3: the modern directors. But you know these these directors like
Speaker 3: Damien and Chris and I'm going to go back to
Speaker 3: even we work a lot with a director named David
Speaker 3: Towey that want to get more involved and want to
Speaker 3: be part of the visual effects process also because they
Speaker 3: know it's part of their movie too and not just
Speaker 3: turn it over to somebody else. That's where you get
Speaker 3: the collaboration, and that's where you get the comfort zone
Speaker 3: of them accepting that you're not trying to like go
Speaker 3: into this basement and work on your own and be
Speaker 3: separate from them. You know, you're actually trying to be
Speaker 3: part of the film that you're you know, we we've
Speaker 3: wasn't mean as much as my partner Matthew Ratsner, but
Speaker 3: we've shot a lot for Martin Scorsese and while there
Speaker 3: were visual effects work involved, we actually shot a lot
Speaker 3: of live action for him too, because he you know,
Speaker 3: he has a long editing period and he'll identify like
Speaker 3: inserts or Martha Schumacher. His editor will say, you know, oh,
Speaker 3: we need this shot or we need this shot, and
Speaker 3: there's we're the last guy standing with a camera that's
Speaker 3: a running. So we'll get a lot of list of
Speaker 3: inserts to do or shots to do, and we'll end
Speaker 3: up doing them and of course doing our dartest to
Speaker 3: match the style and lighting that had been done in
Speaker 3: the live action. And so there's this trust at that point, like, oh,
Speaker 3: these guys can handle this part of it. So they're
Speaker 3: not just the effects guys. They're actually, like you said earlier,
Speaker 3: filmmakers who are part of the process. And whether it's
Speaker 3: inserts or whether it's explosions, or whether it's you know,
Speaker 3: mister French driving into the trailer in The Departed, if
Speaker 3: we're just miniature shot, you know, we're there as part
Speaker 3: of the filmmaking.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it must be. So I love that approach
Speaker 2: by Scorsese. And I mean even Spielberg does that, I hear.
Speaker 2: I mean he did it way back when in Jaws.
Speaker 2: You know, he would watch screenings again, we need one
Speaker 2: more jump scale. Let's get some wood and a hose
Speaker 2: and a hammer and make it look like the shots
Speaker 2: burstings through the hull of the boat, you know. And
Speaker 2: Scorsese's obviously taken that kind of early filmmaking ethos with
Speaker 2: him as well, and having that trusted partner in Filma
Speaker 2: just saying hang on, Marty, we need this, you know,
Speaker 2: and then you having the opportunity to shoot those things.
Speaker 4: That's very cool.
Speaker 2: I mean, I love I think that people just have
Speaker 2: this assumption that you know, a film is shot, then
Speaker 2: it goes into post production and there's it's a one
Speaker 2: way street. But being able to have that two way
Speaker 2: street must be so important to fully realize the film
Speaker 2: that the director wants.
Speaker 3: And that one other sort of nice moment, at least
Speaker 3: secret or for the sequence for us was on Interstellar,
Speaker 3: where we used a director of photographer named Tim Angulo,
Speaker 3: and I've worked with Tim for years and years and
Speaker 3: he shot Dark Knight, worked for us and so forth.
Speaker 3: And when we're on Interstellar, we had pre Viz you know,
Speaker 3: CG animation done in Maya to work with, and we
Speaker 3: were able to take all the camera moves digital camera
Speaker 3: moves and translate those into moves that we could use
Speaker 3: our motion control rig and so we are very carefully
Speaker 3: frame accurately following these Previz shots and we shot for
Speaker 3: maybe a week that way on the ship of the
Speaker 3: Endurance and Chris Nolan's looking at the footage and we
Speaker 3: got the note back from him. He asked, well, are
Speaker 3: we following the previs and we said, oh, absolutely, frame accurately,
Speaker 3: we're following the previs. And he said, stop doing that.
Speaker 3: Like what he said, previz is some guy at a
Speaker 3: computer on a Friday trying to get the shot out
Speaker 3: the door. He's not there, he doesn't have the model
Speaker 3: in front of him, it's not lit, so he's just
Speaker 3: trying to figure it out on his own what to do.
