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The Lightsabre Interview Rick McCallum
Welcome to
Lightsabre. Our latest guest is the
most vital cog in the Star Wars machinery along with George Lucas himself,
and without this man nothing we’ve seen in the past decade would be the
same. He’s the producer of many Dennis
Potter classics, saw Young The interview was
conducted via telephone with Mark at TC – Mark? MN – Hello? TC – I’d like to
introduce you to Rick McCallum. RM – Hey Mark, so
sorry about that, I just couldn’t get off. MN – Not a problem. RM – How’s
everything? MN – Not too bad
thank you, how about you? RM – Very, very good. MN – Keeping busy? RM – Very. MN – I can imagine. RM – (Laughs) Now
tell me, what can I do? MN – Well I’ve got
some questions for you. RM – Yep, no problem. MN – Not just about
Star Wars, a few other things as well. RM – Beautiful. MN – And we’ve got
quite a bit of time to talk, so that’s fantastic, so I’ll crack on with the
first question. RM – Fantastic. Q - Welcome to
Lightsabre. A – Thank you. Q – You’ve become
synonymous with the Star Wars series overseeing the prequels and taking them
from concept to the screen. Looking
back over the two years since they films finished on the big screen, how
proud are you of the prequels and can you believe the times gone so fast? A – No it’s been actually weird because it’s been about
thirteen years altogether, all three from the time we started prep and
everything else until the time we actually finished the final press and
everything else, the summer after, probably by September of 2005 was when it
was all over for us. You know,
thirteen years, it’s long, it goes fast but it was such a fantastic ride, a
great experience and you know, I have such fond memories but I don’t have a
lot of memories of it because I always move forward. I don’t think too much
about the past but it was great, absolutely fantastic, wonderful incredible
moments. How proud am I? Well, I know that there’s
the detractors but I know the impact that it had, especially on young
kids. It’s an amazing, amazing thing.
Especially when you’ve worked a lot before, when you’ve made films
that no one wants to see, it’s a nice change. Q – Talking
about your previous work, you worked with Dennis Potter, notably on Black
Eyes and The Singing Detective. What
was he like to collaborate with? He
was a bit of a character, wasn’t he. A – Well, I was with him for ten years, because we did Pennies from Heaven, Track 29, Dream Child, a lot of films we did and he was a seriously real character but one of the really great unbelievable writers I’ve ever met in my life, and just such an extraordinary human being. He was the most demanding of any person I’ve ever worked with, but just a phenomenal, phenomenal character.
Q – You are
closely linked to Potter and to George Lucas as well. Are there any
similarities between the two men, in the way they work? A- None whatsoever, as people, no. But in terms of kind of obsession and in terms of a vision. You know I’ve also had a really good relationship with a writer named David Hare that I did three films with also and I personally much prefer working with a writer/director: then there’s no kind of misunderstanding whatsoever of what the film is going to be about. Especially when you have somebody like David Hare or Dennis Potter or somebody like George, I’ve been blessed, truly blessed. Q – So you enjoy that
collaborative effort? You’ve worked
with Hare for a while and with Potter for a long time and with George for a
long time so you enjoy that collaborative spirit? A – Yeah I do, and I think the great thing is I don’t have any misunderstandings of what a producer’s job is. For me if you’re a producer you job is primarily to enable a writer/director like the people I prefer to work with to be able to fulfil whatever it is in their minds eye of what they see the film is, and make sure that they have all the talent, and the schedule and the money and everything else. For me that’s the creative part of being a producer, and I think really when you get down to it television is a producers medium – it’s really a writers medium right now, but it used to be a producers medium – film is a directors medium, and the thing is that’s our job, our job is to make sure a director can achieve everything that he’s ever yearned for and dreamed for based on certain parameters, you know money and schedule and everything else. No, when it works it’s fantastic. Q – I did a bit of
research obviously to do these questions, and I had no idea that your step
father was Michael York. A –
Yes? Q – So what’s it like
watching your step Dad play Basil Exposition in the Austin Powers on the big
screen? A – It’s a hoot! I think he did a great job, such a send up of what you think Michael is, as a person and an actor. No I think he did a great job. Q – I had to ask
that, I didn’t know that, was interested to find that out. Back in the early nineties you started
working on Young A – Oh yeah, it was always a blueprint for ‘How are we
going to shoot in a whole different
bunch of countries’, because most people don’t know realise that even on the
Prequels, on the last one we shot in seven countries. And we shoot them very quickly, never more
than 55 days each. So, that’s our
principal photography period, that’s our limit. George will let us do whatever we need to
do but it’s got to be done in 55 days.
