INTERVIEW:
Question 1
You are a supervisor of visual effects. How did you start your career and what is your
professional background?
Answer
I went to film school and studied cinematography, so I got my degree in cinematography.
And then immediately upon graduating, I was lucky enough to get a job being a producer of
live-action commercials. I had no visual effects knowledge and would do fairly elaborate
television commercials, all live, and then occasionally we would have something that was
special that no one knew how to do because that was not our business, and I would end up
taking it over because I was the producer; there was no one left to do it besides me.
Somebody who had done some work in special effects advised me to work for a company that
specialises in them, especially since I wanted to direct commercials and they had
commercials to direct that had effects in them. So I went to Bob Abelman Associates. To
get into a position to be able to direct these commercials I had to learn how to do
various things with the blue screens, all the techniques that we use in films today. Then
I got tired of only doing commercials. I wanted to do longer format, more drama. And I got
into television. I did a season of Twilight Zone, and then went on to Star Trek,
the Next Generation. And then I directed all the second unit and supervised the visual
effects and then directed three episodes. Then television became a little too limiting for
some of the things I had hoped to do and I wanted to work in feature films. The first
feature film I worked on was Interview with a Vampire, I was the second unit
director on that and I did the effects and then Apollo 13 happened, and then Titanic,
and that's where I am today.
Question 2
When did you start to use the computer for special effects?
Answer
I to use digital technology in commercials. The video tape would be essentially digitised
and then you would use a sorts of electronic blue screen and things like that. Things that
you do on a computer now were done in real time with a video tape deck, so the technology
was the same with a different device. When I started doing that each place was at the
beginning of it. When I worked in commercials, we were at the beginning of using
electronic commercial effects for commercials. Then when I went to TV they had never done
that before, they were behind commercials. Then when I worked on Startrek, digital
technology was just coming out, converting from analogue to digital and at a time when no
one was doing it, so I was one of the few people that was available to do that sort of
work. Then when I left that, feature films were new to digital technology, so they saw my
history of only working in digital and thought that it would be an easy conversion from
that to feature films. So each step of the way at various places I was there.
Question 3
In your work the relationship with the director is very important for someone who prepares
visual effects. What is the aspect of this relationship?
Answer
A director's job is to interpret the text or the script and translate it into emotions and
feelings and tone and not just the technical rendering of it. So when you get into
something as technical as effects, sometimes it's very difficult to be able to bridge the
gap between how the director wants it to look like or feel like and what has to be done to
achieve that. That's the collaboration. It's very similar to the collaboration between a
director and a cinematographer. He knows something about the camera but not a lot, but
says" Here's how I want it to feel". The best collaborators make the best
movies: The Godfather, and The Last Emperor were beautiful films because of
the collaboration that they had. So it's like that, except that it's in a more technical
medium . It's no different than working as a cameraman or an editor or a production
designer. You have to realise the look of the film or the feeling of the film.
Question 4
The use of digital effects in the cinema may be a new language. Who do you think is the
director that has understood this new language and knows how to use it the best?
Answer
There are only a few people who actually do it to this level: Steven Spielberg, James
Cameron, Bob Zemeckis. I think they really encourage the use of it and are courageous and
depending on it to tell their stories, whereas other people shy away from it and push it
off and treat it as an aside as opposed to as part of the story-telling process. But those
three, I think, actually are the ones who are the leaders in this sort of film-making.
Question 5
What are the new tools that you used to work on Titanic?
Answer
I worked on Titanic for two years, often seven days a week, for fifteen, sixteen,
seventeen hours a day. The new things were the creation of synthetic water and synthetic
people, digital water, digital people, and the use of them together to the point where it
looks natural, it doesn't look like an effect. Probably the bigger achievement is to be
able to bounce back and forth between a real image and a digital image and confuse the
audience to which is real, and as soon as you confuse the audience to what's real, it's
now judged as a film and not as a technical achievement, because you forget what's
involved in it. It looks like a real ship, it looks like real people. So the achievement
is part of being able to have the tools to allow you to create digitally created stunts,
people falling hundreds of feet and landing in the water, and looking like a real person.
Or the ship sailing during the day, the underwater Titanic with the mere subs
photographing it. Those sorts of things are the types of imagery that we use. I guess the
achievement is that you can do it with such fidelity that it's no longer an effect. It
looks real. It's now a movie.
Question 6
Do you prefer working on digital effects to creating invented stories or invented things
or do you prefer creating digital effects that recreate real worlds?
Answer
It's easier for me to create something that's real. It's something I know. I'm not a big
fan of science fiction, so I couldn't bring anything to it. But I'm an observer of real
life and how people act and react and the way things look, and so I could bring that and
hopefully add some emotion to it and make a picture that tells the story. It is more
fluent for me to work that way. To do something that's just a spectacle, that's more of a
conceptual artist.
