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The Lightsabre Interview Dennis Muren
Welcome to Lightsabre. Today we continue 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 – Do you think when
digital came to the fore in the late eighties, and especially in the early
nineties, had optical effects gone as far as they really could, had they
reached the limit they could go to or was there more that could have been
done with optical effects? A –
You know, I think that optical
effects, and even traditional effects, the money that had been put into
developing and improving those techniques, they could have been made better.
But their just literally wasn't anybody but George and a few other people to
put money into that technology. But you know, we had problems with
film shrinkage, so we'd shoot on Mylar film stock, it didn't shrink.
Then we'd send it to the film lab for processing, and the lab would vary
from one day to another for example. But if you set up your own lab,
and you tested all the chemicals in advance and made sure everything was
going through exactly the same way it had five hours ago or five days ago,
it wasn't out by a tenth of a degree, all the machines were ok, you could
have gotten the work a lot better. But it was just expensive to set up
something like that, nobody came up with anything like that. But I
think you could have. I remember even thinking at the time, all the
money that was being poured into CG could have been poured into existing
effects techniques, making the quality better. But at some point the
producers can't afford it, to improve the quality. Q – Were you quite
resistant to changing it, or were you all for the new technology? A – I was all for it, I was one of the people in there pushing for it, the change, because I'd hit a dead end with it (optical effects) in the mid-1980's. There was just no way to come up with the money to fix it. We'd talked about buying our own film lab up at ILM and doing some of the things I've just talked about, but when you run the numbers on the cost of it you don't see how you're ever going to get your money back. And you're not even really sure if it's gonna work, it's just thoughts I had that might have worked. The digital stuff did come in, all that kind of research on computers had been done with Apple figuring out how to mass produce products and PC's, and Adobe and the Knoll brothers with PhotoShop, the Solitaire film recorder doing slides for business presentations for major corporations that actually could turn out a digital image on a piece of film that looked like a photograph. And that was unheard of, but all the work had already been done, and what we did was we put those things together, and the result was T2 (Terminator 2). And it could have been done a year or two earlier. What I did was I took a year off and read a book on CG and did a lot of snooping around on stuff thinking this was gonna amount possibly to something, because I didn't have anything else to think of with doing a show, I could just figure out how to make this work, if it looked like it had a chance, and it certainly did.
Q - Do you do a lot of research and development? I know ILM are problem solvers, going right back to the seventies, but is that another large part of your job?
A - You know, I don't do it with the ILM group, I bring my ideas to ILM. Some of the ILM guys, they're doing a lot of different stuff for a lot of different departments and what I do is I just approach it differently, completely from a show standpoint. I can sit there and be totally frustrated and feel very sorry for the optical guys who are trying to get rid of those matte lines, doing take after take. For the CG guys, they have a partially badly rendered frame and they have to re-render the entire shot again because of that. I just feel so sorry for them, I know there's got to be a different way. It was hard to convince the ILM R&D (research and development) folk about some of those problems, because they're so busy just trying to put the fires out. So I'm coming to it from the daily fires, I just come into this from a different point of view, more of a film maker point of view. And that's where you think, ok it's worth the effort trying to get rid of the matte lines, worth the effort trying to fix these few frames in a render, not to have to re-render the whole shot. And one way to do that is to paint it, so if we can get a paint programme and paint onto a digital image then we can fix that and not re-render the whole cycle, and those are like revolutionary ideas back then. Because nobody thought that you could kind of do that. And another thing was going on, it wasn't pure work and a lot of computer folks felt that it was very crude to paint out artefacts, they should be able to re-render it and have it be perfect. I didn't care about that, I had a deadline I was working on.
Q - You're just after the end result.
A - Yeah, just the end result is all that matters. And that thinking is still going on to this day, the idea of things being pure, and it's very, very costly. It doesn't really fit into the industry because there's usually more efficient ways to do things and the result will be just as good and it'll be less expensive, and I really encourage people to do that. Not make things that are too precious. Anything you work on, I think you should be able to destroy it before it's done and have to do it again. Shouldn't be so lucky, or perfect, or even repeatable, I don't think you should even be able to repeat or be able to repeat it like a lot of computer stuff. You can repeat it over and over and over again, but that's not necessarily a good thing. If you're just doing a one-off for a movie.
Q - I was lucky enough to interview Irvin Kershner, who obviously you know very well, and he mentioned Spielberg, in that he prefers using film to digital as opposed to George forging ahead with the digital revolution. Where do you stand on that, obviously you would be a proponent of digital. When you're making a movie these days with someone who wants to use film how do the two mesh together?
