July 25, 2024 • 50 mins
What fuels the imagination of a visual effects legend? Join us as Dennis Muren opens up about his remarkable journey from an LA kid in love with the spectacle of "War of the Worlds" to a nine-time Academy Award winner. From the highs of working on Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind to the technical challenges of creating groundbreaking sequences, Dennis's stories provide a rare glimpse into the heart and soul of cinematic magic.
Ever wondered how the iconic asteroid sequence in Empire Strikes Back was created or what it took to bring dinosaurs to life in Jurassic Park? Dennis delves into the creative processes behind these memorable moments, revealing the trial-and-error approaches, the collaborative spirit, and the sheer perseverance required. He also touches on how different directors like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg influenced his work and the fascinating transition from practical effects to digital graphics that revolutionized the industry.
Join us in an insightful conversation with Dennis where imagination meets innovation and every pixel tells a story.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Dennis Muren (00:01):
So I saw an alien invasion and a giant dinosaur
tearing apart New York City inthe same year.
I remember hiding behind theseat and my mom saying, okay,
you can look down, you can lookdown.
But when I walked out I saidwait, where is it?
Where's that stuff?
I like seeing that stuff.
Jennifer Coronado (00:16):
Hello and welcome to Everyone Is I am your
host, jennifer Coronado.
The intent of this show is toengage with all types of people
and build an understanding thatanyone who has any kind of
success has achieved thatsuccess because they are a
creative thinker.
So, whether you are an artistor a cook, or an award-winning
journalist, everyone hassomething to contribute to the
(00:36):
human conversation.
And now, as they say, on withthe show, on with the show.
When I think about DennisMirren, the first phrase that
comes into my mind is cinematicvisual innovation.
From his earliest days helpingto pioneer visual effects work
(00:58):
on the original Star Warstrilogy, to his work on ET, to
Terminator 2, to his later filmslike Steven Spielberg's AI and
War of the Worlds, thisnine-time Academy Award winner
represents the best of whatmovies can provide.
So, dennis Muren, welcome.
Dennis Muren (01:13):
Sure Nice to be here.
Jennifer Coronado (01:14):
I want to start very basically.
Where did you grow up, Dennis?
Dennis Muren (01:18):
I grew up in LA, la Cunada, which is near
Pasadena and Glendale andoutside of Hollywood.
But you know there'd always befilm shoots going on.
You'd see a truck parksomewhere.
If there were two trucks, itmeans there was a shooting of a
movie or a TV show.
So I would always, if I wasdriving, pull over and run out
and have a look.
Jennifer Coronado (01:37):
So as a little kid you were kind of
aware that you were living in acompany town and the company
town made movies.
Yeah, it was like that.
Dennis Muren (01:41):
But and the company Town Made Movies.
Yeah, it was like that.
But I was never going to do itbecause I wanted to do special
effects stuff.
I didn't want to do regularmovies and there was no effects
being done really in those daysthere were some commercials
being done in two or threeplaces and I did commercials.
But the big effects films therewas maybe one or two a year,
like Earthquake or ToweringInferno.
They were studio movies.
(02:02):
You had to be in the union todo them and so I just I went
around.
I tried to get work at Disney,at Fox, when I was really young
and everybody just said, sorry,we can't do anything for you
because you're not in the unionand they weren't hiring because
they weren't making very manymovies.
It was a dead end.
I was not looking forward orexpecting to get a career out of
(02:24):
this at all, but it wassomething I loved to do.
Jennifer Coronado (02:27):
I know the War of the Worlds is a film that
you love the original one,right.
So you look at that movie andyou think, oh, I want to do the
things that they're doing.
Was that how you were thinkingabout it?
Dennis Muren (02:37):
No, I think I was about seven when I saw that and
I also saw the Beast from 20,000Fathoms the same year.
So I saw an alien invasion anda giant dinosaur carrying apart
New York City in the same year.
I remember hiding behind theseat and my mom saying, okay,
you can look now, you can looknow.
When I walked out I said wait,where is it?
(02:57):
Where's that stuff?
I liked seeing that stuffReally.
I remember going up to Yosemitewhen they were doing the
firefall, the real firefall upthere, dropping fire, you know,
down 1500 feet at nighttime,glowing in the dark.
I mean it was unbelievable.
And my first trip when I waslike about nine, to new york
city and just seeing, you know,the concrete corridors was
(03:20):
unbelievable, the scale ofeverything.
So I've always been attractedto some sort of spectacle, you
know whether it's in a movie orreal life or something.