Question 7
Is there a part of the film Titanic which you think is really the best one you
realised, the best digital effect?
Answer
There are so many of them that it's hard to narrow it down to one. One is at the beginning
of the mere sequence, where you see the little subs travelling over the real Titanic. More
than half of the footage is real, so it's the real Titanic, the real subs, and the other
part is not, and they're cut back and forth. What made it interesting for me is that once
you achieved the realism, it was just as emotional, just as effective visually as the real
footage was because you felt it was real. It looks like the real Titanic and you have
emotion with that. So that I thought was successful. At the end of the film, where the
ship cracks in half and the people fall in and there are thousands of people hanging on
there. It's not just a shot. It's the sum total of all the shots that make you feel like
you're on the Titanic to the very end and sinking. Probably the one shot, if I could
encapsulate it, is the very end shot, where the camera travels from the real Titanic,
through the hallway, and the hallway changes and becomes the hallway of the beautiful 1912
Titanic, and then goes inside the big staircase and follows Rose up the stairs, that one
shot is all a very long shot. It reflects what we hoped to achieve, taking advantage of
what your mind wishes had happened - you really want the Titanic to come back to life. We
didn't try to make a trick out of it. We tried to make it as if your mind willed it to
happen, that it was the viewers doing it and not the film-makers. That's a very tricky
thing to be asked to do. Everybody has their own opinion whether it works or not, but to
me it does work, because it's what I imagined, if I saw the old Titanic, what I'd like it
to turn into, and that's what we did.
Question 8
In which field do you think that new digital technology works best?
Answer
In my opinion, not shared by a lot of people, I think when you do digital effects in a
film that doesn't appear to have any in them, it is now just pure film-making. You may be
seeing things that may be difficult or awkward to realise in any other way, but yet they
look believable enough so you don't question it. All of a sudden you are telling a
somewhat more powerful story. Perhaps Titanic is more powerfully told now because
of the use of technology than it would have been five years ago, where you would have had
to avoid the things that we embrace now. The work on Apollo, was basically creating
a real event. It's not a special effect, you've seen the images before. You may even have
seen them in a grander way before, but you haven't seen them dramatically put together the
way we have. So to me that is the best use of it, because I'm thoroughly entertained
without seeing the trick, without seeing the falsehood. When I see a big special effects
movie, I am used to seeing the trick. I see that it could only be done that way and I
don't enjoy it as much as when I'm completely fooled.
Question 9
In Apollo 13 I think you used less digital effects than in Titanic. Why did
you change your mind?
Answer
There were as many as were called for in the story. There was about 160 digital effects
shots in Apollo 13 there are about 516 in Titanic, mostly because of the
subject matter and the length of the film. It's almost twice as long a film as Apollo
and it has more shots to create. It is also a cost factor. It costs money and how much you
have budgeted. Apollo was something like four times less expensive than Titanic.
Question 10
What will happen in the future in this sector, in digital effects?
Answer
Well, you'll always see big obvious special effects films. I think that probably the
biggest leap will be that you'll see digital effects in every film. There won't be a film
made that won't have something in it to enhance the story-telling and enhance the
production value of an ordinary, simple film. Il Postino might take advantage of
not having to go to x number of locations because they get to fabricate some in the studio
and still make you believe their story. After Titanic, big crowd scenes may also be
altered. I did a little work on Martin Scorsese's film, Kundun, where after he shot
it we needed 5000 more people in the scene and were able to take it and put them in there
and he was delighted with it because it looked perfectly real. It looked like he shot it
and that's the ultimate. But Kundun is not a film that you'd imagine has special
effect in it. So I think you'll see more and more of that sort of thing. Everybody's
interested in creating digital people and putting them in situations and positions that
otherwise could not be realised. That will probably happen because people are interested
in seeing that. Titanic has a lot of digital stunts, so these big elaborate stunts,
people falling the highest anybody has ever fell, are now completely eclipsed by digital
effects. For example, you could have a digital person fall five times higher than the most
dangerous stunt ever made.
Question 11
And what is happening now in Hollywood? Are a lot of film-makers using digital effects?
Answer
Everybody is doing it because everybody wants to learn about it now because all of a
sudden it's another tool that they ordinarily were not exposed to. Now in the planning of
their films they want to know what they can do: here's our script, show me something
because I might be able to make a better story with it. We had one meeting with somebody
and we showed them Titanic. They said stop all the production design, stop
everything, we have to go and redo what we planned to do because now all of a sudden we
can do all of these things that we thought we could not. So they stopped the
pre-production on the movie to alter it to take advantage of technology today.
