Light & Magic (2022) s02e03 Episode Script

1
OKA: When I got to ILM,
it was really interesting,
because the first impression was like,
"Hmm, this is not right."
You're making Star Wars.
It's all this, like,
huge Hollywood company.
I get there and I'm expecting all this,
like, wow, you know,
all the lights and action and everything.
It's like a dentist's office.
JIM: The street that ILM was on is Kerner.
And Star Wars had been a big deal.
And when George moved
the business up here,
he wanted to keep it low-key
so that people wouldn't know
what was going on and so forth.
DENNIS: We had a door
that said Kerner Optical Company.
That was just a diversion
so people wouldn't be thinking,
"I don't see Industrial Light & Magic,
or I don't see Star Wars anywhere."
They walk past and go on to somebody else,
to the auto repair shop.
KNOLL: One of the things
that I felt like I could always say
when I was touring people
around ILM was
just by the kind of
ratty rundown nature of the building that,
"Hey, we're putting
every dollar on the screen."
It's not going into
polished brass door knobs.
It's going on screen.
(THEME MUSIC PLAYING)
I got handed a script
for Pirates of the Caribbean.
I'll admit, my first reaction
when I saw the script was,
"Oh, my God, this can't be any good."
I read through it,
and the script was pretty good.
And so my next thought was,
"Well, what about Hal?"
HAL: And so, he slides the script
across the desk
and it says "Pirates of the Caribbean."
And I thought, "Oh, it's a movie
based on a theme park ride."
I don't know.
Yo-ho, yo-ho, a pirate's life for me ♪
How do you make a story
out of that, right?
Strike your colors,
ya bloomin' cockroaches!
Show 'em your larboard side.
It just seemed like, "Okay, you know,
this is what I get handed."
(WHISTLING)
I love making a movie
that's not supposed to work.
That's the magic. The adventure is, like,
we don't know what's going to happen.
A guy is shooting and poking
and firing guns and doing all this stuff.
Gore's whole vision for the project
was offbeat and interesting and fresh.
So, yeah, that first meeting,
I came out of there just, you know,
a couple of inches off the ground.
It's kind of the punk rock Western, right?
I mean, pirates are kind of rogues.
They have a code,
but they're willing to break it.
In a corrupt world,
there's no place for an honest thief.
That aspect of the film
was what initially grabbed me.
The genre was really nonexistent,
so it was super-exciting
to come back to it.
Fire!
(CANNONS FIRING)
I had grown up watching these
old classic movies from the '40s and '50s
of wooden boat in a studio tank,
and I just loved that stuff.
Suddenly, I had this script
where I had this opportunity
to build a tank
and build some big wooden boats
and shoot them
kind of like in the Paramount
or 20th Century Fox lot.
And I thought, "This'll be huge fun."
Out back here, the stage guys built
about a four-foot wall.
Super, super strong.
Lined it with plastic.
We filled it with water.
So we're having pirate ships
that are 35-feet long.
And these giant sets
had to have pyro and model
and stage guys with rigs
to pull the ships across and wind.
Talk about exciting.
MAN: Fire!
(CREW CHEERING AND APPLAUDING)
KNOLL: Hey, can I show you something here?
VERBINSKI: Yeah.
This is your geography.
VERBINSKI: John and I have
a weird psychic connection.
My father was a nuclear physicist,
and so was John's.
And we found out years later
they knew each other.
I'm usually saying to John, like,
"I need this tool
that doesn't exist to do something."
The dynamics aren't gonna be
what you want,
and then I'm gonna be
trying to get rid of it.
You get a lot more energy
from someone like that
when he starts to become challenged.
VERBINSKI: Action!
KNOLL: One of the big challenges
on Pirates 1
was that these pirates are cursed,
so that when they appear in moonlight,
they're these desiccated skeletons.
And when they're out of the moonlight,
they're actors in their picture costumes.
VERBINSKI: Action!
KNOLL: And they had to transition
from live-action to CG and then back.
And so I thought,
"Well, let's just shoot it with the actor,
"and then we'll shoot a clean plate,
"and I'll just paint out
what I need to paint out,
"and we'll just kind of deal with it."
Our paint crew got to be
really, really good at doing that.
Couldn't resist, mate.
VERBINSKI: It was important to understand
what's actually happening,
particularly as Barbossa transitions
in the moonlight
when he's explaining who we are.
It was a tight shot.
And we wanted to work on that shot first
because we just knew
it would be challenging.
And if we could nail it,
the audience would buy into the effect.
So we did a little trick
where for about a half-second after he
transforms into our CG skeleton version,
we kept his real eyes in there.
Then he does a little half-blink
and it switches to all CG
from that point on
to kind of keep that little piece
that we knew the audience was staring at
for just a little longer over the border
from real to digital.
You best start believing
in ghost stories, Miss Turner.
You're in one.