Speaker 3: But if the point of the shot is to see
Speaker 3: the engines light up or the ship dock or whatever
Speaker 3: the case is, if you guys are there and you
Speaker 3: see a better angle or a better speed, or a
Speaker 3: better move that tells the story better than what is
Speaker 3: in the previs, is do that instead. And that was
Speaker 3: a great like sort of liberation for us because now
Speaker 3: we could actually use our skills as filmmakers, you know,
Speaker 3: and my camera operator could actually operate a camera, and
Speaker 3: my DP could actually light a scene. And it turned
Speaker 3: out that we were actually shooting faster by using that approach,
Speaker 3: and many of the shots that we're gonna at one
Speaker 3: time we're going to be digital in Interstellar shifted over
Speaker 3: to the miniature side, So it increased our shot count
Speaker 3: because we were able to shoot at a better rate,
Speaker 3: and that was just, you know, great for us because
Speaker 3: now we've got more work in the movie, and you know,
Speaker 3: he's more satisfied, I hope with the work that was
Speaker 3: coming out.
Speaker 2: It's nice that he's put that trust in you. And
Speaker 2: clearly he often works with the same, more similar crew
Speaker 2: because you know, you want to carry that kind of
Speaker 2: shorthand forward.
Speaker 4: Always talk about that on this podcast.
Speaker 2: I work in live TV, and just walking onto a
Speaker 2: job where I recognize everybody and I've worked with them before,
Speaker 2: you know you're going to have hopefully a good time
Speaker 2: because you know that how each other works, and you
Speaker 2: know you've sort of finished these other sentences. And it's
Speaker 2: so important in something like movie making, isn't it to
Speaker 2: have that shorthand you know.
Speaker 3: I've been fortunate to work on a couple of Coen
Speaker 3: Brothers movies, and they were when they were together, they
Speaker 3: were like that, you know, finishing each other's sentences and
Speaker 3: sort of being very in sync in terms of their direction.
Speaker 3: When I read the script for First Man, I had
Speaker 3: a meeting and I drew some storyboards just off the
Speaker 3: fly of like the spaceships and the docking scenes and
Speaker 3: stuff like that, and and I thought it should be
Speaker 3: more of a documentary style, like as if we're attaching
Speaker 3: the cameras to the space ships, so we'd only see
Speaker 3: it as if there was a actual NASA technician put
Speaker 3: a camera on the ship, and that's how you would
Speaker 3: see everything. So would never there'd never be any kind
Speaker 3: of Star Wars flying through space shots. It'd always be
Speaker 3: like a documentary style and either very tight on the
Speaker 3: ship or very wide as if you're looking at it
Speaker 3: from another spaceship or a satellite or something. And the
Speaker 3: first time he meet Damien, he comes in and the
Speaker 3: first thing he says is, so I want this to
Speaker 3: be like a documentary. I want to imagine that we're
Speaker 3: attaching the cameras to the spaceships, and so we'd never
Speaker 3: see anything other than like really close right on the spaceship,
Speaker 3: or very wide as if you're seeing it from another spaceship.
Speaker 3: But never never anything like a Star Wars flying through shot. Right,
Speaker 3: And I book the book open. I said, you mean
Speaker 3: like this, and I'm showing you my storyboards. He's like, yeah,
Speaker 3: like this one, this one's too wide, this one's you know,
Speaker 3: not tight enough, you know. But we immediately were in
Speaker 3: sync in terms of like what the style was going
Speaker 3: to be for the photography, and I think that was
Speaker 3: great that we were able to establish that because he
Speaker 3: was busy making the movie. We were shooting that in Georgia, Atlanta, Georgia,
Speaker 3: and so I had my own stage and we built
Speaker 3: the models and we set them up to photograph them.
Speaker 3: And before we started photographing all the scenes, I got
Speaker 3: maybe a twenty minute meeting with him where he was
Speaker 3: able to sit down and go through the sequence with
Speaker 3: me in very very detailed matter. He did an animatic
Speaker 3: showing exactly what he wanted and it was all cut
Speaker 3: to a piece of music that had been written. So
Speaker 3: most of the of the sequence is not just shots,
Speaker 3: but it's actually shots played to music and timed to music.
Speaker 3: And once we had that, you know, that meeting, and
Speaker 3: we established that we had the style that he wanted,
Speaker 3: it was up to me to take it and just
Speaker 3: go and shoot it. And I felt again really good
Speaker 3: that we're able to come up with this shorthand approach
Speaker 3: and match the style be wanted, and be able to
Speaker 3: be trusted to you turned over the work to without
Speaker 3: having to have him set on our shoulder all the time,
Speaker 3: because we were doing exactly what we had discussed.