But I love the, of course,telling stories, at least effect
stories.
So not necessarily the wholemovies, but I but you know,
movies are something I've alwaysreally liked a lot.
And, uh, I found some friendsin la there are probably a half
(03:42):
dozen of us and all of la thatwere like my, and this is in the
late 50s and early 60s thatcared about these films and we
all kind of found each other.
We were our own group and grewup together and made our little
movies together and showed themto each other and all.
Jennifer Coronado (03:58):
How do you find each other?
How do you go about finding acommunity like that?
Dennis Muren (04:02):
There was a magazine, famous, monsters of
Filmland, that you could find ata few stores.
I found a copy of it on a tripto San Diego.
There weren't many places youcould find it and I wasn't
interested as much in themonsters as the special effects
and that's where you'd seepictures of King Kong or War of
the Worlds or something, becausethere was no way to see the
picture again unless you see themovie again, and then you had
(04:24):
to stay and see it a second timeto try to see it.
You couldn't stop it.
I tried shooting still photosin the movie theater and
sometimes it worked.
I shot still photos andeventually 8mm movies off the TV
.
I wanted to hold those images inmy head and we all have the
same stories.
I mean, we're just comparingnotes.
Recently we all said, yeah, wealways thought everybody could
(04:47):
hold an image in their head, butwe learned because we wanted to
see it so much and we've had todo that, just years and years
of having to do it.
Right now you know you can justgrab a freeze frame of
something, look at it and studyit and see 20 versions of it and
everything.
It's much easier.
I think you can probably learnmuch faster now than you ever
could, than we ever could,because there's so much
available.
Jennifer Coronado (05:12):
I had someone say to me once and I can't even
remember who it was that theythought that you, as an
individual, see the world in adifferent way than other people
do.
And when I hear you talk aboutthings like going to New York
and those big corridors rightand the fire fall, do you?
And obviously you know how yousee the world, but you don't
know if you see it differentlythan other people because you
live in your own experience.
What do you think someone wouldsay you see the world
differently.
Dennis Muren (05:34):
I guess they see me from the outside and are
comparing me to other people orsomething I don't know.
And you know, I thought that alittle bit that everybody could
pre-visualize stuff and theycan't just, realizing that
within a couple of years,realized that not everybody
could do that and I'm sureeverybody in some skill probably
goes through the same sort ofthing.
Because you only know, you onlyknow what you are, who you are.
Jennifer Coronado (05:53):
You know, I don't know thank you for
answering that esoteric question.
I appreciate it.
I know like in the 60s and 70sthe studios were struggling,
right, so they had initially hadtheir own visual effects units
that were attached to thestudios.
You talked right, so they hadinitially had their own visual
effects units that were attachedto the studios you talked about
getting into the business wastough.
I think you were looking atbeing some sort of doctor at one
(06:13):
point, weren't you?
Dennis Muren (06:14):
I think that sounds great.
Being a doctor sounds great.
Unfortunately, I had no skilland no experience being a doctor
and I was looking through theLA Times for a job and saw
inhalation therapy and I saidwhat is that?
And I looked at it and said youknow, it's how to treat people
you know who've had lungproblems like pneumonia or
something to breathe again.
(06:34):
And it said it's very easy tolearn and you can make.
I think it was $1,200 a monthor something like that and I
thought, okay, I guess this iswhat I'm going to want to do.
I don't want to work in afactory or something like that.
I just would get bored with.
This would be a little moreinteresting.
So I was about ready to do thatand we had a sort of a lucky
thing happen at Cascade, whichis a company doing commercials
(06:57):
Pillsbury, dolboy and all.
They were struggling for like10 years and finally closed up
but managed to restart theeffects department under a
friend of mine, jim danforth,and I got hired there to be the
head cameraman of the place, ofbeing effects cameraman really
what it was.
So I got from the union doingthat.
I decided I wanted to get inthe union instead of being an
(07:19):
outsider.
That's the rebel.
I'm never going to join theunion, but if you really want to
work, I wanted to, so so I gotin that way and then that group
we all folded in one year.
Cascade was amazing.
It was like the MGM oftelevision commercials.
They had like three or foursound stages.
You know big stages inHollywood for in commercials all
(07:39):
the time Things you've heard ofand you could go through and
learn everything about how tolight hair you've heard of and
you could go through and learneverything about how to light
hair.
Phil Kelson, my boss, he knewhow to take a silver dollar and
make it look like it was worth amillion dollars only in the
lighting, how to light somethingin such a way to make it much
bigger than it ever was, and Isaw examples with people doing
(08:00):
that, with models, people doingit with cans of soups and stuff
like that faces, you know.
