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The Lightsabre Interview
Lorne Peterson
Welcome to
Lightsabre. Our next guest has been at
the vanguard of the Star Wars saga since December 8th 1975, and had a hand in
many of the most memorable scenes in the six films. He won an Oscar for his work on Indiana
Jones and the Temple of Doom and has worked on many of ILMs
biggest projects. Please give a warm
welcome to Kerner Optical stalwart Lorne Peterson.
Q - Lorne, welcome to
Lightsabre.
A -
Ok, well thank you.
Q Its now over 30
years since you first walked into the fledgling ILM facility in Van Nuys to
start work on Star Wars. In your
wildest dreams did you ever imagine still being involved with this line of
work thirty plus years later?
A Not at all.
You know, I use this as an example. The first Star Wars was done in
LA, and then we moved up to northern California to do Empire. Well,
northern California was colder than Los Angeles. Here the wintertime
we sometimes have frost, LA you'd never have ice. So we move up here
and we get a warehouse and start working away. Well, wintertime sets
in. We have no heat, no heater in the building and I ask the producer,
I said 'Well, it's getting really cold in here, we're wearing down jackets
inside the building and everything', and he said 'We'll only be here for one
year and we'll be finished and move on to someplace else', he wasn't even
beginning to suggest we'd be moving on to another film. And so I
thought I was going to move back to LA, but the whole wintertime people wore
down jackets, and wore those little fingerless gloves. If it hadn't
have been really successful, it wouldn't have continued on. I thought
we'd be moving back to LA after we did Empire. By the end of it, when
Spielberg came along, he wanted projects, it became evident that we were
gonna be there for a while, but not necessarily thirty something years.
Q That would be
Close Encounters with Spielberg?
A - No, LA was Close Encounters, we did that in LA.
I switched over from Star Wars a little bit, right near the end of my work
on Star Wars, they needed some help on Close Encounters. It was only
about ten miles away. The projects that we started up here were Indy,
Poltergeist, Dragonslayer and E.T. Actually E.T first. All of a
sudden it was the goose that laid golden eggs, at that time, so then it
became obvious, they make one hundred million plus, near two hundred million
they're gonna keep doing this. And actually we got overworked at that
time because we were kind of the only ones doing it and every producer who
was a friend of Spielberg's or Lucas' wanted to have the goose. They
thought that that was the charm, anything with special effects in it at the
time was going to be a big high roller movie. But me personally, no I
never did. Prior to Star Wars I worked in industrial design and had a
small shop myself, just two of us, and we struggled, it was really a
struggle. The energy crisis happened in '74, I started on Star Wars in
'75 so it meant the economy was not so hot. At that time a long phase
of work was a year, six months or a year and before I had my own business
you'd go to one shop, work on a show, go to another one, so it kind of
seemed like that was what I was going to be doing. And I don't know if
you know but the only reason that I
worked on Star Wars was that I was on a studio lot working as a sculptor.
You may not have it in England but here McDonalds have these things called
McDonalds Land and they would have a slide coming out of the mouth of a
giant Hamburger. And they would have the Hamburglars, the swings,
things like that, so I would sculpt those things. And I just happened
to come across a friend of mine that I went to college with, and we came
nose-to-nose down a hallway and he said we're working on a science fiction
film and we can't find any model makers, do you think you'd wanna do that,
help out? I said 'Well, I guess, maybe.' And at the time science
fiction didn't...I'd probably only read four science fiction books in my
life.
Q It wasn't your
thing really?
A - It really wasn't my thing, so the word 'work' pricked my ears up, the
word science fiction didn't necessarily, because prior to that the year
before that was Logan's Run was the big film. And you know, Logan's
Run, I can't even remember what it was about.
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|
Jenny Agutter -
where are you now? |
Q I remember Jenny
Agutter took her top off.
A
I...yes! She did Walkabout around that time. She was the best part
of the whole thing. I often judge if nothing else is redeemable if
someone gets their top off, or better yet their bottom. There we go.
Q Yeah (laughs)
A I wonder where Jenny Agutter is these days?
Q She crops up on
British TV now and again.
A
Does she?
Q
Yeah, but she keeps her top on now.
A An attractive 58 year old.
Q Oh, very.
From those early days, when you were doing your early model making right
through the spectrum to today, what has essentially changed, is it the
equipment and materials that you use? What has really changed in the
model making world?
A
Technology wise there is one big deal that has changed a lot. We still
use tools that cut and slice your finger and machines you get caught in, and
we do, but we have a laser cutter now and we have two of them, and they're
big. One's four foot by eight foot. You can programme it to cut
multiple parts, where you couldn't do that easily before. We used to
bash model kits and make one part and then mould it. The tank treads
on the Jawa Sandcrawler had to be moulded, there was 280 of them and it was
quite a task, I did those things.
Q Do you still do kit bashing like you used to?
