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The Lightsabre Interview Dennis Muren
Welcome to Lightsabre. Today we conclude our interview with a true titan of the special effects industry. With eight Oscars cluttering his shelves and a lifetime of innovation, please welcome back to Lightsabre Dennis Muren.
Q – Are there any big
movies of the last twenty, twenty five years that you didn't work on that
you wish you had? A – Oh, there's probably been quite a few. I'm not sure what, I did want to work on Pearl Harbor but I wanted to do A.I instead because I worked with Spielberg on that, but I really like those big spectacle movies, and I would have loved to do a war film on that scale, and I was really tempted to do that but I wanted to do the Stephen thing and the Kubrick thing, I thought that was wonderful. I wasn't so excited about the Lord of the Rings films until I saw them, then I saw 'boy, they came up with some great ideas'. But I didn't think they were ever gonna do all that really interesting forced perspective stuff, which I love, because I never thought a first unit crew would take the time to do it, because they certainly don't like to do that in LA, but I guess being in New Zealand with Jackson being the director and producer he could say 'No, this is the best way to do it, we're gonna do it like this.' That was great, I thought that stuff was wonderful.
Q – Given that you
like to finish a project, move on, finish a project, move on, has the lure
of doing a television series ever appealed to you? A – No, it really hasn't, probably because the quality, the movie doesn't have the impact on that small screen. My memories, and everybody's of my generation is first you get in the car, you go somewhere, it's a special event. And you get out, you go into this big giant room with the huge screen, the lights go down and there's this massive thirty foot tall and wide image that you're looking at for the next two hours. And that does not happen at home in your living room, even on a big screen. You can turn it off. Right away, the fact that you can turn off a DVD means that you've lost, you're in control if it, and you're not in control of it when you're in a movie theatre. I love that feeling, when something's just sort of taking over. TV just doesn't have it.
Q - It's like hearing your favourite song on the radio as opposed to disk. It's got you, it's grabbed you and it's got you where it wants you.
A - Yeah, and you have to force yourself, if you've got to do something else, if you've got to run off and use the restroom or something - you can't. So that just gets you more excited about staying and hearing it, and you're suffering to hear it (laughs). So it gets more of your attention. That's right.
Q - You were honoured eight years ago with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. How amazing was that, because you were the first effects guy to get it weren't you?
A - Yeah, that was pretty amazing, I just never thought it was going to happen. My cousin had been trying for ten years to get me a star on the walk of fame and I kept saying 'Don't even bother, I'm not interested, no one else is interested, don't bother' and she said 'No, I'm gonna try, I'm gonna try' so just on her own she gathered these letters from people. Spielberg, Lucas, Cameron, lots of other folks and kept sending them in every single year, the same package, and she kind of got to know the secretary of the committee group, and every year they voted and every year it was rejected and I just kept saying 'Don't do it, it's a waste of time, I don't care about it' and then suddenly, I guess it was when Phantom Menace came out and VES (Visual Effects Society) was involved, they knew who I was from my cousin, they said yes. I just kept thinking, they made them a mistake. We meant Dennis Miller not Dennis Muren, stay home. But it was really great, a lot of guys showed up. Ray Harryhausen showed up, Cameron, George, Artoo, See-Threepio, my family, it was great. I walked along that street for years, growing up in LA, when they first put them in the Walk of Fame, and the crazy thing is that the location that was available were three locations and I picked one right underneath the old Hollywood Theatre, now the Guinness Book of Records Theatre, but it was the old Hollywood Movie Theatre where we had a sneak preview of Equinox. That's why I picked it,. I said 'This is amazing, this place is available, this is where I wanna be.'
Q - That's fantastic. One final question, when you had the chance back in 1996, 1997 to revisit the Special Editions, how special was it for you coming back to those films after an extended period of time away from those movies?
A - You know, I was fine with doing it, I didn't feel at all that we were hurting anything. My feeling always was that the original version was always gonna be there, and I don't know if that's necessarily happened. George hasn't put the effort into doing an HD, super good HD version of the original versions and I don't know if that will ever happen. But at the time my feeling was that we could finally make these shots better, you know. He went through and picked a bunch of shots, and I picked a bunch of shots and we redid them so they just looked a lot better. I was fine with it, and I think it's gone overboard, I think it's been done too many times and too many shots, but I just feel as long as the original version is always there that it's fine to be able to work on it later on, and sort of like 'so what', you now? I'm not saying don't look at the original, but it makes me feel better if I can finally get rid of some of those crummy motion control shots that were done at 3.00am in the morning that just weren't quite right, or something on a spaceship.
Q - But you'll always have those great memories of being there at 3.00am doing it though.
A - Oooh god yes.
Q - Well thank you so much Dennis, really appreciate your time and its a pleaure to speak to you.
A - Ok, bye. |