Speaker 2: That must be such a relief for a director to
Speaker 2: be able to do that, because there's so much going
Speaker 2: on for a director every day. To have him to
Speaker 2: scrutinize everything in every department must be utterly exhausting. But
Speaker 2: you're right, You're absolutely right those how important that feeling
Speaker 2: is that you get from those shots they in motion,
Speaker 2: that that invokes, you know, that isolation and the claustrophobia
Speaker 2: of it all. And you know that wouldn't have worked
Speaker 2: if you'd have had big, sweeping, balletic two thousand and
Speaker 2: one type shots all the time, or flybys, Star Wars
Speaker 2: fly bys like you say, But no, I think that's
Speaker 2: a great movie. I saw that in Imax when it
Speaker 2: came out. Was that twenty eighteen? Uh yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 2: think it was twenty eighteen. I don't know if I
Speaker 2: saw an Imax or just a very big screen, but
Speaker 2: I remember it's one of those films that I really
Speaker 2: felt sort of enveloped me. You know, I didn't even
Speaker 2: think about looking at my watch. I was just totally
Speaker 2: engraced by it. One of the things I was going
Speaker 2: to ask you about because about twenty eighteen that LED
Speaker 2: technology started to emerge in the industry, I think Mandalorian
Speaker 2: obviously being one of the big proponents of that. But
Speaker 2: did you shot some of the miniatures, didn't you against
Speaker 2: large scale LEDs, didn't you?
Speaker 3: Yeah, there was a handful of shots in First Man
Speaker 3: that we're done on the LED screen, the majority of
Speaker 3: it because it's deep space and when you're actually you know,
Speaker 3: in deep space, if you're being Frontlet or whatever sielot
Speaker 3: by the sun, it actually blows out of stars, so
Speaker 3: you're actually almost always in black. So we shot those
Speaker 3: in a more traditional most control method where we put
Speaker 3: velvet up and velvet over the model mover and shot that.
Speaker 4: In your shed with your brothers.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yes, with the holes punched out, So we did.
Speaker 3: We did most of the shots that way. But there's
Speaker 3: a handful of shots where they get to close to
Speaker 3: the moon, which we're done on the LED screen, but
Speaker 3: also one the LED screen in addition to the screen
Speaker 3: had a key light on a robot arm so it
Speaker 3: could actually move over. So there's a shot where the
Speaker 3: sun has come up and sort of glances over the
Speaker 3: surface of the Apollo Capsule, and those particular shots we
Speaker 3: did against the LED screen, you know, so it's in camera,
Speaker 3: and I think the led screen method is fantastic. I'm,
Speaker 3: you know, coming from rear projection in front projection. You know,
Speaker 3: I'm sort of like, oh, this is just a everybody
Speaker 3: thinks this amazing, Like, well, it is amazing, but it's
Speaker 3: it's the same technique, just a better method. But I'm
Speaker 3: a big proponent of it. And when we did that,
Speaker 3: we were in Stuttgart doing something called the Sparks. It
Speaker 3: was a Sparks Festival, which is of visual effects and
Speaker 3: computer graphics animation festival, and we're presenting first man and Michelle,
Speaker 3: who was the VFXX producer, explains everything shot in the
Speaker 3: led screen and everything, and one of the questions was, well,
Speaker 3: wasn't that more expensive than if we shot against the
Speaker 3: green screen? And she said, no, it's less expensive actually,
Speaker 3: And that's the things like that's well, that's when you
Speaker 3: finally get to producers when you say it's less expensive,
Speaker 3: because they don't want to. They don't they don't care
Speaker 3: about the technique. They don't care about like how much
Speaker 3: it's better for the filmmaker or whatever. They just want
Speaker 3: to know if what the cost of ramifications are and
Speaker 3: when you understand that, you know, it can be less
Speaker 3: expensive because it's mostly in camera and you can, you know,
Speaker 3: sort of move on. The trick, of course, is you
Speaker 3: have to plan, you have to pre render your grounds
Speaker 3: and or for it to work. So you need directors
Speaker 3: who are able to articulate and come up with that
Speaker 3: plan of action. That's the tricky thing is, you know,
Speaker 3: getting somebody to commit to what they're going to see
Speaker 3: and put out there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a really good point.
