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The Lightsabre Interview Dennis Muren
Welcome to Lightsabre. Our latest interview is with a true titan of the special effects industry. With eight Oscars cluttering his shelves and a lifetime of innovation, please welcome to Lightsabre Dennis Muren.
Q - Welcome to Lightsabre, pleasure to speak to you. As an effects artist you're known for your work with ILM. Of all the projects you've done with ILM over the years which one's stand out to you the most, for technical or personal reasons? A – Well probably
two or three. One of them would certainly be Empire Strikes Back, the
hardest film that I ever worked on, and one of the most rewarding. I
was just real excited about it, I thought the work came out really good and
I liked the film a lot. That's because we had just moved up from Los
Angeles to San Francisco and we had to crew up all the people up here, an
awful lot of them locally, because we didn't have very many who came up from
L.A for the show, and it was just very difficult. If you look at
Empire compared to the original Star Wars it's like far more complicated.
It was just much more of a challenge than the first Star Wars was, so that
was really amazing. And also I really enjoyed the period around
Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park. We were really trying to get the
digital working and getting the CG imaging working so that we could actually
budget a show and deliver it on time and everything like that. Q - Would you say that
was the most important period in your effects career, that early digital
age? A –
Ahhh, you know I guess it had the
most influence. Yeah, I suppose of that I was really involved with.
Star Wars was certainly really influential but the digital stuff was pretty
amazing. We sort of were trying it out using Macintosh's, Photoshop
and everything, really early on to see how consistent this sort of stuff
was, see if we could get used to looking at a monitor. It was pretty
clear that it was gonna be a revolution
Q – You were an
effects cameraman on Star Wars? A- Yeah, Richard
Edlund and I were the two main cameramen on the effects. Q – And then you did
work on Battlestar Galactica and Close Encounters, so that was a really
fertile period for effects back then. A –
That was great, yeah, and I always thought it was gonna end in a year or two,
because there'd been a few little blips where there'd been effects movies.,
There was one in 1974 where there'd been two or three films, then there was
another one in the late sixties, but very few and they'd only last a couple
of years and they'd be gone again. Q – You had some wild times early days at ILM. There's all the stories of the pool out back and the laid back atmosphere, but the work still got done back then didn't it. Do you miss those days?
A – Maybe the camaraderie of it, but it was pretty nerve-wracking on that, because you never know what the outcome is when you're in the middle of something, right? It seemed like that show was never gonna get done. Same with Close Encounters, seemed like it was never gonna get done, Empire Strikes back, never gonna get done. But somehow, I tell ya, in the last three months there's just been an amazing transformation that happens with the entire crew, and it's still going on, and I'm sure it happens over there, it happens here. Everybody just starts getting on the same wavelength and everything happens faster and the work is better and those massive shows get done. Now that we realise that we can plan forward, but back then it seemed like 'Oh, this is the end. This will never get done, we'll have to change the release date. It will be a disaster', yet they always got done back then. Q – I'm sure I remember reading somewhere that when Empire was finished the final effects sequence before the end credits weren't completed, it was a very close call getting them finished. A – Yeah, you know my memory is there's thirty 70mm prints that were made that are not of the finished shots, and that's what I remember, and our hope was that we were gonna send them far away, to like Antarctica or something, and no one would ever see them.
Q - Let the penguins watch them.
A - That's true, that's very true.
Q - I was very fortunate to interview a fella that I know you're familiar with, David Ankrum. You and David's brother used to make cine films back in the early sixties.
A - Yeah, Cary and David. So where do you know him from?
Q - Well, we interview a lot of people through the website and I interviewed Christian Simpson, who was Hayden Christensen's stand in on Revenge of the Sith, and he happens to know David from conventions and he put me in touch with David. I did a bit of research and found out that you guys knew each other from way back. Have you got any good memories from those days?
A - Oh yeah, that was really great. I was a fan of science fiction when I was a kid. I remember coming home, probably when I was 14 years old and my Mom said 'You won't guess who moved into the neighbourhood. General Ankrum. They called him General Ankrum, as a joke, because he was always a general in the movies. And so here Maurice Ankrum moves in across the street from me, and then he has these two great kids David and Cary, and I just made a bunch of home movies with those guys. I don't know if you've seen the Equinox DVD, they're on the Equinox DVD both of them. But they look pretty young, you wouldn't recognise either of them. It was great, and then we did a little museum of photo's, we'd all been collecting from science fiction horror films, stuff like that, and it was through that that I met Phil Kellerson, who was working on a movie called Jack the Giant Killer, and he just lived in the neighbourhood and saw this little sign we put in our front yard one Saturday and he happened to stop by and said he was working on a movie that had special effects in it, come and visit. And we found my Mom, or Davids Mom or somebody to drive us down to Hollywood to see it, and that was kind of where I first made, and those guys first made a connection with Jim Danforth and other folks that just led to being able to understand that movies were made by people, and not some kind of magic. Even though we only lived a half hour from LA it was still hard to imagine when you saw a movie in a theatre how it was actually made. And especially a special effects film.
Q - Well it's cool because he actually sent us a photograph of the three of you in that room with all the pictures, I think he dug it out from somewhere.
A - I just found a photo of his Dad there too.
Q – What were your early film influences? I would imagine effects movies, although not necessarily so because being an effect supervisor you want to tell a story, not just dazzle with effects. A – Yeah, they really have been the effects films.
I like the Harryhausen films and King Kong, but I also like other kinds of
effects films, like the Invisible Man movies, Wizard of Oz, the tornado in
that and Dambusters. I used to photograph with my 8mm camera off the
TV screen, the effects sequences. This is long before there was video
tape or anything. I'd study them, I'd take still photo's off the TV
screen ands study those and everything, so there was really no way to see an
image, to hold an image in your head unless you did something like that,
take a still photograph of it. And they were shown very, very seldom.
So I think a lot of what I developed, and probably other people around my
same age developed this ability to be able to hold these images in your head
and analyse them. I don't think there's much of that going on anymore,
because you don't need to Q – I always remember watching the Making of Return of the Jedi and watching you guys set up the Speeder Bike animatics, so to visualise it has got to be very important. A – Yeah, a very important idea, that meant that we got it out of our heads and on to video tape. I remember we did that with the first little hand-held video camera that had ever come out. It was about five inches by seven inches, just got in from Japan. It still had all the Japanese labels on it, but it was small enough that we could use it ourselves, we didn't need a technical crew to do it. So I thought let's just try this thing, see if we can do an animatic with it and it worked great.
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