And it really worked.
-(LAUGHS)
-(ALL LAUGHING)
Hal had started as a stop-motion animator.
He really connected with the work.
My upbringing, uh, the most important
part of it was on a ranch in Colorado,
about a million miles
from anything film-related.
That gave me a strong identification
with Luke Skywalker,
both in terms of the fantasy narrative
of Star Wars
and being far, far
from the bright center of the universe,
or whatever Luke says about that.
Well, if there's a bright center
to the universe,
you're on the planet
that it's farthest from.
-(HELICOPTER WHIRRING)
-(ROARING)
(SCREAMING)
HAL: I was living on a pretty steady diet
of midnight movies,
horror, sci-fi, fantasy, mystery
most of the old Universal horror films,
everything by Ray Harryhausen.
The sort of birthplace of the idea
of being an animator for me
was seeing the original King Kong on TV.
I was outraged
at Kong's treatment in the film
and asked my mother to help me
draft a letter to the local TV station
who I held accountable for his death.
In 1988, I started on Will Vinton Studios
doing stop-motion clay animation.
And they were blowing up
because they had gotten this account,
the California Raisins,
which were kind of a blip
on the cultural radar in the '80s.
Ooh, I heard it through the grapevine ♪
HAL: My goal was
to ultimately come down to the Bay Area
and work for ILM.
So joining ILM ultimately was huge for me.
VERBINSKI: We were huge fans
of Ray Harryhausen
and Jason and the Argonauts.
But a lot of that stuff's locked off.
They're miming.
We didn't want to lock off the camera.
(PIRATE GRUNTING)
GORE: We wanted to liberate the camera.
When you've got, you know,
70 characters interlaced
and you're handheld and they're all doing
this sort of choreography,
you want to make it feel like
there is no plan,
that you're literally reacting.
That guy's head's
bouncing across the floor,
that's just happening,
so you want to respond intuitively.
That was probably the biggest challenge.
KNOLL: The only thing
that really made sense
was to go ahead and shoot the actors
in their picture costumes
and then match move them
as closely as we could.
(BABBLING)
(GROANING)
But that process was really fraught
and difficult and error-prone.
There were times when the characters
were only going to be the skeletons
where we did do some motion capture.
We just shot it on our stage here with
some of our animators playing the roles.
(SCREAMING)
All right. Looks good.
We were right in the finishing months,
and Ray made
one of his period visits to ILM,
and he sat at my desk and I showed him
some of the shots from Pirates.
And he had a big smile on his face.
He just got a big kick out of it
and really enjoyed it.
For anyone who grew up on Ray Harryhausen,
and particularly folks who then
subsequently did stop-motion as a job,
you know, nothing could be more perfect.
JOHNSTON: So, by the time
Revenge of the Sith came along,
you were already in a digital pipeline.
-But George kept pushing the envelope.
-Well, yeah.
Revenge of the Sith is when we really
started to use a lot of digital doubles.
In this particular shot,
we're going to have to create
a digital Obi-Wan.
Here you can see
we start putting in the cloth sim,
so we're thinking about how the cloth
is going to be reacting to the throw.
And here's the final shot.
We now have a digital stunt double
doubling Ewan McGregor.
George was always pushing the envelope
in terms of what he wanted
from his fights.
(LIGHTSABERS BUZZING, HUMMING)
And Revenge of the Sith had,
I think, more sword-fighting in it
than any of the other films.
(LIGHTSABER HUMMING)
Anytime you see
someone leap or jump or flip,
it's highly likely
that it's a fully digital character.
The other thing we did
was head replacements.
So there's a fight between
Palpatine and Mace Windu
where Ian, as amazing as an actor he is,
he was like, "Guys, I can't I"
He could barely
You know, he can't swordfight.
So they had a stunt double doing it,
but then it didn't look enough
like Palpatine.
So we had a digital head that we put on.
So that was some of the big innovations
that we were doing.
(LIGHTSABERS CRACKLING)
The scale of the show, it kept growing.
Not unlike the Star Wars
to Empire to Jedi.
I think on Episode I,
it was just under 2,000 shots.
(ENGINE REVVING)
And then, Episode II
was a little over.
(SHOCKWAVE REVERBERATING)
And I think Episode III
was like 2,500 VFX shots.
(LIGHTSABERS BUZZING, CRACKLING)
So I was trying to work out technique
for all the sequences.
(ENGINE WHINING)
This is a very, very succinct
collage of early ideas for Mustafar.
And as we developed it more,
things got a little bit darker.
What's interesting now
is that the model shop is doing a build
that's not too dissimilar to this,
uh, at a very large scale.
PETERSON: When I was presented, you know,
"Here's the storyboards for Mustafar,"
just now I was thinking,
"Well, we've used the word big
and really big.
"And Mustafar was, like,
really, really big."
You know, and it's
We don't quite have words for that.
