Star Wars comes out in the summer of '77.
I'm 13, living on a cattle ranch in Shawnee, Colorado.
- For me, at ten years old. - I was about 18 or something.
I must have been... I don't know, about nine.
At the age of 15,
I hear this film is supposed to change the way people make movies.
I was watching Saturday Night Live, and this commercial comes up and...
Somewhere in space...
Coming in too fast!
This may all be happening right now.
Star Wars.
I didn't go into it cold.
We knew that it was some big kind of space opera.
I saw Star Wars the weekend it opened at Grauman's Chinese Theater.
I went to see it in Leicester Square with a few friends.
I was in Hong Kong.
In a multiplex at the Briar wood Mall in Ann Arbor.
Bunch of my friends waited in line for, you know, like 12 hours.
And that film had a profound effect on me.
Aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper?
- Huh? - It was absolutely fantastic.
It was just magical.
It was just stunning.
It was like discovering another floor of your house.
It was like, "What? I can go there?"
This is Red Five. I'm goin' in.
My reaction was, "Wow, they could make movies like that?"
I mean, it really opened my eyes.
It took everything to another level on such a massive scale.
We walked out and all I did was say to Cheryl, "Want to see it again?"
And she said, "Yes."
And we walked over into the next two hour line and watched it again.
What? Like, there was nothing I couldn't even... There are no words even still
to describe what that felt like.
I went home and I said, "I'm quitting my job."
"You have to pay the bills for a while. I wanna make a film."
When Star Wars ended, I went back to doing commercials for a little bit.
And figuring, well, that's it, you know how movies are.
That's the end of that.
We did our job. We worked really hard, had a great time,
and then went on our separate ways.
They split up because they wouldn't...
They were down in LA for six to nine months,
and I wasn't doing anything. ILM didn't exist.
I worked on Close Encounters for a few months.
Doug Trumbull was just setting up, and they needed somebody...
We ended up shooting the mothers hip.
Jon Erland and I, we got a call from the producer on Flesh Gordon.
Flesh Gordon...
Journey with Flesh Gordon...
Not Flash Gordon, Flesh Gordon.
And John Dykstra immediately called us into the office.
He said, "What in the world are you guys doing?"
And he said, "There's a project that's coming along.
"I promise you, if you can wait another three weeks or something,"
"there is a big project that's coming."
I didn't want Star Wars to finish. I didn't drag my feet, but I didn't...
I-I... The experience
was so enjoyable and so enlightening.
Everything about it was it was brilliant and I didn't want it to end.
I wanted to keep that place, and I wanted to keep those people.
More than anything, I wanted to keep those people.
Those people were my friends.
Those are the people that I spent Thanksgiving dinner with.
It was so exciting every day. Coming to work was fun.
I went, "This is what I want to do."
But at the time, even though Star Wars was a great success,
there was no way of knowing for certain
whether ILM would continue or dissolve or whatever.
So I pursued doing Battlestar Galactica.
He created a company called Apogee.
And Apogee got the contract for doing Galactica.
I came back and I was probably there on Galactica for maybe like eight months.
So that crew that had finished the work on the first Star Wars was still together
doing additional work in that environment, with that equipment.
We got the tools, we got the people.
I think we were still in the unknown for Galactica
wondering, "Why is George doing this? Why is he letting us do this?"
I lent it to John Dykstra to do Battlestar Galactica
while I was off writing.
So we produced the stuff
for Battlestar Galactica, and I think that's when George decided
he wanted to take the equipment and move it to Marin.
I just said, "Look, I don't want to live down there."
We said, "Well, let's just move to San Francisco."
"We don't have to make movies in LA."
I was working in the model shop on Galactica and Richard Edlund
came downstairs and he said, "There's a phone call for you upstairs,"
not saying it very loud.
I said, "Well, who wants to talk to me?"
There's a phone right here, you know. He said, "No, no."
"Go upstairs and take a phone that's off the hook at Joe's desk."
"Go right now."
And it was George and Gary,
"and then they said, " We want to do the sequel in Northern California,
"but don't exclaim, don't spread the word that"
"we're talking to a very few people."
There was all this talk about a sequel and George is working on it.
And so, basically, I said, "Look, if I get a call from up north",
"you know I'm going to take that phone call, and I'd be stupid not to."
And we were all sort of saying the same thing.
We did hear that maybe George might be doing another Star Wars movie.
Dennis was the slam dunk to be hired, and I knew I would be hired and Ken.
I went to them and said, "Would you like to come up to San Francisco?"
"We'll pay for getting you up there.
"We'll find you a house," that whole thing.
It was performance-based. It was who had done the best jobs.