So you kind of learn the tricksof lighting and photography and
all that, which is what I wasreally interested in.
And somewhere around this time Ialso got onto a or I pulled my
car off at a school in HollywoodI can't remember quite where,
(08:20):
it was Los Fios where they wereshooting a lot of movies.
They're always shooting there.
So I got out there and ran upjust to see what was going on
and I'd been doing that a fewtimes and I noticed that the
film crews, that there seemed tobe a place that was very
important and that was where Icould see, oh, we have cameras
there, okay, okay, no-transcript, other guys are.
(08:53):
So I always thought, if I evercan do it I don't want to be one
of the guys cleaning up ordoing this or building that.
If I could do it, I don't knowif I could, but in that group
and I also had noticed the fewtimes that guys were nice enough
to invite me to a shoot, a bigminiature shoot.
I went out to 20th Century Foxtank in Malibu a couple of times
(09:16):
and watched Bill Abbott LBAbbott shooting stuff with a
crew of 40 people and wavemachines and a big spectacle,
and it was a whole deal.
They were nice people in theworld and I'd realized I mean,
the most important job in doingeffects is the cameraman,
because he has the button andBill would not shoot anything
until it was right in his mindand so I always was thinking you
(09:39):
know that's the job I'm goingto want.
If I ever do effects.
It's a union.
You know, if you're in a union,that's where it's got to be.
So I decided, okay, I'm goingto be a cameraman.
I kind of knew I'd like, butalso, if it ever happens to me,
he's the guy with the finalbutton and I've got ideas in my
head about how things shouldlook.
So I had no problem imagininglooking at a storyboard or an
(10:03):
idea Instantly.
I have imagining looking at astoryboard or an idea instantly.
I have a visual view of it inmy head all right away.
Whenever anybody's talkingabout it, I do that.
So that's the job I wanted.
So after so that's what I got inthe union I had a chance to get
into the union that said I'lldo it, be a cameraman.
That that closed up, cascadeclosed up.
And three months I heard aboutStar Wars that was being done in
(10:26):
the San Fernando Valley.
I knew some friends that wentto actually talk to George about
doing the effects and theydidn't.
They said nothing's going tocome with this film.
He wants to do it, throwingmodels by the camera and
everything, and it needs to becontrolled.
And stop motion was the way wewere all doing stuff in those
days.
I was in the very archaic filmschool, still using techniques
(10:47):
from the 20s and 30s becausethat's all my little group ever
knew, and at that time Georgewas not talking to John Dykstra
or anything.
He was not talking aboutanything.
So I heard the film look likeit was actually going to happen
and I approached them to work onit and managed to get hired on
it.
Jennifer Coronado (11:05):
How do you get the chutzpah to do that,
like you just approached?
Hi, I'm Dennis.
I want to work on your movie.
What is it?
What motivates you to get tothat point?
How do you get there?
Dennis Muren (11:14):
You know, I was out of work, three months out of
work.
I'd always I'd ever seen before, and not knowing quite how it
was ever done, that's where itwas happening.
And I said, okay, I'm justgoing to have to do it.
And I heard John Deister, who Ididn't know.
(11:37):
I got their number somehow outthere or probably from my
friends that had visited Georgeand Gary, and said, oh, that's
not going to be anything.
They probably had a phonenumber, I don't know, or maybe I
called Gary or something, notknowing him either.
But I tracked down where it wasand just called up and they
said, okay, come on in.
And that's the way I rememberit.
(11:59):
Now Phil Tippett says heremembers hearing somebody who
was working out there about himand said Dennis, recall this guy
and try to get work out there.
But I don't remember that partof the story at all, so I don't
know which it was.
Probably both happened actually.
So anyway, I ended up gettingonto the show and the good thing
about it was, if I'd gone intoa big Hollywood film it would
(12:21):
have been lost, because all theold techniques, you have to
learn them.
All the gear, you have to learnthem.
Nobody knew anything about howthis was going to be done,
except John had an idea for thetechnology but none of us knew
about.
Literally, how do you movethese motors with a knob, you
know, and you may have 12 motorsdoing a complicated shot with
all the camera moves and themodel itself on a movie in front
(12:44):
of a blue screen.
You know 30 or 40 seconds torecord one motor and then you
got to do it for each axis andyou put it all together and you
want a really nice motion.
That's got.
I always put in spaceships.