LUCAS: It's meant to look like hell.
And that's sort of where
Darth Vader comes from.
KNOLL: My CG supervisor was pushing for,
"Hey, we can do this stuff
in computer graphics.
"We can do lava. It'll look great."
And I had had enough experience
seeing fluid sims being done
that I was skeptical that we were
going to get enough resolution out of it,
enough detail.
Scott Farrar had done a movie called Congo
back in the mid-'90s
where they had done lava using Methocel.
And that was
I felt like a pretty good way to work.
And so, I pitched doing Mustafar
as a big miniature.
That was
I think the miniature was 40-feet wide
by about 30-feet across.
PETERSON: It was probably
not quite as long as a tennis court
and not quite as wide.
Not only was it a huge sculpture to do,
you know, out of these huge foam blocks,
but there were, you know, hundreds of them
sort of built like big building blocks.
And we built all the lava channels
with clear Plexiglass bottoms
so that you could have
this translucent Methocel
and under-light it
to get the glow coming up from them.
Yeah. That's orange.
And then, off to the side,
we had someone you couldn't see
that would be shoveling
burnt cork of various sizes,
from half-inch to eighth-inch
to two inches.
And so, the lava when it came down,
would have that black crusty thing on it.
I don't know quite how to describe it.
It's like a ballet that
everything has to come together,
you know, to make that set work.
But it worked out incredibly well,
I thought.
George was very satisfied.
It was very gratifying for the model shop
to do something like that,
and have George so satisfied with it.
(GRUNTING)
(LIGHTSABERS BUZZING, CRACKLING)
LUCAS: No, I think that looks great.
Very good.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
DAVIS: At the end of Revenge of the Sith,
that was it.
We were done with the Star Wars movies
for a while.
In 2006, I got laid off
because things had gotten
really quiet at the studio.
LUCAS: We knew we were going to build
a new ILM at some point.
And the opportunity
at the Presidio came up
and I said, "Well, let's get that."
I just wanted a beautiful place
for people to work.
KNOLL: There was
no visual effects business model
that could ever support
building a building like that.
Um, George spent
a lot of money building that
that he knew
he was never going to get back.
LUCAS: So when they saw it,
they realized that the old way
of doing things was going to be gone.
DAVIS: We were really unsure
as to what was going on.
And then they had a meeting,
and they invited us all
back to the practical division.
That's when they gave us the announcement
that the practical division
was being sold off.
-JOHNSTON: How did that feel?
-Oh, it was heartbreaking.
I had always imagined, you know
once I got that job at ILM,
I would retire there.
The sale of the model shop was
(SIGHS) It was the end of a great era.
There was no going back.
When I came to ILM,
ILM was pretty much the only game in town.
MORRIS: There was a long period of time
where we dominated
the visual effects industry.
I'm Jim Morris.
I'm the general manager at ILM.
These folks are some of the key people.
DAVIS: The plus side of ILM having
such incredibly talented people
and having so many of them
Pretty much everywhere I work,
I do run into a couple of people from ILM.
And if you look at
all the visual effects companies
that are out there now,
the majority of them
have been started by people at ILM.
MORRIS: It's funny, back when I started,
we'd sit around saying like,
"One day, every film is going to need
the stuff we do in visual effects."
Later, it became,
"Be careful what you wish for."
You know, suddenly you've spawned
all this competition.
There had been some people doing
some simple CG in commercials and all.
We were still way ahead.
But we were in competition.
ILM was seen as
sort of like both the pinnacle,
but also sort of as the champion
you wanted to take down.
KNOLL: A lot of companies were
trying to buy their way into it,
offering people
double and triple their salaries,
which was really great for them,
but it was really hard for us.
BROMLEY: There was some poaching going on.
And, you know, people are going to
be disgruntled from time to time, right?
JOHNSTON: Anyone ever try to
poach you away from ILM?
Yeah, I had a few people
wanting to take me.
A couple of offers over the years.
But nothing was quite as compelling
as being here in this storied facility.
JOHNSTON: Who were the major new players?
And did ILM feel the competition?
There were a number of companies
that got to be really, really good.
-(GUNSHOTS)
-(BULLETS WHOOSHING)
KNOLL: Especially in the early 2000s.
MUREN: Some of the work
that was coming out was really good.
Every year, it got better and better.
(ROARING)
Wētā, I would say,
is our biggest competitor.
There's a lot of similarities in the way
we approach our companies and the work.
You know, part of that is Joe Letteri
running the company.
He was a senior effects supervisor at ILM
before he went to Wētā.
My title is technical director.
And I'm responsible
for the way things look up on the screen.
The reason I went, really,
was to work on Gollum,
because he was just a favorite character
of mine from the books.
My precious!
There were a couple things
that were revolutionary about Gollum.
From a believability point of view,
we needed the skin to look like skin.