Some people didn't want to go up there.
Some people who we had to try to convince to come up,
but we knew we wanted Richard and Dennis.
Filmmaking was really important to me,
and I certainly saw that in George and I saw it
in the people that also got invited up north.
It's like they went through and picked the people that they thought,
"Well, here's someone who is a kindred soul."
Who am I to argue?
I mean, here we had this incredibly well-received movie
that I knew that our reputations were on the line to best it with Empire.
And so basically when the phone call came in, I left.
For me, I mean, it was no question.
I could stay and work in this sort of rundown warehouse
in Van Nuys or I could move to Marin County
and start a whole new visual effects facility.
I think most of those guys were very much of that kind of person
that would rather be in a place like Marin than Van Nuys.
The day of awakening, that actually was the last straw,
I was sitting outside in Van Nuys, where we were doing Galactica.
The Van Nuys airport is a half block away.
It's 105 degrees, we're facing due west into the sun,
and the sky was orange and yellow.
And it dawned on me, this is hell.
And I have a chance to get out of hell and go to someplace else,
and I just... And that was it.
I don't know. I mean, it was...
It's weird, right?
Because the business of moving up north, I wasn't invited to go.
I think he fully understood that that was going to be the case.
I think he realized that there was a bridge on fire there.
He did a great job.
But he was in a very difficult position when he was making the movie.
He was under a lot of pressure.
He was, I think, over his head.
So when changes would happen, he would get very angry.
I was not...
Oh, shoot. I don't know, what was I not?
Um...
It wasn't... I can't even say that he wanted a company man.
I just...
I probably was just too young and volatile.
John Dykstra called me into the office and he was really angry.
He actually took his desk, and he lifted it up
about four inches and he slammed it down,
you know, and all the stuff on the table, it was like...
Let's face it, you win an Oscar,
and then you get left at the station.
How does that make sense?
I don't know.
The only thing I do know is that that must have hurt really badly.
You know, it wasn't... Uh...
Am I disappointed that I wasn't invited? Of course.
But we got to break a lot of ground.
And you know, there was, there were some chip...
There was some chipped paint and there was some dents
and a few scratches here and there.
But it was so much fun.
It really was a lot of fun, and I think that it was so tragic
when we all split up.
It was like breaking up a family.
It was just going to be for a two-year job.
That's all they would guarantee.
So I said, okay, and then managed to convince my other friends
who wanted to come up and so we all kind of moved up as a group.
That's kind of where it started,
and that's when we were at the Kerner facility.
When we first moved into the building, it was a single story structure,
with no walls at all.
It had a front door and offices and bathrooms at the front,
and then it was just an open warehouse.
We didn't even have the whole building.
There was an auto mechanic right next to us and somebody else next to that.
There was an open vacant field outside
where we actually blew up stuff for a while.
No frills, believe me.
I remember one of the producers said,
"Well, you know, we'll never fill this up."
And within six weeks we had already started building the second floor.
I mean, it was a lot of just mundane stuff
we had to take care of as it started to take form.
I can still remember the pieces to the Dykstraflex showing up,
and we were all sitting around going, "How did this go together?"
We had to get going really quickly, and somebody came up with the idea,
well, if the carpenters would give us 2x4s,
we would just lay out the rooms, and where the doorways would be,
without doing drawings.
And so they just started building walls and everything where we said.
You know, I'd arrive in the morning and the 2x4s would be moved over two feet
into my department, you know, to make someone's hallway a little bit wider.
The model shop was not quite big enough
and there was a hallway where they put
all the drill presses and bandsaws, and it was just like...
That's a huge mistake you know,
'cause there's just a lot of traffic going through them.
And it was just waiting for an accident to happen.
So I made a mold of my index finger
and cast it and painted it up and painted the stump to look bloody
and put it on the band saw and just left it there.
And, you know, days later, the saw was gone.
We've got a tour of the facility up here,
then went back to where George was working
and saw the artwork that had been done or was being done,
by Joe Johnston and Ralph McQuarrie had also been working on.
That was just stunning, the work for Empire.
This was just really a big step beyond what Star Wars was.
From the scale of the film to the scale of the effects,
all these different locations that all needed
to be problem solved.
We knew we had to top Star Wars, and that's no mean feat.
It was a little bit scary,
and a thousand percent exciting.
It was pretty overwhelming
when I arrived to work on The Empire Strikes Back.
I had done matte paintings on Star Wars
and probably there's only about a dozen in the movie.
Maybe not even that many.
But suddenly... Oh, God, I had 150, I don't remember.
One of the difficulties, of course, was to staff it.
Because they had to re-staff the company, and I was a supervisor.