I put a skid into them Wheneverthey're going, like airplanes
do they sort of skid I put intoeverything.
I do something you can relateto.
(13:04):
I'll find something in therethat makes it human, but it
makes the programming of thosestuff harder.
But I picked it up really fastand I think it was because John
Dykstra knew that I'd done stopmotion.
He'd seen the stuff I'd doneand thought this guy understands
unusual film speeds or he cando stop motion one frame at a
time, but imagine, at 24 framesa second he could probably do
(13:27):
this.
John was absolutely right.
So I really took to it and ittook us all a while but I
managed to do it.
So that was it, and then I hadfour days off after that and
went right into Close Encounters.
Jennifer Coronado (13:39):
Well, that's a totally different speed of a
film, right, star Wars is verydynamic and very energy driven,
and Close Encounters is verycontemplative and it leads you
down a slower path.
So how do you approach those,being a novice, cause you had
just done one movie?
Dennis Muren (13:55):
First of all, nobody's I'm not figuring
everything out.
That kind of is coming fromdirect the director, whether
it's George or Steven, and thesupervisor, whether it's John or
Doug Trumbull.
They've got a strong opinion onhow it's going to be.
Half the work had already beendone on Close Encounters, so
right away it's a lyrical movie,it's almost spiritual.
It's all more illumination oflight, slow motions on things.
(14:17):
I don't have any problem doingthat over Star Wars.
It's not like Star Wars is whoI was.
The motions that was was just.
You just adapt to the show andyou learn over a time.
Because anyway it wasn't.
That wasn't difficult if theyhad everything worked out.
All I was really on, mostly onclosing counters, was like a big
babysitter.
I made sure the shots got setup right, followed all the
(14:39):
lighting stuff that had alreadybeen laid out by richard yersich
and dougumbull according towhat Stephen wanted.
So it was six months of that toshoot.
I don't know how many shots.
It ended up being themothership in the movie.
I had no idea that's what I wasgoing to be doing.
I thought I was going to be inthe corner somewhere, you know,
and it wasn't until a few days Irealized oh, this is the end of
(15:00):
the movie.
Okay, that's, I'm fine doingthat anyway.
That was great.
And meeting I never worked withdoug before, of course, and but
meeting steven was fantastic,so after jaws, you know.
So I so in that short span Imet both george and steven, two
amazing filmmakers that werelike about my age, they were all
contemporary and they were allwonderful to work with.
(15:23):
They all had strong visualopinions about things and they
could just make decisionsinstantly.
And I had a visual connectionBecause I think we all are the
same age or we all grew upwatching the same stuff.
Jennifer Coronado (15:37):
Yeah.
Dennis Muren (15:38):
And even though they're writers also, they're
also visual.
That's why they want to get inthere and make these visual
movies.
It was neat, it was neat.
Jennifer Coronado (15:46):
It's really interesting because, going back
to what you said earlier abouttaking pictures in the movie
theater, trying to capture thatfeeling, A moment, just capture
an image, something you couldlook at and you could study it.
Dennis Muren (15:57):
You could look and see the composition, anything.
Jennifer Coronado (15:59):
And, like you've said, it's not like you
can do now and go on YouTube andfreeze frame something and find
like an old Godard movie, andgo through step by step, like
you had to capture it Right.
All of you, as filmmakers atthat time were doing, was like
I'm capturing something, I'mcapturing a visual, I'm
capturing an emotion, I'mcapturing so much so.
(16:20):
Yeah, so you did CloseEncounters, and then where did
you go?
Dennis Muren (16:26):
then we kept thinking.
I was thinking george has gotto do another star wars, but he
was the same.
I didn't ever see him after theshow was over.
I don't think I might have seenhim somewhere, I don't know,
but not on the sequel of starwars or anything.
But we started hearing that hemight do another one.
But I went back to work withjohn dykstra, who had not gotten
along with george, and he wasdoing balisar galactica, which
(16:50):
was all based on Star Wars sortof thing, and I'm thinking, my
God, what the hell is this?
And it's an amazing example ofwhat Hollywood can do.
You look at Star Wars.
You've got a template for howto tell these stories.
And you look at Galactica,which has some good things but
also has some old things in it,and they actually have a
template to look at when theydid Galactica, but they missed a
(17:14):
lot of it, of what was going onin Star Wars to keep that
really going.
So it was not a very satisfyingsix months that I was on that
show, tried some really neatshots, though I was getting more
and more visual and moreaggressive about compositions.
I did some very interestingthings in it that I learned a
lot about motion control.