So there was a technique
that we were just starting to develop
at ILM before I left
called subsurface scattering.
You don't have any friends!
Nobody likes you!
The light goes in, scatters out the sides.
That's what allowed us
to make Gollum look so lifelike.
(GROWLS)
For achievement in visual effects
JADA PINKETT: And the Oscar goes to
Jim Rygiel, Joe Letteri,
Randall William Cook, and Alex Funke
for Lord of the Rings:
The Return of the King.
Thanks everyone at Wētā Digital
for that burst of creative energy.
It's funny,
because everything is top secret
while you're working on the film.
And as soon as it comes out,
we just all talk about it.
So everyone knows what you did
as soon as the film comes out.
We come from
such a small community to start with
that we still maintain these friendships.
So we all build on each other's work.
Gollum probably made it
a little bit easier for ILM
to pitch a digital version of Davy Jones.
And they upped the game on that.
This is Davy Jones.
The first time Gore talked to John and I
about a Pirates 2 and 3 with Davy Jones,
he's like, "I've got this CG character.
He'll be in a lot of the movie.
"He's going to be super-important. I want
you guys to be thinking about that."
It was going to be his Gollum.
VERBINSKI: Early on,
I just started thinking that
what if being out on the Flying Dutchman
over time was like a curse, a disease,
that you started to
kind of grow parts of the ocean floor,
becoming the dregs of the ocean
and become part of these characters.
So that was fun.
And early on, just doing sketches
of all those characters,
it was joyous.
And then, we knew
we needed the devil himself
to sort of rule over all of them.
And calling in a really good friend
and amazing artist, Crash McCreery,
to come in and do, like,
"Okay, let's design Davy Jones
"knowing that
that's the fundamental premise."
On Pirates 1, Geoffrey Rush
gets to play Barbossa as Barbossa,
and only transitions into a CG character
in these sort of handful of shots.
Davy Jones, he's going to be digital for,
virtually, well, every frame that he's in.
So really, the question became
less about motion capture
and more about emotion capture.
So you do this,
but then this is sort of stuck out there,
-and it seems like there's
-Yeah, yeah. I see.
VERBINSKI: Bill Nighy
was going to be Davy Jones.
He did not want to give up
the thought behind his
the window to the soul.
I don't want to give up
anything in his performance.
And that was sort of the challenge
to John, really, and the team.
How do we get rid of this conflict
of visual effects and actor?
You will watch this.
HICKEL: We knew we were going to have
a great actor in the role.
We wanted them to act on set
face to face with all the other actors,
and for that performance
to be the performance that's in the film.
This had to be something robust.
It had to be field portable
and low-footprint on set.
And it was Hal Hickel who asked,
"Hey, if these guys
are going to be CG all the time,
"then they can be wearing anything, right?
"Can we put
some kind of tracking marks on them
"to make that process
a little more technically accurate
"and not as labor-intensive?"
They came back to us
with the IMocap system.
Damn you.
My working costume is
a deeply attractive grey tracksuit.
People have seen the actors,
of course, in these grey suits
with the little reflective balls on them.
We came up with a slightly different suit.
And for one thing,
it had these bands instead of balls.
And that was just about how
we were planning to track their motion.
KNOLL: Carefully designed tracking marks
that would let them recover
both position and orientation
and scale of all the joints.
And this meant that
the cameras could be operated
however they wanted to be operated.
They could be lit
any way the DP wanted to light them.
And we could be standing
in two feet of water in a lagoon,
or we could be on the deck of a ship
in pouring rain.
Everybody could just ignore
that we were doing visual effects,
just shoot the movie,
and we'll do what we need to do later.
VERBINSKI: Fortunately, we had Bill,
who can walk on set in a spandex outfit
covered in dots
with little polka dots on his face,
and you can show him
the picture of Davy Jones
and he's like, "Got it. I'm that guy."
And suddenly, you feel like
you're a time-traveler in your pajamas.
He's just bringing everything.
Bill would do these amazing things
with his jaw.
He would do all this kind of crazy
And he has no jaw.
His character has no jaw. There's a beard.
Open the chest. I need to see it!
The most daunting task
was this beard of 40-some tentacles.
ING: It had to be constantly alive.
It has a mind of its own,
so as he was acting, it would twist
and twirl around like an octopus.
Coiling around each other,
colliding with each other,
moving in response to his body motion,
getting hooked on each other
and pulling apart.
VERBINSKI: Interesting translucency
right in there.
KNOLL: Is it too much?
VERBINSKI: My only question is does it
make him a little too fragile calamari?
So, extensive conversations
with our team about,
no, here he's agitated, or here he's coy,
or here it's curling,
at that moment he's thinking.
There was no way
we could possibly do it by hand.
We would still be making the film today
if we tried that.
There had to be some kind of
an automatic procedural way to do that
so that the beard could
automatically be doing that in the shot
while the animators layered on
the facial animation
and the body animation.