You know, in Star Wars, we didn't really know what we were doing.
Now we knew what we were doing
and we had to do it again and do it better.
You know, my mother was interested in what I was doing,
and I'm working on budgets and scheduling, you know, working with a calculator
and you know the calendars and she said, "Well, how much money?"
"What are you talking about money?"
And I said, "Well, I think my budget"
"for this year is going to be about three million," and it just...
All of a sudden, I knew that she wanted to end the conversation
and go off to the neighbors
and somehow blend that into the conversation
that her son was working on the budgets for that next year at $3 million.
I lived in San Rafael, and I actually hadn't seen Star Wars.
I didn't get out much.
I was looking for a job.
I had two young kids, and I saw this ad in the paper
for a receptionist and assistant bookkeeper.
So I met with Jane Bay, who had just recently been hired
as George's executive assistant.
I was just really going in for a job, I never anticipated
getting a career.
Thought didn't enter my mind.
Joe came in '78.
He was the first ILMer I met and, you know,
the first real artist I think I'd ever met.
I mean, you know, there wasn't a whole lot to do at first.
George hadn't finished the script yet. He had some sequences.
One of them was the battle on Hoth, the ice planet.
And George said, "Just draw some interesting shots."
The rebels are here and the Imperial Army is coming on this ice plane
and I remember him showing me a clip
from the Eisenstein film Alexander Nevsky,
which is the beginning of this battle on the ice.
And he had this shot where it's just the ice plane and you can't see anything.
And then way off in the distance, you see those tiny little figures
marching toward you.
And I remember him distinctly saying,
"I don't want it to look like this. I want it to feel like this."
You know, they might be five miles away, but you know they're coming
and they can't be stopped.
George knew he wanted this big snow battle.
And it had yet to be determined, you know, the process.
So there were designs that Joe had done, wheeled radio controlled vehicles,
or Gary Kurtz wanted to gussy up Norwegian tanks, you know, and...
We had a design for the Imperial vehicle that had treads on it.
And Gary had arranged with the Norwegian army
to borrow, like, six tanks or something.
He gave me a picture of the tank that they were going to borrow,
"and he says, " Design something that we can cover this with
"that doesn't look like a tank."
"And I said, " Okay, well, it's going to look like a tank
"if you see treads, it's always going to feel like a tank."
So all this stuff was flying around,
and I think pretty much Dennis convinced George
to do it stop motion, in that we had total control
over everything, and these things were machines,
and it would lend itself to stop motion work
in a believable, you know, kind of a way.
I found this brochure from the U.S. Steel Corporation,
and they had produced this thing in the '60s.
They were illustrations by Syd Mead.
"And it was all about, " This is what steel is going to be in the future.
And his illustrations were really amazing.
This portfolio was fantastic.
U.S. Steel would give it to you if you just requested it.
So everybody in the industrial design department had one of these
portfolios tacked to the wall, you know, just to
make them sad that they couldn't paint that way, but...
And one of the illustrations was... They called it... It was a truck,
but it was a four-legged truck.
And it was walking through the woods in the snow,
and I said, "That's it."
Instead of a truck, we're going to make a military vehicle out of it.
So, I studied military vehicles, you know, to look at detail.
"And I said, " Okay, once we've got this thing on four legs,
"we have to make an anthropomorphic, it has to look like it is a creature."
And Joe, I guess, kind of imagined, like a dinosaur kind of effect.
It was actually a huge prehistoric mammal
called a Baluchitherium which was kind of
the conceptual model for the thing.
Let's put the cockpit out in front on a neck.
And it can look around, and it's got these gun ports
that they sort of look like eyes.
And it's got these guns underneath it, you know, almost look like teeth.
While he was working on that, Jon Berg was doing prototypes
for how the walkers could function as a stop motion character.
Because they wanted to have all these kind of self-animating gears in it.
So when you move the leg, you see things on his, you know, knees rotating
or pistons going up and down that we didn't have to animate
'cause Jon had engineered all that stuff that
when you moved the leg, all these things would happen.
So we abandoned the whole tank idea
because that wasn't going to work anyway, I don't think.
On Empire,
I did not feel that I was at the place
I needed to be skill-wise.
But fortunately, Dennis found the very first reel to reel,
single frame tape recorders.
And so I was able to, you know, do a mockup of the walkers.
And I just practiced. It was like playing the piano.
I just did the scales every day,
eight to ten hours, and it was like learning
to ride a bike over, like, six months unsuccessfully.
And then, all of a sudden, I get it.
All right, boys, keep tight now.
Hobbie, you still with me?