Speaker 2: What when you're working with like Damian and Chris Obviously
Speaker 2: they're both very visual directors and they want that authenticity
Speaker 2: of the physical in camera shot where possible? Where does
Speaker 2: that divide between aesthetics and physics come though with those
Speaker 2: directors because obviously they're trying to recreate something that you know,
Speaker 2: we can really buy and it's not in a fantasy
Speaker 2: world necessarily. I mean obviously interstella obviously goes into that
Speaker 2: as well. But you know, where does that divine happen though?
Speaker 2: That aesthetic versus physics?
Speaker 4: I think difficult. It's a difficult question with a different answer.
Speaker 3: I think the aesthetic always wins out. You just have
Speaker 3: to convince the esthetic that it's that it appears to
Speaker 3: be physically driven, that appears to be realistic, that it yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: But going back to what you'd said about, you know,
Speaker 3: the spaceship shots in First Man, you know, we're we're
Speaker 3: taking the cameras to them where we're just sticking too
Speaker 3: close to it as if you were there. But it's
Speaker 3: still about the isolation. It's still about the you know,
Speaker 3: strapping yourself into a tin can and going up to space.
Speaker 3: So you still have to get that emotion across. And
Speaker 3: one of the sort of cheets that we used on
Speaker 3: your Interstellar was, well, we put Canada arms on the
Speaker 3: space ship, on the Endurance, and so you can't really
Speaker 3: see them, but imagine you know those Canada arms which
Speaker 3: they used on the Space Shuttle, which was these manipulator arms.
Speaker 3: And so if you were a director of photography and
Speaker 3: you actually could go into space and you actually have
Speaker 3: Canada arm available to you that you could stick a
Speaker 3: camera on, you would think this was the greatest crane
Speaker 3: in the world, that you could do anything you want
Speaker 3: in space with it. So we use that as an
Speaker 3: excuse to stick the camera away from the model a
Speaker 3: little bit and be able to move it as if
Speaker 3: it was on a Canada arm because that's what a
Speaker 3: DP would have done, and justify wider shots as needed
Speaker 3: or moves as needed. So there's they're not radical moves,
Speaker 3: you know, they're all they're all within the I don't
Speaker 3: know ten meters of travel in scale that this arm
Speaker 3: could have traveled. So you know, our emotion control moves
Speaker 3: are relatively small, but they still feel realistic because that's
Speaker 3: what that crane could have done. And and but but
Speaker 3: to answer your question, yeah, I think the aesthetic ways
Speaker 3: are wins out over the the realism. But you want
Speaker 3: to make it feel realistic to get the audience to
Speaker 3: buy it.
Speaker 2: M And what dictates the scale in which you make
Speaker 2: a model and photograph model? I mean imagine it's a
Speaker 2: whole bunch of things. But you know, if you take,
Speaker 2: for instance, first Man, where you've got is it the Gemini,
Speaker 2: isn't it that that was like what six scale or something?
Speaker 2: Then the Satin five is like one thirtieth scale, And
Speaker 2: then you've got an aircraft that rocket plane as well.
Speaker 2: I mean, they're not interacting with each other necessarily, so
Speaker 2: they don't have to be the same scale. So how
Speaker 2: do you decide is it based on the shot the
Speaker 2: closeness of the camera. Is it based on having a
Speaker 2: more realistic weight to it and therefore making it bigger.