KNOLL: So, you know, I think we've made
a lot of improvements to it.
VERBINSKI: Is it going soft
before the rack to Orlando?
HICKEL: So there's no plan B.
The simulation engine we were creating
to run his beard had to work.
And it provided a lot of sleepless nights
for me, literally, until it did work.
And then, once it worked,
it was like magic.
It worked perfectly.
That was sort of next level,
all those things combined
to feel like there's nothing CG about it.
You know, it feels like
he's literally that character.
Damn you, Jack Sparrow!
NAOMI WATTS: And the Oscar goes to
John Knoll, Hal Hickel,
Charles Gibson, and Allen Hall
for The Pirates of the Caribbean.
HAL: Pirates 2 came along
at a really interesting time
in terms of movies and visual effects,
because we were in sort of early 2000s
and there was kind of a malaise
in terms of audience reaction
to visual effects.
Almost a backlash, maybe.
The rapid
Super-rapid expansion of possibilities
in terms of visual effects was
in a way kind of responsible for making
audiences lose their sense of wonder,
which we really kind of depend on.
They stopped asking, like,
"How is it done?"
They'd see it and say,
"They can do anything nowadays.
"They do it with a computer."
That was the project that showed me
how we get an audience to say wow again.
They were like, "I don't know
what I'm seeing there. I don't
"Is that makeup? That can't be makeup.
What is that?"
And that gave them
that little spark of wonder back.
Thanks very much.
HICKEL: It kind of renewed my faith
that as filmmakers
and visual effects artists,
we could get audiences to just go, "Wow."
-(SHOUTING)
-(SCREAMING)
VERBINSKI: By the time
we were doing the third movie,
there's the burden of
how do you one-up the previous film?
We want to launch in.
Take turns, vying for close-up. Bam.
-MAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
-And then, kaboom.
We needed to go out of
what I'd call the trilogy
with something extraordinary.
Probably the sky first,
and then a kind of first strike
of lightning hits the sea and
And then it starts to move.
So the two ships
in the maelstrom felt like,
okay, you could walk away saying,
"Yeah, top that."
It'd be great to see it framed like that.
But you saw these guys jumping off
VERBINSKI: They're going that way?
VERBINSKI: The challenges were, you know,
that sort of location-based filmmaking
that we had embraced with the first two,
we couldn't embrace any longer.
There's no way
we could actually be at sea for that.
KNOLL: This is the biggest
blue screen setup I've ever seen.
And I think this may be
the largest blue screen ever.
Got a lot of pixels to fill in.
But I'm not a big fan of CG water.
Water on that scale and how it behaves,
we're still fundamentally building it
as three or more basic
completely different particle simulations.
Only the problem I have
with water sims is,
you can get a big mass of water,
but when it breaks, it turns to foam.
And then the foam turns to spray.
And it always looks like there's stitches.
It's something that's inherently not real.
And I think that was the one request
that broke John,
was like,
"Hey, can you make me a water sim
"that will be massive,
but also break and become foam
"and then the foam will become spray
all in one sim?"
It was much harder
than I expected it to be.
We had done pretty good fluid surface
simulations on previous projects
and I thought, "Okay, well, if we can do
"a decent-looking patch of water
in the foreground
"and we can keep repeating that
into the distance,
"it's going to fade off
into a big whirlpool shape
"and rain and thunder and splashes."
And as soon as I saw
the first render of that idea,
I thought it looked terrible.
Plan B was
I needed to do the whirlpool itself
as the biggest simulation
I could afford to do,
and then do all of that fine detail,
procedural detail in the foreground.
Ay-yi-yi-yi-yi.
KNOLL: Gore hated it.
It was like a toilet bowl.
It was like the ships
felt like a miniature.
It felt completely off.
Your brain's just going,
"This isn't real."
Uh (CHUCKLES)
Then we needed a plan C.
The ship that takes the inside lane
is moving faster.
Those were some dark days for me
because the clock was ticking.
It was a very compressed post,
and a lot of shots.
They are trying to make it look plausible.
JOHNSTON: John said
you pushed him pretty hard.
Yeah.
Yeah. And he loves it.
He responds to that challenge.
So I realized that
the only part that I really cared about
was the surface of the water.
So what if we took the whole maelstrom
and we flattened it
so it was like a pancake?
And then, when we were done with the sim,
we would transform it back
into that funnel shape.
And that finally got us to a place
where we were getting enough detail
and resolution out of it
and it looked big enough for Gore's taste.
Fire!
KNOLL: That's what's in the movie.
That was plan C.
It was done with that looming deadline
and a lot of sleepless nights.
Just last thing we're working on
are little tiny water splashes
on a bunch of those.
Wow, that's fantastic, John.
It's a friendship
driven out of a love for adventure.
We've never been there before.