When I arrived at Kerner, the first thing I saw
when I walked in there, there is Phil Tippett,
doing stop motions on the walkers.
And this set was amazing.
I thought at that point, "What have I gotten myself into?"
I just didn't want to be the weak link in the chain.
I didn't want people to say,
"Hmm, good movie, except for those matte paintings."
"What happened there?"
Over some of the big shots in Empire, there was one of them,
it was pretty grueling because the set was maybe 40x40,
and there was a big Pangrazio painted background,
and there were two walkers in it.
And the ship goes down and flies through the legs of one and comes up and strafes
the other one and flies off. And it's a point of view.
And it was going to require two animators
and Jon Berg got the flu that day.
And we had to move off the set the next day
and make it free for something else. So I got to do both of them.
The set was on, like, three or four foot risers.
I would get on my hands and knees
and go down to the first trap door, open it up.
Animate, animate, animate, and because of the scale
and the slowness of the speed of the walkers,
a lot of the movements just had to be felt.
You couldn't gauge them, you know.
You couldn't even see them. You just had to...
I think I moved it, yeah, a millimeter,
and take, like, whatever it took, like 20 minutes to do all that stuff.
I mean, click, go down,
get on my hands and knees, go down to the next one,
open the trap door and repeat the process.
Over and over and over and over forever.
Fortunately, the shot wasn't that long, so...
Okay. Why don't we hit the blue screen?
Okay, that's... Oh, oh, oh.
Okay, right there.
All right, let it go.
Bang, bang.
- Yeah, that's it. - All right.
Well, Empire, that was like graduate level compositing.
In other words, we had done undergraduate work on Star Wars.
It's fairly easy to matte a rocket ship over star fields,
because it's mostly black anyway.
And, you know, you wouldn't see a matte line, frankly.
There's certain shots that did have a few matte lines in Star Wars.
But in Empire, there could not be any matte lines.
You had now landspeeders, which are light gray
and they're flying against white snow background,
fluffy white clouds, pale blue sky, I mean,
it was like, you couldn't have a matte line
in the shot or the 10-year-olds say, "Hey, that looks funny."
You know? I mean, the 10-year-old is one of our most severe critics.
Because if it doesn't work, if it doesn't look right,
he's not buying the shot and you're losing him for the scene.
And so I had to build a special optical printer to deal with this problem.
An optical printer is this giant machine.
It's all using film, it's taking multiple pieces of film,
and running through this process, all lined up
and pushed together like this.
It's not two pieces.
It's multiple pieces of film, multiple pieces of mattes
that have been created to combine images
of a background plate and a foreground image.
All kinds of things that have to all be sandwiched into this machine
and run through one single frame at a time.
And it's being re-photographed.
The camera is essentially photographing what goes through these projectors.
Normally, you would only have two projectors,
and this one has four projectors, so we can run more images at one time.
That just gives us more flexibility and more capability
to composite many images at once.
It was really a big project.
Using telecentric optics, which created parallel rays coming out of the lens.
So you don't have geometric distortion,
which is the harbinger of matte lines.
Empire was really gratifying
because I felt that we had conquered the evil matte line.
What you see behind me here is our production boards.
And many times we're compositing as many as 15-20 elements together.
So here one would mean original negative, three would mean an explosion,
and 22 means a particular kind of speeder.
The master board then gives us an indication
of how many shots have not been approved finally by George.
On this film, we're attempting things that are extremely difficult.
I mean, much, much more difficult than anything we ever tried in the first film.
We're doing a lot more stop-motion, which is difficult.
And we're experimenting more and more
with video and computer technology to try to advance the art of film,
and to make it easier to express yourself.
When I was working on Star Wars, we did some digital shots.
An analysis of the plans provided by Princess Leia
has demonstrated a weakness in the battle station.
You know, the demonstration of the Death Star, where it has to go,
and all that kind of stuff, I said, "This is the way of the future."
But it was a little bit early.
The film industry was in the 19th century, 18th century,
and you look at it and say, "Well, this is stupid. We have computers."
And George was very much a proponent of that.
And once digital became a viable thing,
he was always, you know, pushing the envelope on that stuff.
The thing I really wanted to do was digitize editing.
That was my big thing.
If Dwayne were here.
Oh, it's frustrating in the editing room.
"I said, " This doesn't have to be this way.
"This is crazy."
Oh...
And I said I want to be able to go from top to bottom all digital.
See if you can find somebody to head up the computer division.
My father grew up on a dirt farm in Idaho.
He was one of 14 children, only nine of whom lived to adulthood.
My father was very smart and driven,
and he got his degree in Education to be a teacher.
He brought us out to Salt Lake City at a phenomenal period of time.