Speaker 2: What are those what's the sort of criteria there?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's it's what its function is going to
Speaker 3: be and how close you get the Apollo we actually
Speaker 3: didn't get up end up building the Germany capsule. That
Speaker 3: was a full scale prop that was shot against the
Speaker 3: led screen. But we built the Apollo and the lunar
Speaker 3: module in the command module, which is the part they
Speaker 3: went to the Moon with, and we actually built the
Speaker 3: third stage of the rocket also where they where the
Speaker 3: doors open and the ship comes out, where it's sort
Speaker 3: of containing the lunar module. So those were built in
Speaker 3: a pretty large scale, mostly because we were going to
Speaker 3: be putting the camera quite close to the surface and
Speaker 3: we wanted the detail to hold up and be able
Speaker 3: to hold focus on that. And then, as you mentioned,
Speaker 3: the Saturn, which is this incredibly tall rocket with its gantry,
Speaker 3: was built in a smaller scale because that would be
Speaker 3: we would tend to see that almost always in wide
Speaker 3: full frame shots. One of my favorite shots we did
Speaker 3: actually for that was near the end after they cut
Speaker 3: the movie together, we came back and we shot the
Speaker 3: reveal of the Saturn rocket when it's leaving the assembly
Speaker 3: building and it goes out into the sunlight, and we
Speaker 3: actually set that up in a parking lot in the
Speaker 3: sun and then we took a crane with some black
Speaker 3: flags to flag off the sun and then instead of
Speaker 3: moving the model, we actually pulled the crane back and
Speaker 3: the flags revealed the sunlight hitting it, and that's part
Speaker 3: and that was composited with a real shot done inside
Speaker 3: the real vehicle assembly building. So that was a nice
Speaker 3: sort of just very simple, majestic shot of the of
Speaker 3: the Saturn reveal on Interstellar. We would have gone maybe
Speaker 3: slightly bigger on the Endurance spaceship, but the size of
Speaker 3: that which was still fourteen feet across this fifteenth scale,
Speaker 3: was dictated by the height of my stage, so you know,
Speaker 3: I needed to be able to shoot it in my
Speaker 3: stage and put Blacker at it. So I sort of
Speaker 3: like guests or estimated the biggest I could build that
Speaker 3: model and still be able to shoot it within the
Speaker 3: confines of my space. But if you're doing something where
Speaker 3: it has to get destroyed or uh, you know, fire
Speaker 3: or whatever, then you go much bigger for the range
Speaker 3: of spaceship and Interstellar that gets destroyed that not to
Speaker 3: ruin it for rame when it has never seen the movie.
Speaker 3: Matt Damon is on board. That was a fit scale model,
Speaker 3: quite a bit bigger, and and we shot that outdoors
Speaker 3: with a high speed camera and you know, did pyro
Speaker 3: for it. So that was that was dictated by the action,
Speaker 3: which was the destruction. Everything else we were able to
Speaker 3: do with the smaller model.
Speaker 4: Mmmm, that makes sense.
Speaker 2: Now, get your trumpet ready because you're going to have
Speaker 2: to blow your own trumpet now.
Speaker 4: To answer this question, what what?
Speaker 2: Why do you think you survived the industry when so
Speaker 2: many other physical model making shops kind of fell by
Speaker 2: the wayside. I mean, what was it that really gave
Speaker 2: you longevity?
Speaker 4: Do you think?
Speaker 3: Okay, Well, way back when we were we worked on
Speaker 3: a movie called The Arrival, not Arrival, the Arrival, Yeah,
Speaker 3: with Charlie Sheen. It was directed, written directed by a
Speaker 3: filmmaker named David Towey. And I worked with him a
Speaker 3: few times and.
Speaker 4: He he did Pitch Black and yeah.
Speaker 3: Exactly, yeah, and Kron was a writic. So on Pitch
Speaker 3: Black he came to us and this is a great moment.
Speaker 3: He came to us. He'd just written a script, rewritten
Speaker 3: the script from some of the guys scripts, and he
Speaker 3: came to me and Matthew Gratzer, my partner, and we
Speaker 3: sat down at a table, just the three of us,
Speaker 3: and we were talking about the opening scene, and he
Speaker 3: was talking about how he didn't have a lot of money,
Speaker 3: but he wanted to do this crash and I knew
Speaker 3: he knew movies, so I said, well, what if we
Speaker 3: try it like Foreign Correspondent, where we do it mostly
Speaker 3: from the end side, Like we're inside the spaceship and
Speaker 3: we're actually subjective to the crash event outside once in
Speaker 3: a while, but for the most part we're inside. The
Speaker 3: glass breaks and things fall apart, and we're actually in
Speaker 3: there when it happens. And he said, yeah, I love
Speaker 3: that idea. So he started rewriting the scene to be
Speaker 3: more you know, Foreign Correspondent esque in terms of like
Speaker 3: seeing it from the inside, and Matthew and I had
Speaker 3: a design off where we both designed the spaceship, and
Speaker 3: then David picked Matthew's version, which was this train in space,
Speaker 3: The idea being that like it's long and it's a train,
Speaker 3: but then you start letting go containers trying to lighten
Speaker 3: up the load, and some of those containers are full
Speaker 3: of people, but you don't care, because you know it's
Speaker 3: about saving your own skin. And so I started doing
Speaker 3: the storyboards for this sequence based on our discussions around
Speaker 3: that table. So here we got the design. Here we're
Speaker 3: getting the storyboards. We're working on. They're coming out of
Speaker 3: hundred ratsner and the studio set the storyboards and designs
Speaker 3: out to other people to build to get bids. And
Speaker 3: so we find out that they're bidding other people to
Speaker 3: do the work, and we have a meeting at the
Speaker 3: studio and David's sitting there at the table with us,
Speaker 3: and they're like, Okay, we love you guys, you know
Speaker 3: great work. We love the boards and everything. We know
Speaker 3: you did some fine work for him on the bit
Speaker 3: on the Arrival, but we're just going to have other people,
Speaker 3: like look at getting us bids on doing this work.