A - You know, the only film that I've done that's actually been digital movies, acquiring the data on the set, was Phantom Menace, the first and second Star Wars, and I didn't even work on three. Those are the only shows I've worked on that are digital acquisition. And that's all that Steven and those guys are talking about, after you shoot the dailies they don't care what you do with it. So I don't really have a problem in shooting the film in digital. I think there's big wins in shooting it digital that's not even been discovered yet, and I've been encouraging Spielberg's camera man Janusz Kaminski, and other cameramen, to shoot in digital if for n o other reason than to force the engineers to make the equipment do what those guys want to do. r else the engineers are just gonna make cameras of what they think other people are gonna want. Which isn't necessarily at all what other people are gonna want. So that's what I've been doing.
Q - You made an appearance in Raiders of the Lost Ark. What are your memories of that little scene?
A - (Laughs) That was a lot of fun and it was very, very strange being on the other side of the camera and looking up and seeing Spielberg there, Richard Edlund was the cameraman, all the light guys looking right at me. And of course being with Harrison and all was really fun. It was very strange, it was very neat. We did it in about half a day, but it was a lot of fun.
Q - I remember reading a piece about that scene, the establishing shot of the Sunderland on the water. There was a lot of effects work went into that shot wasn't there? There was a practical model and a matte painting, it was quite involved.
A - Yeah, the painting. For some crazy reason the airplane was right over here by ILM, the other side of the bay, but it couldn't fly. And it was just in storage, sitting on the water there, if I've got my memory right. I don't think it's there anymore, and that's why we shot it here locally. The whole bottom of the plane was still there and maybe the wings were still on it, but the background was all wrong is probably what it was, so everything from a certain point upwards was a painting and then from down below was the actual airplane that used to fly but didn't fly anymore. And we shot on that plane and everything, all the interiors were done on there.
Q - You must have been so pleased with Raiders, the way that the film came out ultimately. All time classic.
A - Yeah we were surprised, we had no idea. I was doing Dragonslayer at the time, I wasn't watching what was going on with Raiders, but to see the final film together and have so much energy was pretty neat.
Q - Dragonslayer was quite a progressive film at the time, that was around the era that Go-Motion got going.
A - Yeah, we established Go-Motion for that film, which we had sort of experimented on with the Tauntaun on Empire Strikes Back. But we got a lot more advanced with it in Dragonslayer. We shot that over at Pinewood, all the live action work.
Q - I was lucky enough to meet you about four years ago at the Hulk premiere at the Empire, Leicester Square.
A - Oh really?
Q - Well, I saw you walking towards me and I went over to shake your hand and somebody veered you away and I managed to say 'Hello Mister Muren', and that was about it. But you must have very good memories about that film because effects wise that was absolutely stunning.
A - Yeah, that was a real mixed bag. Some of it came out real well, we had so much trouble with that green colour. I think it was almost insurmountable because I thought it was gonna help us with green being so radically different from anything in the real world, you know the colour, the shade of green they wanted and everything was so vivid that it just looked wonderful, it didn't really have to ever match anything, but in fact it meant that you always just looked at the Hulk. That's something that we don't really want to do too much, because there's too many shots to do. They're not all perfect. That was a tough show.
Q - There's another question then. If you could be brutal with yourself and look back over your career and pick one special effect that you'd like to re-do again, which one would it be?
A - I probably wouldn't tell ya. Somebody would feel very bad if I said it. I can't say that, there's a lot of them. A lot. (laughs)
Q - Being a perfectionist it must rankle.
A - I'm not as much of a perfectionist as some people are, I just wanna get through the shot, you know. Some people are perfectionists, and nobody can see the difference between what you're working on now and the same thing two weeks ago. I don't like that at all, but I think you reach a point where you think 'Yes, that will work.' And there's many, many times when we run out of time or we just didn't have the right magic together correctly to make the shot work, and it's too late to start over again or whatever.
Q - I guess it's like catching lightening in a bottle a hundred thousand times each movie, trying to get that right element.
A - That's right, it always seems like that, especially when you're trying to do something that hasn't been done. The first thing I do when I finish a film in my mind is I consider it obsolete, and try to figure 'ok, if I was doing that same movie again, what would I do differently?' I don't want to do the same thing again, and that's hard to figure out because there's nowhere to look, for something new, so I spend a lot of time looking at artwork and the real world for inspiration and stuff. There's some great stuff on that Planet Earth series, we've just got that over here finally. Just phenomenal stuff, and there's great inspiration in things like that as opposed to copying movies you've already seen, because that's very limited. That's a copy of reality, and if you're copying movies then you're a double copy. |