Growing up in the '50s,
the iconic figures of that time, were Walt Disney and Albert Einstein.
All right, so Walt Disney's on television.
Will there be mechanical robots controlled by super intelligent beings?
And at the same time, Albert Einstein,
and the ideas of relativity in all those areas of physics
were very fascinating, so I held both of them,
but I actually wanted to be an animator.
The background for this is we've got the Cold War going on
and the government had this brilliant idea,
and that was, they were going to fund
students and universities around the United States
for the development of computer science, and it was what was then called ARPA.
Advanced Research Project Agency. In fact, the Internet came out of ARPA,
but it was first called Arpanet, and the University of Utah
was one of the first four nodes on this network.
So I entered The University of Utah, and got a degree in computer science.
The earliest computers were for financing, bookkeeping and so forth.
But they can imagine at some point it's going to be bigger than that,
we will need picture making.
In graduate school,
the very first class I took was one in computer graphics.
It was like... Gong! Holy cow!
You can make pictures here, we could do animation.
And all of a sudden, bam, everything took shape.
So I thought, well, I'm going to try to animate my hand.
So I made a plaster mold of my hand, learning the hard way
that you should put Vaseline on the back of your hand first.
So I'm sitting there with a razor trying to cut the hair
to get my hand out of the mold.
And then I digitized it.
I went from wire frame to polygonal,
and then I wrote the software in order to be able to animate it.
At this time, it was mind-blowing for people.
I believed, at the time, that we were ten years away
from being able to make an animated film.
You had this list of things that you had to solve.
And at the beginning, you don't know what the answers are,
you just know, that's a problem.
And I didn't even know what all the problems were,
but the ones immediately in front were really big.
So who's going to support this?
Out of the blue, we get contacted that Lucas film was looking for somebody
to bring technology into the film industry.
Richard Edlund came out.
We're trying to keep this whole conversation a secret that's going on,
but Richard, of course, got this big belt buckle which says "Star Wars" on it.
And he's talking to an artist,
who is inherently extremely observant, who calls out the belt buckle.
He's just a friendly person who's also very interested in everything.
So he's now seeing for the first time computer painting,
and it's completely wrapped up into it.
So he realized that something important is happening there.
The first problem we solved was how to describe an object to the computer.
The simplest way to do that is to just draw it off on graph paper.
This is just a cross-sectional view of one half a simple cup shape.
And a computer can then spin this around to make a surface of revolution
of what it would look like from different views.
Now, this sort of picture is made of an array of little spots on the screen
which are called pixels.
You can see here individually, each pixel magnified
to be a little square.
The idea here is that each square has a number stuck in it.
And the brighter the pixel, the larger the number.
And so the computer program then has to figure out what value
or what number to stick in each of these little spots.
With digital manipulation,
the fact is that now, the visual effects artist has at his disposal
millions of addressable pixels.
You can address each point in the frame,
and because of that, nothing is impossible.
Once we got digital, you could do anything.
Absolutely anything.
When I first met George, they were working on Empire Strikes Back.
The state of the art was pretty primitive at the time.
He said he wanted digital audio.
He wanted video editing, and he wanted some digital imaging for compositing.
George believed that the world was changing,
and technology would change everything.
It was as simple as that, he was just open to it.
And he was willing to put the money behind it.
Now, anybody that had done a deep analysis at the time,
would have said, "That doesn't make any sense."
"It's too far away."
But for George, it was like, "I got to start somewhere."
I still don't know how to work a computer.
I barely know how to work my cell phone, but I know what I want to have happen.
And I can talk to somebody,
and they can say, "That's impossible."
And I can say, "Well, think about it."
After working with George for a while, I began to understand the way he thought,
and the way he told the story in pictures.
As the fighters go in, we assume that
- the Rebel cruisers also start to go in. - Yeah.
We'd pin the storyboards on the wall, and then he would go through
with his red pen and he would say,
"We don't need that. We don't need that. Rip those down."
And we learned very quickly not to put the originals on the wall,
'cause he'd take a red pen and draw right through it, you know.
Okay. Next.
You know, it was really like
understanding the essence of the storytelling
by looking at the way he would do these things.
It was really like going to some film school that doesn't exist.
You know, this fantasy film school that you can only attend
by getting in the mind of this guy.
Storyboards really helped me out a lot because I very rarely read scripts.
Being dyslexic didn't help, but I never liked the form that much.
You know, it was just very hard for me to, like, see the movie.
So I would just wait.
I would wait until it got to the place where there were storyboards,
or if George could explain, "Yeah, it's kind of like this," you know.
Then I would run with it.