Speaker 3: And too, he stands up in the middle of this
Speaker 3: meeting and says, you guys don't understand. These guys just
Speaker 3: aren't model makers. They're filmmakers. And I thought that was
Speaker 3: such a great moment for him to, like, you know, like,
Speaker 3: don't you get it? Like, it's not just you know,
Speaker 3: this isn't a this isn't a rental house where you
Speaker 3: rent c stands. You know, we're part of casting process
Speaker 3: as much, which is you want the right actor or
Speaker 3: the right dp, you want the right effects people doing
Speaker 3: the work. And so I don't know if if you know,
Speaker 3: if that's part of it is the is the dedication
Speaker 3: to like trying to be part of the filmmaking and
Speaker 3: trying to be part of the storytelling and and being
Speaker 3: more than just the guy that like delivers you know,
Speaker 3: the tank or whatever. You know, Like, I think that's
Speaker 3: part of the reason why you know, I'm occasionally still
Speaker 3: get called upon to do this kind of work is
Speaker 3: because I'm a filmmaker and I want to be story
Speaker 3: telling that story with them and being intrinsic to that narrative.
Speaker 2: That is a brilliant answer and one that I hadn't
Speaker 2: really considered, like the casting of an effects house. I
Speaker 2: think that's and the artists within. I think that's a
Speaker 2: really nice way to put it. I feel like I
Speaker 2: could talk to you for you know, many many hours.
Speaker 2: We've reached the hour and a half point now, I
Speaker 2: think that would I think that would be a really
Speaker 2: nice closing point there. But what I do want to
Speaker 2: ask is just one final question. We'll see where it goes.
Speaker 2: If not, we'll kind of end it there. You've worked
Speaker 2: on so many cool movies. You've been involved in so
Speaker 2: many great sequences. I'm not going to ask you which
Speaker 2: one is your favorite. Don't don't worry. I hate that
Speaker 2: podcasting question. What I was going to ask you was,
Speaker 2: you know, what what are you working on now? You
Speaker 2: talk about being a filmmakerself, of course, what about directing yourself?
Speaker 2: You know, is that something that's that's been on the
Speaker 2: cards and been in your mind for years?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I actually it has, one of you would funny
Speaker 3: you would ask, Yeah, I've really always wanted to be
Speaker 3: a director. I actually, you know, luked out getting into
Speaker 3: the movie business and then immediately wanted to become a director.
Speaker 3: And you know, I've directed shorts, I've directed commercials. I
Speaker 3: got to ill Sean Bean, which was a fun, wonderful
Speaker 3: thing to have in my resumes. Director of the scene
Speaker 3: with him getting getting killed. So got that.
Speaker 4: What was what was that?
Speaker 3: Oh? That was the film. It's called Don't Say a Word,
Speaker 3: And it's an actual, uh kind of nice thriller with
Speaker 3: Michael Douglas and Sean We're looking for a jewel. Huh
Speaker 3: into that that open grave and the grave collapses on
Speaker 3: him and uh.
Speaker 2: Huh, I saw that it didn't. Wasn't Britney Murphy in that?
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, And yeah, you just.
Speaker 4: Opened up a memory there for me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but uh but but yeah, Sean Bean falls into
Speaker 3: the pit and uh. And Gary Fleet of the directors like, so,
Speaker 3: I want to bury him live, and how are you
Speaker 3: gonna do it? And I said, We're gonna bury him alive.
Speaker 3: That's how we're gonna do So that that's an outstanding one,
Speaker 3: you know, not that anyone but to me, And you know,
Speaker 3: doing dramas is sometimes harder than doing the fantasy or
Speaker 3: the science fiction movie, because you're you're suspension of disbelief
Speaker 3: when you're watching a fantasy is or superhero movie is
Speaker 3: like you expect that. But to pull off something in
Speaker 3: a drama and not take people out of the movie
Speaker 3: is a very difficult process and very difficult exercise. And
Speaker 3: so I'm always proud of those movies when we're able
Speaker 3: to pull that sort of work off. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 3: I was a few years ago. I was up to
Speaker 3: directing a movie. It was a low budget science fiction movie.