(17:35):
With that six months on CloseEncounters, I had a chance to
think about what we'd done onStar Wars and what worked and
what didn't work.
And I tried it on Galactica andreally had it all figured out
how to program the stuff andwhat you can be thinking
visually, spatially, more thanlike sort of flat planes moving,
like in 2001, sideways.
It's more complicated stuff.
(17:56):
Along came an opportunity to goup north and I moved from LA
then up to San Francisco andsaid goodbye to my friends and
family.
I brought four or five of myfriends up with me Tom Sanamon
and Phil Tippett and John Bergand Ken Ralston and a couple
others.
We all came up and worked on ittogether and that was the
hardest show I've ever worked onand maybe the most.
(18:17):
It might be the most satisfyingI think so, but it was so hard
and just rewarding because itwent everywhere that Star Wars
didn't go there were so manydifferent planets with different
types of effects on them didn'tgo.
There were so many differentplanets with different types of
effects on them and I wascredited as the effects
cameraman, but I was really aneffect supervisor on the show
along with Richard.
(18:37):
So I decided let's do the stopmotion, let's do the asteroid
sequence.
This way, I laid out mysequences, whichever whatever
they were, and started at thebeginning, really for the first
time, being able to say startingwith how I imagined the end
result, backing up and lookingat the technology and how then
we could do it as efficiently aspossible without breaking the
(18:59):
bank and making shots that werelike you had never seen before.
Jennifer Coronado (19:03):
Yeah, you talk about complexity.
So, like Empire, jedi, complexshows, right, but you've worked
on shows that had simpler thingsto solve, right, like where it
doesn't have 15 differentplanets or it doesn't have a
really complex effects sequencethat you have to figure out.
How do you shift your brain tosolve the smaller problems and
(19:24):
the bigger problems, and whichone's more exciting for you?
Do you find peace in solvingthe small problems?
Dennis Muren (19:30):
I don't know.
Everything has to look real andeverything has to be compelling
and on top of it, everythinghas to be emotional.
So how do you make a shotemotional?
Because the big advantage wegot over photography is that we
have time going by, so theemotion can change during the
shot.
So I tried to build all thatinto it, the simplicity.
I had that all in Empire.
(19:50):
I had the Walker sequence,which I consider a simple
sequence.
It was all stuff that youinstantly figure out, with big
backings and sets and stopmotion, and that was pretty
straightforward.
You get the asteroid sequence.
You can't tell what the hellyou're looking at.
In the first few dailies it wasso complicated visually it's
like this is never going to work.
I can't tell the story and thenthat's where you have to figure
(20:12):
out how you move objects andlight objects and fine framing
to be able to tell that storyclearly.
So I go either way.
You know it's something thatcould be really simple.
I suppose it'd be like et.
You think that would be asimpler show.
Maybe it was, but we got intoshots like that or that.
I made sure, like the bikes areflying off into the setting sun
(20:34):
, that the light in that lookedlike your memory of the moment,
not like what it really lookedlike, but everything's
heightened a little bit.
The colors are a little bitmore colorful, because that's
what I think kind of movies are.
Anyway, they're like yourmemory as opposed to a
documentary and all the peopleworking on them.
They're all adding stuff too,so I'm going to add something
(20:54):
that I think is going to helpthe show so I can shift back and
forth between hard and easyeasily.
Jennifer Coronado (21:03):
It's interesting because I think
about Stanley Kubrick's films,for example.
He just does such intricatecolor mapping for mood in the
work that he does and you knowyou have that shot in ET where
it's the heightened reality andwhat a kid would feel like if
they really were riding a bikeup in the sky right.
Dennis Muren (21:19):
Yeah, and what your memory is of it like just
after it happened.
What's your memory?
Jennifer Coronado (21:24):
Do those ideas come to you kind of
immediately, or do you marinateon them, or do you get those
light bulb moments, or is it acombination of it?
Dennis Muren (21:31):
It can be any of them.
It's not like a dawning, like Ihave a checklist, okay, I got
to figure the lighting out here.
I mean, you know, you get intoit and you say, oh, I see where
this is going and it seemsappropriate.
Other times it's you just thinkthis is the way you're going to
put it into the film.
But the thing is we've usuallynever seen the film in advance,
so we don't know if we're rightor not and I'll be on the set a
(21:53):
bit and I'll be able to talk tosteven a bit.
But it's not.
Like.
You know, there is the kubrickcolor design for everything like
that.
I don't think I'd even be goodat that, so I see it more as a
shot by shot thing and thatseems to work.