"Joe told me, " Hey, George is interested in you coming up with some ideas
"for this character that's like a snow lizard."
So I spent a day just drawing, like, really quickly.
It could be this, it could be that. It could be this, it could be that.
And sent it to George, and he picked one and asked for a maquette of it.
So I sculpted a little clay maquette.
But you know, my design was mammalian.
It had familiar aspects to it,
like ram's horns and kind of like a camel face,
but not really, you know... Two sets of nostrils,
but something that was identifiable.
Phil Tippett knew he had to do the tauntaun and he knew that unborn calf,
the hairs on unborn calf are much smaller than on a cow.
You know, full cow, or even a newborn calf.
And so we went on pursuit
of an unborn white calf, you know.
We went around to taxidermists. We went around to slaughterhouses.
And eventually we had to settle on a white, already tanned hide.
And then there's an old process,
you know, from back in the days of King Kong,
in which what you do is you take a white glue
that's water-soluble, and you wet the fur side,
and then you put it into a box with maggots.
And the maggots eat away the flesh,
but they don't eat follicles 'cause there's no energy in a follicle.
So now you have this matrix of white glue
with these little follicles sticking up out of it.
And then what you do is you brush in a thin layer of latex
and you turn it over, and then you use
the water soluble glue and get it out,
wash it out of the hair and now you have an unborn calf that's stretchable.
So that's how the tauntaun was done.
But try to explain that to people,
you know, at a slaughterhouse or at a taxidermy place.
People must wonder if we're devil worshipers or something like that.
Well, I spent, like, about 20 minutes trying to sculpt
somethin' that looked kinda like Han, figuring that you'd never ever see it.
So we built this thing and we took it up to George and showed it to him.
Well, this is important 'cause this sort of establishes the whole thing.
Okay. So you think the running forward shot will be...
I think it'll be all right because it's superimposed,
and there's snow blowing in front of it and all kinds of stuff.
And I found that George responded really well to three-dimensional stuff.
Just in general.
Yeah, he would just, viscerally, it's done.
A lot of times with 2D stuff, you get into this conundrum and go,
"Well, what if this one had that one's tail
"and that one's toe," but you get a kabam!
You know, it's just right there.
Maybe also just to make it darker because of the scale.
Not that I understand color on scale.
To me, it's like kind of a form of management
that I learned working with George.
It's just to get creative people to invest, make it theirs,
and back away and let the creative people, you know, run with it.
I don't consider myself a really good leader.
I picked people who were really good, and of course I was probably saying no,
much more than I'd say yes.
You know, if anything, it would be better to have this
- be slightly darker than this. - Okay.
I mean, that's a guess on my part.
But I didn't yell at them. I didn't scream,
"What are you doing? You're an idiot," and all that kind of stuff.
Mostly, I would just say, "Look, try it, we'll see."
We should maybe make it slightly darker than this.
And then it might, you know, the perspective on it might be right.
- Sure. - Right.
- Okay, yeah. - Call me insane.
No, no. Definitely do that. I don't wanna...
- I only wanna do it once. - Right.
One of the things that I learned from George
that was, that's just affected my entire life,
is that we had a shot in Empire Strikes Back,
that he came in one day and he had a helicopter view
flying over this big ice field that had been shot in Norway.
And the camera's flying over it,
and it kind of just looks down on the ice field.
And he said, "Can you put a tauntaun"
"running along like it's running on the ice field down there?"
And knowing, you know, the limitations we had with camera rigs
and making it look like it's actually his feet
are on the ground running and everything,
I said, "No, you know, there's just really no way that we could do it."
"We could build a big giant set and do it that way,"
"but that's gonna take a lot of time and cost a lot of money."
And he said, "Well, why don't you just think about it?"
And I said, "Yeah, okay, but there's no way that we can do it"
"with the tools we have."
"Okay, okay, just think about it," and he walked out.
And I thought, "Well, jeez, okay," and I started thinking,
and within 15 minutes, I'd figured it out.
How to do it with the limited tool set we had,
but a clever way of putting stuff together again.
There were no new tools. It was just an approach.
We shot the tauntaun model first, and it was tracked frame by frame.
And then with the aerial plate background,
and the actual piece of film is re-photographed in each new position,
based on the tauntaun and then combined in.
So it meant you could do composites with big moving cameras.
And the amazing thing about it was it was very clear that
before I could verbalize how I had figured it out,
my body had figured it out, and I just felt it.
"Oh."
And then I started thinking about what did I just feel?
And yeah, that fits with that.
And this fits with that. And that fits with that.
Which means I guess your subconscious is like working on this thing or something.