Speaker 3: We were four weeks from starting pre production. The money
Speaker 3: got pulled, so that was very h took the wind
Speaker 3: out of my sales, so to speak. But I'm still
Speaker 3: pursuing that, still trying to get into that position. Because
Speaker 3: of that, you know, we're we're entrusted to do the
Speaker 3: these shots, these scenes from directors. And I've always joke
Speaker 3: and he said, there's only of all the directors I've
Speaker 3: worked with, I can only count on one hand the
Speaker 3: number of directors I have respect for, and two a
Speaker 3: number of brothers. So so so if you know, if
Speaker 3: they can do it, you know I can do it.
Speaker 3: And and it's a little bit arrogant, but it also
Speaker 3: I think through the years having work with them and
Speaker 3: having you know, like in the damienes l moment, you
Speaker 3: know like, oh, this is how he wants to shoot it,
Speaker 3: presenting that and like he's agreeing that, you know, yeah,
Speaker 3: that's how he wants to do it, and he's giving
Speaker 3: me that input. That means I'm I'm in tune with
Speaker 3: what the story is. And I remember being at a
Speaker 3: table read for a pretty big movie and we're reading
Speaker 3: the script and this is. I mean, I was like
Speaker 3: visual effects art director on the movie, and so I'm
Speaker 3: not even sitting at the real table. I'm sitting at
Speaker 3: the kids table. But there were these questions coming up
Speaker 3: from the director and from other people like this, and
Speaker 3: I'm looking at the script, I said, but it says
Speaker 3: right here, like oh my god. I realized they aren't
Speaker 3: seeing the movie playing in their head as a movie
Speaker 3: when they read the script. They're not taking the words
Speaker 3: and translating that visually. And I am am like, okay,
Speaker 3: but you're in charge of the visual media and you
Speaker 3: don't have it. So at that point I realized, you know,
Speaker 3: I do have it, and and through the years having
Speaker 3: work with people, I do have the ability to do that.
Speaker 3: So It's always been something I wanted to do, which
Speaker 3: is direct and I'm still pursuing that to this day.
Speaker 2: Well, I wish you the best to lie and it's
Speaker 2: been so cool talking to you. Like I said, I
Speaker 2: feel like we could talk for another couple of hours.
Speaker 2: Probably maybe we need a part two of this little you.
Speaker 3: Know, maybe we can everything post posts, stats and and
Speaker 3: pre Nolan. But yeah, we did, we did.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of movies in there. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 2: all right, well listen if you're willing to commit for
Speaker 2: part two.
Speaker 4: So am I.
Speaker 3: Okay, Yeah, sounds good. Yeah, I would love to do that.
Speaker 3: I think there's a lot more people I could mention,
Speaker 3: and I'd love to talk about those films I'd worked
Speaker 3: on in the past.
Speaker 2: So that was my conversation with Ian Hunter. This one
Speaker 2: of the most thoughtful and articular people I've spoken to
Speaker 2: about what it actually means to work in practical effects
Speaker 2: and the effects at the highest level, not just building things,
Speaker 2: but thinking like a filmmaker and reading the story and
Speaker 2: understanding what the audience needs to feel like. He said,
Speaker 2: they aren't just model makers, they're filmmakers. We barely scratched
Speaker 2: the surface. Of course, as we said, there are entire
Speaker 2: chapters of Ian's career we didn't get into. And he's
Speaker 2: already agreed to come back on for part two as
Speaker 2: you heard, and I can't wait, so looking forward to
Speaker 2: that until then. If you enjoy this episode, please do subscribe,
Speaker 2: leave a review, and share it with anyone else you
Speaker 2: think might love it. If you want to support the podcast,
Speaker 2: because it is just me and my laptop and my
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Speaker 2: I've got no producer, i've got no editor. I'm doing
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Speaker 2: your support. And that could just be like twelve dollars
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Speaker 2: In terms of the time it takes and the effort
Speaker 2: it takes for me to do those things. And I
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Speaker 2: who else you'd like to hear on the podcast. I'll
Speaker 2: try my best to get those guests as well if
Speaker 2: I agree that they would be interesting. So thanks for
Speaker 2: joining me, and I hope you can do so for
Speaker 2: the next episode of the film you Mentories podcast
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