A Not very much, only a little bit. Here's one of the things that
happened. We tend to make models that are bigger in an action film,
rather than say when we started Star Wars we were doing spaceships that
could fit on a desk. Well, what happened is
computer graphics came along and I naively thought that the role that they
would fulfil would be to get budgets down, bring us up to date storyboards
and scheduling. I thought that was what they would excel in, and I
naively thought that's what they were doing, because I'm not a computer
person. So no, they wanted the artists too, and they were artists, and
the thing that was best for them was to do desktop models. They
weren't good at having something that was still and didn't move, but if it
was moving through the air with a blur, that was up their alley. So
more and more of that kind of work went to them and what the model shop
started to do was more bigger models and more action filled. By that I
mean we would do the equivalent of the big water tunnel for Indiana Jones,
although at that time computer graphics wasn't so rampant. Or the lava
for the last film, on Mustafar. It's a misperception to think that the
model shop actually diminished during that time. What happened was we
diminished in percentage but not in numbers so by the time we did Sith the
company was around 1200 people and 100 of those were model makers. But
back on Star Wars there were seven model makers and about 70 people, and
then by the time we did Empire the model shop was the largest it had ever
been, it was 23% of the whole. But it was maybe 15 people. So
you can see we jumped from 7 people on the first show, 15 to 18 people on
Empire and then by the time Jedi came there were about 25 model makers.
So then by the time Sith comes along we were almost a hundred.
Q Well I remember reading that there were more models made for
Episode One than the whole of the original trilogy put together, and yet the
perception is that The Phantom Menace was made in the computer. Was it
gratifying to you? Well, I guess it wouldn't be gratifying to you, it
would be gratifying to the CG guys.
A It was gratifying as a whole. It's still very satisfying.
One of the ways I compare it is by the time
you reach Sith some people would ask is it better to work on something like
Mustafar or better to work on, say an X-Wing. Well, an X-Wing is like
your individual effort, it requires two or three people, but no one or two
people can make the pyramids at Cheops, so you have all these people doing
this massive co-ordinated thing costing more than the most expensive Ferrari
there is and then you achieve this thing and you step back and see it in the
film, and their jaws drop and they're amazed, so there's a great
satisfaction in that kind of thing too. It does sometimes tend to be
physically harder, that's true, there's more up ladders and down here and
things swinging and sculpting and that kind of thing. Not that we
don't sometimes do smaller things too. One time on Men in Black they
needed a close up of a cats neck, and you can't hold a cat still so I went
and got reindeer fur, and reindeer fur is really thick and the underneath
part of a reindeer is creamy white which this cat was creamy white around
the collar. Then we made a large jewel and this thing was only 18
inches across, but that was a detail that had to be done, so we don't always
make big things but in the same movie we were doing the crash into the
earth, the two guys were standing there as the ship comes crashing into the
earth. And that was very big, it was the size of Mustafar really, it
was sixty feet long and twenty feet wide.
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Lorne in his cameo role
as Osleo Prennert
from A New Hope |
Q Do you think the day will ever come where CGI effects
supercede model making, or do you think there's always going to be the need
for the practical, from a directors point of view, so they can look and
direct around? Do you think that will ever happen?
A - Well it
already seems like the obituaries being written, at least right now.
It never did fifteen years ago, but it's always being predicted and years
come around and that's not the case. But there is this thing, younger
and younger directors are unfamiliar with model work really but they're very
familiar with CG. And CG, even though it costs more money the iterations of
everything you're doing, if you want to make a hot pink, you push the hot
pink button and that kind of thing. That can be very appealing to a
director who has many things on his plate. It's like 'At least that
I can can have control over'. So there is that tendency that younger
directors who are not familiar with models at all and what they can do, they
can more easily be on the premises and point and say 'Do this, do that',
it's more like growing crystals in a cave, it happens over a period of time,
you have to put a bit of trust there. but who knows, maybe it will swing
back. I'm not absolutely sure, younger people when they see a film
like Beowulf are not critical in the same way that older people are.
Q - Yeah, I quite
agree with that.
A
Somebody called Beowulf 'Cadaver Vision'. I thought that Beowulf was
pretty incredible but it does have that quality of a video game. Who
knows, myself I'll be retiring shortly.
Q Really?
A
Within a year, yeah.
Q - You've done your
stint.
A
I've done my stint, that I have. Quite frankly I belong to a union and
we do get a pension and all that stuff, and there's other things I'd like to
do. I thought of myself as an artist, I studied art and that kind of
thing and yet there's that thing where you're in the service of someone
else's art, you lend your art to it for sure, and there's a lot of
satisfaction to it but it's a communal kind of effort and yet we as human
beings have a tendency to want to do individual efforts. Although
looking back on it I'd have to admit that rather than being a wildly
solitary person I'm better being in the service of someone else.
Q - You feel very
collaborative. I guess you've got to be in your line of work haven't
you?
A - Yeah, well I can
come up with my own ideas but as far as administering a company, doing
books, rustling up business, I work much better and happier when someone
would come up and say 'would you solve this problem?'
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