Let's go there together.
(RUMBLING)
An effect isn't just spectacle.
If it's spectacle, you don't sit like this
drawn into the screen,
sucked into the experience.
You sit back and you
And there's a huge aesthetic distance
between the audience and the film,
because the effect is
pushing the audience away
because it's just maybe too big,
too much to consume,
to much for your eye
to be able to sort it out
into something that makes emotional sense.
And so, every single
special effect for me, anyway,
in my films needs to make
some sort of emotional sense.
I think I got a call from Steven one day
saying he wants to do War of the Worlds.
-(LASER BLASTING)
-(EXPLOSION)
MUREN: And I had seen the original movie
when it came out,
and I was like six or eight
and just thought it was amazing.
So, okay.
And I remember one of the challenges
of War of the Worlds was that
Steven had thrown down the gauntlet
and said, "We'll make this film
in eight months."
You know, a huge film like this,
which should really be
about a year and a half,
he's like, "Let's do it in eight months."
I remember when I heard that, I was like,
"Okay, wow, the clock is ticking,
we've got to run."
We started shooting in December,
and it was gonna be out in June or July.
We were shooting in the cold
on the Hudson River
at five degrees in the middle of the night
for a ferry that sinks.
And then we'd be shooting
in the daytime in New York
and the sun would be going down
behind the buildings at 4:00 p.m.,
so we could only shoot
between 8:00 and 4:00.
So everything was against us.
But all those things
also made people alert
and made them be, I think, more creative.
BOLTE: The great thing in the design
of War of the Worlds was
that the camera was always kept
where Tom Cruise was
so that you as an audience member
had the sense that
you were the protagonist,
that these things were happening to you
and in front of you.
And the camera wouldn't go to a place
where you couldn't be.
And this was because of the two of these
master filmmakers working together
to work out every single shot.
In the front seat.
-Whose car is this?
-Just get in.
MUREN: There's a scene
in War of the Worlds
where Tom Cruise is racing away
from the war machines
that are starting to
blow up the area around him,
and there's this big bridge
in the background.
And it was shot
in a real residential area.
And Steven wanted the bridge
to be hit from behind by explosions
and kind of curl up like a scorpion tail,
which is a neat idea.
And I kind of tried it, and I thought,
"You know, it looks
kind of manmade and fake-y,
"but what if we try it in sections,
which is the way bridges are really made.
"Between pylons would be the beam,
and it could kind of bend and stay there.
"Then the next one would ratchet up.
And is that good for you?"
He said, "Yeah, that'll work."
The bridge is now a CG bridge.
The houses are models that are made
that we're sort of combining
into the real background there
and covering up the real house
that's been undisturbed.
Falling from the bridge
is this tanker truck that is a model,
probably about four or five feet long.
We shot it outdoors in Marin
in front of the blue screen,
just dropping it down,
and then it explodes,
which is a couple of other elements.
So the thing is made up of
a bunch of separate pieces of elements
put together,
and it looks like this one continuous shot
with all these different things going on.
(EXPLOSIONS)
MAN: Next shot! Good!
It looked really great on the monitor.
Dennis is terrific in the sense that
he can see
right through the clarity of designs
and get to the heart of it.
So you can try to
sell him with all this bling,
but it's like, "Is this design real,
does it work?"
MUREN: There's a shot in there
that the camera is moving
all around the minivan
that Tom is driving with his family.
It was all shot indoors
in front of the blue screen.
And it was made up of
four or five different sections
that the parts of the car
could be pulled away, the van,
and then you would switch to part two,
and then you would go as far as you could
and then stop.
And there would be a transition
of some sort, an invisible wipe.
Like a
You know, a pillar would go by in the car,
and that could be where it switches
from one moment to another.
For the backgrounds, which is the freeway,
all the cars stuck on the freeway,
and he's driving through it,
that was shot actually on a real location
where they blocked the freeway off.
And Pablo Helman,
who was my associate on that,
he would have, like, six or eight cameras
on the top of it
shooting in every direction,
making this big tile of 360 degrees.
And when you put all those together,
you had a very seamless transition
moving all around
for this two-and-a-half minute
dialogue scene of the actors
as though you're, like,
magically moving through the car.
-Who is attacking us?
-Rachel.
Rachel, you've got to keep it down.
Rachel. Rachel. Shut up, Rachel!
-You are freaking her out!
-Look, I'm driving!
Do something!
War of the Worlds, I think,
was one of ILM's, actually,
a kind of a high watermark
for the company,
and a film that didn't get
a whole lot of attention.
But when I look at that film,
I was astonished
at how much they were able to do
with a very little budget.
That was my favorite film.
-(DEEP RUMBLE)
-(PEOPLE SCREAMING)
MUREN: It's everything I liked to do.
Spectacle.
It's long takes.
It's impossible.