And if I'd stopped thinking one minute and 59 seconds before,
I wouldn't have thought about it that last little bit.
When Dennis is working on a problem,
you don't know how to solve it to begin with.
So there's actually a thing that some people have and some people don't have,
is that when you're starting, you don't have the answer.
And now when you're talking with somebody else who actually gets,
that you don't know what the solution is when you start,
then you have a different kind of relationship,
and it's like, okay, you can become partners
in solving the problem, and that's who Dennis is.
The whole idea of making something real,
is like a kind of a hard path to pursue.
But, you know, I have an obsessive side
that I just look forward to doing this stuff.
When I wake up in the morning, when I'm doing it, I get super excited.
By the end of the day, I'm like too much for myself.
Yeah, I'm exhausted and I have to have like, two or three beers
to calm down.
But what I've just recently figured out is
I've always had depression and anxiety all throughout my life.
The anxiety was never motivated by anything.
It would just come like a storm.
Like, I was plugged into a 220V.
And it was just like "Ahhh!"
I realized if I made stuff, and get out of my mind,
I could...
I was cured. The storm would just go away.
That was my self-narrative
that I kind of thought was operating
until just really recently, when all of a sudden
it occurred to me, that I might be bipolar,
and, um, I am.
The key therapy that I think that has helped me...
I'm very process-driven.
Everything really, you know, is
you do one thing, then you do the next, you do the next.
You're going to make a stop-motion puppet.
You build an armature, then you put clay over it,
then you make a mold, then you cast in the latex.
You trim it, you...
So you have to, you know, have, like, all these skills,
and it really is like a form of alchemy, you know, you really do feel like that.
And then you get on the stage
and it's all blacked off and it's all quiet.
And you just got lights and a puppet,
and you're bringing it to life, one frame at a time.
And this is being shot in stop-motion photography,
where one frame of film is shot for every, you know, infinitesimal movement.
So in, like, one frame of film, if this guy is running along,
his back leg has to be moved...
A little bit like that.
And his foreleg has to like, come forward.
And his head has to go down and maybe up a little bit.
All of his bags have to be moved.
The rider has to rock on the saddle in relationship to whether this guy's
going up or down.
And all the little pieces of filigree on the saddle are moved, too.
People ask, you know, "Don't you find it boring or tedious to do that stuff?"
And... "No, What are you talking about?"
Because you get in the zone.
You know, and it's a form of meditation, really.
And you are just slowing time
way down and you're not even aware of it at all.
And...
I think that's kept me from you know, killing myself.
Here are a few of the matte paintings we're using on Empire Strikes Back.
This is an example of one that is an interior
of Darth Vader's Star Destroyer bridge,
where we've added the windows and the ceiling.
On Empire Strikes Back production had wrapped,
and now we were into visual effects.
And I was the department head.
This matte painting shows the Millennium Falcon at Cloud City.
In the clear area of glass,
Han Solo comes out and meets his host at Cloud City.
You've got a lot of guts comin' here, after what you pulled.
This is another angle of the Star Destroyer bridge
with the windows and ceiling added.
Take evasive action!
This one's been painted by Ralph McQuarrie.
One of the real blessings I had
was meeting and getting to know
the great Ralph McQuarrie, and I don't say that lightly.
There wasn't much room,
so we painted in the little matte department that we had.
Ralph was a remarkable human being.
He was just patient and he would do these wonderful paintings.
This is Cloud City, and it was something that evolved.
George said he wants a city floating in the clouds,
and we looked at Flash Gordon cities, you know, from the '30s.
And he thought of just something like this art deco look.
The whole thing just bobbed along
like a cork in the cloud in some miraculous way.
I came to other forms, you know,
thinking, you know, shapes that were like pieces of pottery maybe.
And, as I worked in openings and windows,
I think began to look, you know, maybe like an aircraft carrier or something.
That seemed more fitting, I don't know why.
Most of these things are rather hazy.
They just feel right, you know, sometimes, and sometimes they don't.
So you just keep fiddling until they start to feel right.
I have to admit, the only thing I was not pleased with
is his clouds looked like illustrator clouds.
Clouds are probably one of the hardest thing there is to paint,
and I didn't want to offend Ralph McQuarrie.
But his first clouds looked like cauliflowers.
I mean, they just didn't look like clouds. So...
So I said, "You know, Ralph, we've got so much work to do",
"and tell you what, you do the wide shots
"of the Millennium Falcon at sunset on the platform.
"You do this, you do that.
"You do the establishing stuff, and by the way,"
"you know, let me do the clouds."
"Why not? I'll do that. You're busy."
I don't know whether he bought that or not,
but I did the clouds.
And it was a struggle.