Question 12
You talked about the three directors, Zemeckis, Cameron, and Spielberg. What is the
difference among their approaches?
Answer
They have adopted the fact that there is no difference using that tool than any other
tool; it is no different than building a set. So they're courageous. Other directors only
want to direct what's in front of them and not imagine what it could be. They imagine what
could be built, what could be physical. And they treat the effects portion like it is
real. It's real to them. When they direct the moment, they know that there's going to be a
ship behind them or there's going to be outer space or whatever. Whatever they're
imagination comes up with, they're able to look to the camera and fill in what's missing
know that eventually it's going to be what they hoped it was going to be. People would
think they're crazy on the set because they only have one person standing there and the
rest of it is no good, but yet the shot will come out because they imagined what it could
be like and take advantage of it. Very few people can do that because it is seeing what's
in your head and not what your eyes see. I think it's very hard for other people. So their
films have greater imagination to them and take advantage of things that are just not
physically in front of them.
Question 13
They have a great imagination but do they also know the technical aspect of computing and
what you can have with a digital system?
Answer
They don't necessarily know how to do it. They just know it can be done, and once they
know it can be done, that's very liberating. I can create this scenario because I know
that some of you people will figure it out. So they have enough knowledge to know that if
you hire the right people or engage the right people, they will figure out the solution.
Other people don't know that it can be done, and so when they hear somebody promise
something, they don't necessarily believe them or they believe them too much. You've seen
that in films as well where you see something very obvious, because someone said: we can
do it. Then it's very obvious what it is because the director or the producer or whoever
has hired them doesn't really know. But these guys know and they know when you tell them
something that you're either correct or half the truth or your "no" doesn't
really mean "no". They know it can be done and that's the difference, I think.
Question 14
Can you give me a definition of the visual supervisor, of your work?
Answer
The way I view my work is that I'm a second unit director. You are asked to film something
just the same way a normal, ordinary second unit director might film an action scene or
some other aspect of it. You're asked to direct and film a rocket launch. It doesn't
really exist without the tools of the trade - the computers and the models and things like
that - but you're asked to direct it. You say: here's the emotion, here's the idea. I'm
going to use this model, this digital background, this computer-generated ice, I'm going
to add whatever and create the shot just like somebody else can go out on real land and
create a shot. I just have to break it down into the different elements that I do it. But
the work is no different, because, ultimately, when it's all put together, it's judged as
harshly or as kindly as any other image of the movie, whether you believe it, whether it
works in the story or not. It should be thought of that way and not as a technical hand
because that doesn't mean anything. It only means what it looks like. It doesn't matter
how you got it. My job is to come up with what I think the image should be like in
conjunction with the director, if the director wants to be that involved. Sometimes they
don't, it's just: you figure it out. Then you realise it isn't, and you design all the
different ways that it could be done: who is going to do the synthetic water, who is going
to do the synthetic people walking around, who's going to do this, and then you supervise
every moment of it to make sure it's all directed like the original picture you saw in
your head that you're convincing the director is the right choice.
Question 15
Was there a time in Titanic where you tried to convince the director and you
succeeded?
Answer
Most of the time, yes. Originally, even for Jim Cameron it's very difficult to believe -
because he hasn't seen it before - that digital people and digital water and the ability
to take part of his set and add the rest of the set to the point where you can't see where
his set ends and a computer-generated set begins. Then a person falling from his set
through the fake set, hitting the water, with digital people swimming in the water. It was
very difficult to convince him. He got on board very quickly because he believed that you
said you could pull it off. But at first it's a very daunting challenge because you've
never seen it before. And this is his big movie. He has to trust that the film doesn't
fall apart, that maybe we overstepped our bounds or we overstepped our ability to produce
it. Every shot had to be convincing. We showed a test early on and so it was easier and
easier to be convinced, even though he didn't see the real thing. The difficult thing is,
you say that's what you're going to do, you shoot all the elements to make that happen.
But you don't see it all come together until six months later, and you still have to shoot
it as if it's going to work without the backup plan, because there is no backup plan.
Question 16
We're almost at the end of the century and digital effects is a great revolution for the
world of the cinema...
Answer
I'm proud to be a part of this and may be in some small way have helped it or made it more
visible or more possible sooner. It would always have been there. It always would have
happened. It would be nice to know that in some way I was there when it was happening.
It's a part of the film business that I have loved ever since I was small and I was
nominated for a movie that... I didn't think I could even be in the film business, so I
was so delighted to be a part of the whole scenario, and maybe even help in some way.
Question 17
Your next work?
Answer
I don't know what the next work is. I'd love to be able to direct something if I'm allowed
to, and some people are interested and there are some scripts I've been reading and if
not, then maybe some other great film that I haven't seen the script for yet is going to
come up.
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