And the sequence in Newark
when the pod comes out of the ground
and all that stuff
it was terrific.
Tom is running
and the people are running along with him
getting hit by these blasts
and they were becoming, like, ash.
And I had the clothes go up like angels
just so there's this
subtext going on with it, you know?
And it's all these amazing shots.
And after that, I said, "I can't do
any better than this," so I sort of
(CHUCKLING) That's kind of about
the last show I officially did.
We had made some conservative decisions
in the past.
You know, as an example,
we turned down Avatar
after many, many months of bidding it
and working on the tests
that got it greenlit.
You not fear.
You strong heart.
Our leadership at the time
when faced with,
"Okay, this could be unachievable,
it's so huge,"
they were not willing to take that risk.
But we had a great relationship
with Gore Verbinski.
And, you know,
he had this incredible idea.
Rango.
BOLTE: Rango was a huge undertaking.
It was the first digital feature
that ILM ever did.
And it was really scary.
VERBINSKI: I don't know how to make
an animated movie.
I mean, I know how to put
2,000 shots together and tell a story.
And we certainly have made
visual effects shots
that are fully computer-generated.
We've made lots of those.
(SQUAWKS)
(GROANS)
I wanted to work with ILM
just because I wanted to take everything
that we'd learned from Davy Jones
and, you know, Maya and Kevin
and Hal and the team,
like, everybody that we had become tight
with in that process.
It could have been
a disaster, financially.
This was an example of between John Knoll
and Hal Hickel and Jacqui Lopez and me
and a number of other people
really pushing the company to say,
"You know what,
this is going to be amazing
"and we want to be a part of it."
ING: This was a new thing, right?
Rango was completely an animated feature.
And so, super-excited
to work on this project.
VERBINSKI: I think when you're making
an animated movie,
it's not sort of
fly-it-as-you-build-it approach, you know?
So the story reel became very important.
And to afford that, we were at my house.
Bring the flux
Flux capacitors
Are they phasing right now?
-Are they phasing?
-Yeah, they're phasing.
VERBINSKI: Seven artists
over a period of 18 months.
We had a microphone, we had a Mac,
and we were just basically drawing
every frame of that narrative
and building the animatic
so that it was really execution-specific.
There was a huge change in ILM
from "shot-based"
to kind of, "Hey, we're telling a story."
With typical visual effects,
you're working on this one shot
out of context.
"I'm making this thing.
I don't know where it fits."
But on Rango, it's like,
"No, stop thinking like that."
Like, fundamentally change
that way of thinking.
We are "What's the scene?"
Gore wanted to foster
a little more family feeling on Rango.
He wanted to get to know the artists
and invite them in as individuals
into this filmmaking process and family.
In other words, make them all feel like,
"Hey, we're making a movie together."
So we had spent all this time
discussing the scene
and where is the character coming from,
where are they going to,
where have they been,
you know, so that every character
who walks into a bar has a backstory.
Uh, and so, that became, I think,
really joyous for the animators.
They became a family.
Basically, at that point,
they are my actors.
And until the people of Andromeda 5
return him safe and sound,
I will not sell my ranch!
-What?
-What are you doing?
What? What are you doing?
And there was just so much joy.
You could see kind of like this great
release of, "We never get to do this."
You know, like
"We're telling the whole story."
HICKEL: Most of our other departments
had been for years really focused on
doing things with realism.
And fortunately, this project of Gore's
kind of coupled animated characters
but with a world that,
while it was stylized,
it had a very tactile, real feel.
So if something was made of wood,
it was very realistic-looking wood.
If it was rusty iron,
it was realistic-looking rusty iron.
It wasn't some stylized,
painted version of that.
I came on to do the look development
and shepherd through
basically the whole town of Dirt,
where all of these little critters live
out in the desert.
So, really, what came to us
on the team was
all of the reference filtering through
Tim Alexander and folks.
And I remember them all telling us,
"There Will Be Blood.
"There Will Be Blood.
Use that as your reference."
Super-hot baking sun.
High noon coming down on the characters.
It's just like
everything had to look parched.
The landscape, the buildings,
the characters, everybody's parched.
So we had to build
all that detail into this town
and make it super-unique
to Gore and his team's vision.
But we kept adding more and more detail,
so it started becoming unwieldy,
and layout artists, animators,
technical directors
couldn't work with it anymore.
So, a super-emergency
in the middle of the show.
We had to really step back
and think about ways
we could make it more modular
so that you could turn things on and off,
have levels of detail
of each model of the building,
bake out certain aspects
of the geometry and the texture
so that it would render.
The vocal recording process
was really unusual on Rango.
Gore, coming from live-action,
did not want to have his actors
just one by one recording separately
at a little lectern.
He wanted to have them ensemble
and recording together.
And even
We even had props and cameras on set
to kind of shoot the scenes.
And you would get those happy accidents
and people stepping on each other's lines
and so forth.