Because we’re financing the films, not only the production but the
marketing and the distribution of the films, so it‘s a really big deal for
us. We’re a company that makes a film
every three years. We can’t afford to
make a mistake and we need to make them in the most cost efficient way that
we can. To stay independent, to stay
out of the establishment, stay out of the system of
Q – Yeah, because I
think a lot of people misconstrue the fact that Lucasfilm
is an independent film company. A – It is, I mean we’re a film company with about 1800 people but there’s only five of us in the film division of the company. The rest is ILM, which is a client based company, we’ve got Skywalker Sound which is a client based company and those two companies are in motion and in existence to push the limits of sound and visual effects so that they’ll be ready when we’re ready to make a film. And we want other people to pay for that, to keep them going and living and making a life and having an incredible thing, but we’re still 50 or 60% of the total film effects business worldwide. Their job is to do the biggest and best films that they possibly can and push the elements of digital technology as far as they can go so that when we’re ready with our next script they will have exhausted all the possibilities of their imaginations, be there ready for us and know a way to solve the problems that we’re gonna give them. Q – So you guys must have been thrilled with the Oscar for
Pirates of the A – 16th or 17th one, so yes I am
because it’s the first time we’ve won in like 10 years, because we dominated
it for so long. Q – Oh yeah. A – And then there was so many other different companies
coming up, other great films being made and everything else, but it’s always
nice to know that almost anywhere you go and anyplace I go in the world
wherever there’s an effects company, there’s somebody from ILM there. But everybody uses what everybody else is
doing, so you know if we create some kind of thing, it’s used by somebody else,
and then they push it to the next level and then we have to take it and push
it to the next level. Because all
we’re all trying to do is get it to a place.
We’re kind of in this transitional period, the periolithic
period of film effects and we’re just trying to get to a place where we can
create absolute photo-realism. That
takes an enormous amount of man power, software and hardware to do that, and
we’re still not there. These are just
the first tentative steps. In the next
five, six, seven years nothing will be impossible and it will be done at a
level that is commensurate with any kind of reality that anybody wants to
achieve on any film. Q – So there’s a big step coming up that’s not that far away? A – I really don’t, it’s really just a question of
finding…there’s a finite amount of talent right now but every year there’s
just hundreds of thousand of kids worldwide who are into film effects and
sound and engineering who are pushing technology at a level. Because film is so backward right now,
we’re so far behind where we should be in relation to the impact that we have
on the popular culture and the money that we generate, even the impact that
we have worldwide, we should be thirty years ahead of where we are right now. And especially the whole experience of
going to the cinema has to change. We
have a very conservative business, not us personally, the film business is
conservative. Always about five or ten
years behind what consumers really want or understand. Digitally we’re so far behind it’s just… Q – Oh
absolutely. Obviously when Episode 1
came out George was talking about digital projection and cinemas picking up
on that and pushing it further and it never seemed to quite happen did it? A –
No, it’s happening now and nothing will stop it, but in three or four years
will be the tipping point, and then it will be ten years, but the problem is
the whole collective experience of going to the movies is changing so
dramatically for young kids that with gas prices the way they are, the cost
of what everything is, the cost of just going to a movie, you know that
basically you can wait six or eight weeks and you can go to WalMart and buy the film and own it and have all the
extras and you can share with your friends, and once the downloading starts,
once that becomes a real reality the film business is in serious deep
trouble. Because they haven’t provided
the minimal decent experience, plus the whole atmosphere and experience and
adventure of going to a cinema on a weekend has changed from most kids
now. It just isn’t the same thing, you
know the real experience is going to your best friends house when their
parents leave and watching the film with ten or fifteen of your friends
watching on a flat screen, plasma screen where the sound and picture quality
are a hundred percent better than they can get in any local cinema. And then you can smoke pot, you can drink,
you can freebase, you can do whatever you want to. That’s the new collective experience,
sadly. Q – So the whole
thing of popcorn and drive-ins… A –
The trouble is the popcorn costs seven bucks! Q – More than the
film. A – Or, you know, if you’re going to school, you don’t have much
money, you’re parents are broke it doesn’t work. You don’t get the value of what you paid
for anymore. Q – It’s true, I mean
I live near A –
Good movie. Q – Really looking
forward to it, but I know that the ticket will cost me £6.00, the popcorn as
you say will cost another £5.00 and the travel will cost £5.00. I’ll be able to buy it on DVD in four
months time for less than that. A – I know, plus you’ll be able to download it immediately, the
quality will be better than any cinema you can see it in, and you’ll be able
to watch it with all your friends. Not
that I’m suggesting that that is the way, but what I am suggesting is that
unless the film business gets its shit together, gets its act together
quickly they’re going to face exactly what happened to the music industry. Q – Yeah, yeah. A –
The incomes are more than they were last year, that’s because the price of
the ticket has gone up, it’s not about admissions. The average American sees seven films a year, that should be 25 films a year. That’s part of our heritage and we’re
losing it. Q – More so in the
States than in the UK, admissions seem to have been picking up here, but
nothing like it should. A – So you’ve got a real dilemma going on, so yes, to get back to
the original question that is what Indy was about, how do we make it in a way
that would allow us to keep a group of people on for a long period of time
and make them still interested, and luckily we’ve been able to keep that same
group of people for fifteen, seventeen years so it’s been a real fantastic
experience. |