And sometimes George would say, "Why don't you let Ralph do the clouds?"
Step aside, kid.
That's not true.
Universe with Walter Cronkite.
Tonight, the science behind a fictional universe.
While we were still working on Empire,
we had heard Walter Cronkite was coming to ILM to talk to George
and shoot some stuff on the stage and see what was going on.
He took us on a tour of his facilities...
They wanted to show the tauntaun in Empire Strikes Back being shot.
We know no one has a clue how we create these things.
Well, this is the stop-motion animation department.
And they're making tauntauns run across the snow.
And so we decided to do it in a way you would never do it.
'Cause we knew no one would recognize it.
So it's the two of us in there.
We brought in what's called the surface gauge,
a bunch of those, which is what animators use
to mark little things on puppets.
What else did we bring in? Some weird gizmos with rulers on it
and whatever we could grab filling the scene with this
while he's having a very serious conversation with George
and talking about what we're doing out there.
It's a whole art of... They studied movement.
They shot animals.
And studied them against grids and things to study the motion.
And then they practiced for months and months, doing tests.
We're acting like we're doing stuff.
But we weren't doing anything for real,
and playing it very serious, I think.
But it was fun, you know. We weren't hurting anybody.
And if anyone actually knew we were doing it wrong,
it showed they had some idea of how the work actually was accomplished.
But to do it with Walter Cronkite, who the had the nerve? Come on.
What were we thinking?
As a science, it's fascinating, but you're ruining my fantasies.
It sounds like me just trying to be a jackass, which maybe it was.
But it's also through the course of all these movies,
it's an interesting lesson to learn about
what an audience perceives and what you really need to do.
Asteroids.
Oh, no.
Oh.
Chewie, set 271.
What are you doing?
You're not actually going into an asteroid field?
They'd be crazy to follow us, wouldn't they?
On Empire Strikes Back,
my version of seeing what you could get away with were potatoes
in the asteroid field, and I think it was my comment
on the fact that some of the models that were built look like potatoes.
My assistant, Sel Eddy, and I,
bought some asteroid-looking potatoes, stuck them on this rig.
They actually had a pronged pipe for the Styrofoam asteroids we were using.
You would just shove it on there, took one of the asteroids off,
put the potatoes on, shot it against blue screen.
They're flying through, there's shots, looking out the window and stuff,
and some of them are potatoes, but you'd never know in a million years.
Not only is it funny, but it keeps you thinking
about what's the best, fastest, cheapest way to do this.
You know, it's every producer's dream.
You know, being a successful visual effects person,
often times is someone who knows how to cheat
and also to spend the least amount of money.
There were all sorts of problems that we came up with
that we had to invent our way out of.
For example, the stars streak and disappear shot,
that's the one where the stars going into hyperspace.
And then we have to cut to a shot of the Millennium Falcon.
zipping away from me.
And the problem is, I can only get the model
to be this big in frame on a 42-foot track.
I said, "Okay, I got an idea how to do that."
So I took the Millennium Falcon and I shot a 4x5 Polaroid cocked
Cut it out and placed it on a piece of glass and shot it.
Sent it to George and he says, "Great, I'll cut it in."
We didn't have to do a take two on that.
One second shot and it got the biggest applause in the movie.
So, I mean, this is how you learn to cheat.
Dailies will be screened in five minutes.
There's more?
When we come in, we're sort of like this.
Looking down on it. Sort of, three-quarter down.
It comes into the frame, and then we come down like that.
And I would try to get it as small as possible at the end.
So it really looks like it's shooting away from us.
The perfect effect,
is conveying the point of the movie, the emotion of a moment.
It is invisible in some ways.
We have the responsibility
to keep the train of drama even and flowing.
Enhance it whenever possible, whenever it's necessary...
And to reel back when it's necessary.
If you have a visual effects shot and everyone's going,
"Wow, what a cool effect," you have failed.
While we were still working on Empire,
we already knew what was coming up on the next group of shows.
One was Raiders of the Lost Ark and one was Dragons layer.
ILM started becoming more of a work for hire company
than a George Lucas production company, because Jedi was right around the corner.
It would take me, again, at least a year to write the script.
So we had to do something to keep all those people there and keep them employed.
So that's when we started taking outside work.
We had this mandate from George,
to not refuse the films of any of his friends.
If Spielberg came up and wanted to make a film
by such and such a schedule, we had to make it work.
I was very excited about it.
We did draw in some very interesting projects.
And it's also opportunities for a lot of different work.
We started making films that were like the golden eggs.
And suddenly everybody wants to come to ILM.
But it was a very painful growth period.
Each project had a whole new set of challenges.