-That was really good!
-It was-- No, I'm choking.
-Oh. Oh, you do
-(CHUCKLING)
You actually ate the bullet.
I I ate my prop.
HAL: So that Gore can really get
he can work within the way
he's used to working with them.
And that process was dubbed
emotion capture,
which a lot of people have asked about.
Emotion capture
was really just a jokey name
for this whole goofy thing
of having the actors
on this empty stage in their
cowboy costumes acting like idiots.
May I present
Madam Lupone's Terpsichorean
Troupe of Traveling Thespians!
-What is that?
-I think they's thespians.
Thespians?
HICKEL: It wasn't about
reinventing feature animation.
It was about working the way
he was comfortable working
and getting that kind of live feel.
Not that we broke every rule,
but we were certainly more of a hybrid
visual effects model animated movie.
ING: I love everything
I worked on in Rango.
It wasn't a sort of cookie-cutter
animated feature.
Uh, it was this weird blend of
a photorealistic style
blended with a very stylized
look and feel.
HICKEL: It didn't look like Pixar,
Disney feature animation,
didn't look like Illumination,
didn't look like DreamWorks.
It was its own animal in every regard.
The animators at ILM
always had that ability,
but didn't always have the opportunity.
And I think, really, that's the magic
of Industrial Light & Magic.
We're all storytellers.
ROSE DUIGNAN: This used to be
the original ILM.
Magic was made here.
When George moved everybody
to the Presidio,
all the model shop people stayed.
We continued to work for ILM
and many others.
We did Pirates of the Caribbean,
Transformers, we did a ton of stuff.
But the revenues dropped
from 20 million to 10 million
to 5 million.
That's when I just said,
"Guys, it's over. It's really over."
Lots of memories on this stage.
This is where we shot so much stuff.
It was so fun.
And now we're organizing
for the final goodbye party.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
Good to see you.
I said something to George one time,
and it was right
(INDISTINCT CONVERSATION)
(CHEERING AND APPLAUDING)
In 1978, the art department
for Empire Strikes Back
was over in San Anselmo.
And one day, this wooden crate arrived.
We opened it up, and it was
the white plastic Boba Fett suit
that Ralph and I had been
working on designing.
I went to Jane Bay
and I said,
"I need a place to paint this thing."
And she handed me a set of keys.
She said, "George has just leased
a building in San Rafael at 3160 Kerner.
"It's empty.
You can have any room you want."
The other day Friday, actually,
we shot our last interview
for the Light & Magic Season 2 documentary
in this very stage right there.
And I think that it's time to say goodbye.
Uh, the work that was done here
by all of you people
and many who came before you
will live forever
on movie screens and TV screens
till the end of time.
And this is indeed hallowed ground.
So I would just like to say
ILM Kerner,
it's been a pleasure to know you.
Thank you.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUDING)
You know, it's in our DNA. It truly is.
I think that's the special sauce.
We strive to do things better.
We want to change and evolve,
whether it's in how we do the work
or how we manage the work
or how we engage with our talent.
In any kind of way,
we want to push the envelope.
George was always pushing ILM.
I think at one point, he said,
"ILM was created to do the impossible."
And we are continually asked
to the impossible.
We took a lot of pride in that.
So there was definitely a cultural thing
that was very ingrained
and still is ingrained in us forever.
It's funny, because I know most
people will think George Lucas,
Star Wars, right?
And yes, that's true. Definitely.
He's the creator of Star Wars.
He's the creator of Indiana Jones.
Those are the obvious things.
But I think in the industry,
he's going to go down
more as an innovator.
You know, you see THX sound.
He revolutionized audio
in motion pictures.
You look at nonlinear editing Avid.
We turn it sideways.
George Lucas was behind that.
And then you have
Pixar was born
from Industrial Light & Magic.
To infinity and beyond!
LEWIN: Now there's a lot of talk,
obviously, about AI and real-time.
I'm curious to see the extent to which
those technologies really move the needle.
It's hard to imagine that AI won't play
a massive role in digital effects.
It's going to make
a lot of work get approached
in completely different ways
than we've ever approached them before.
But I never feel like there's some
technology or some breakthrough
that's going to dramatically change
what we have that's so special at ILM,
which is the people.
37 years ago, I walked in that front door
and was instantly made to feel welcome.
Part of an amazing and formidable group
of the most talented people around.
If I carefully observed how they worked,
paid attention to what they were doing,
asked the right questions,
I thought I might get to a place
where I could say that I belonged here.
And to everybody
who helped build this place
and make the incredible art produced here,
a deep and sincere thank you
for all you did
and for welcoming me
to be a small part of that.
(CHEERING)
I attended just the greatest school ever
working for some of these folks.
And my way of paying back
is to try and do the same thing
for the next generation,
with the hope that
they can go to much higher heights
than I ever did.