You know I I was to a certainextent copying Alan Daviau's
lighting that he was doing in ETfor the live action.
(22:15):
So it all did seem to fit, butjust doing this other bit to it
that he probably would have donetoo if he was lighting
something like that really big.
So I'm aware of those thingsthat are going on.
But again, if you think aboutthe fact that you've never even
seen the movie, it's amazingthat they all come together, but
it's because we all think a lotabout it.
We all talk a lot about it too.
Jennifer Coronado (22:37):
And the story drives it right.
Dennis Muren (22:39):
It should always be, oh yeah the story, yeah, but
the story certainly drives theemotion.
That's where you want to getthe idea.
Okay, this does have to be anuplifting moment, has to be a
satisfying but still dangerousmoment, or this I'm seeing has
to be a moment that looks likewe're never going to get out of
this.
Oh, we are.
Oh wait, no, we're not, andthat's all going to happen in
(22:59):
two and a half seconds.
So and I'll try to fill inthose things, because that stuff
often the director won't evenknow what he wants in the shot
he's done some storyboards.
They're usually not in theboard.
The board will have an examplekind of the camera view with
some kind of you see the threatsor whatever it is going on, the
emotion in it.
But how you fill up those twoto five seconds is pretty much
(23:23):
up to me and that's where Ithink all my liking movies and
loving them and seeing them andfeeling them and enjoying the
reality of life and how itchanges in relationships.
I make sure that stuff's inthere because it's opportunities
.
It's like an actor's, the wholething is opportunities.
You've got five seconds to dosomething.
You've got a two-minute shot.
What are you going to do withit?
(23:43):
What's an actor going to dowith it.
You're not just standing theresaying your words, you're adding
something to it.
And most departments do it.
Camera guys do it, I do it,actors do it, writers certainly
do it, everybody.
Jennifer Coronado (23:56):
Yeah, I see it sometimes in acting
performances where there's justa singular gesture that someone
makes and it could be verysimple and very small, but it's
just the perfect moment and theperfect gesture for what you're
trying to indicate in that scene.
Everybody does that in theirdifferent roles.
Dennis Muren (24:15):
And what you may not be aware of, and I'm not
really aware of very much, ishow that character is creating
that whole role so that whenthey decide to do the gesture,
it stands out.
Are they big, are they small?
Are they distant?
For the entire role, for allthe regular scenes, they're
talking and listening.
That's all a decision.
It's so complicated whatthey're doing and then to think
(24:39):
some of it can be figured out.
They could have a script that'sfull of notes and everything,
but ultimately it comes down toinstinct, which it probably does
to me and most people too.
Do you feel it as you're doingit and whatever?
That's important, to have anemotional connection to yourself
, and it's a goal.
Maybe it's not a clear goal, ormaybe the goal is not to be
(25:01):
clear, but just for more of youare acting.
Yeah, I don't go into much.
I know some folks do, but itaffects people do, but I don't
go into it not knowing what'sgoing to happen.
I, some folks do, but itaffects people do, but I don't
go into it not knowing what'sgoing to happen.
I pretty much at the beginning,want to know what's going to
happen and I may want to trythis.
We're not sure how it's goingto play out, but I pretty much
know the feeling.
(25:21):
I want to get from it no matter, and I don't care how we get to
it, and if it's a, theirsurprise is great, but not like
a serendipity sort of thing atall.
Jennifer Coronado (25:29):
Here's a question for you.
Sometimes, when you're doingsomething creative particularly
you're in a creative industryand you do it as your job right
it can sometimes feel like a joband you lose a little bit of
spark around the initial joythat you had around it.
And have you ever hit that wall?
And have you ever?
And how do you overcome that?
(25:50):
Because everything has its upsand downs, right.
Dennis Muren (25:53):
Yeah, I think all the time.
After doing Empire Strikes Back, I said that's everything I
ever wanted to do in movies.
That was it.
But I didn't want to leavebecause I was enjoying it.
And I got to Dragon Slayerafter that and I'd never done
anything.
I love dinosaurs and stuff likethat.
I thought I'd love, love themby.
Really it's neat to see them onthe screen.
But he got a chance to dosomething.
(26:14):
So, yeah, that goes all thetime.
You have to keep yourselfmotivated and the nice thing
that we've got at ILM is I couldpretty much do a show a year
and the directors were oftendifferent, so you've got
different challenges all thetime and different people to
work with and crews and goalsand everything.
So there is new stuff that youneed to come up with and you
(26:36):
want to, but all the time, yeah,I'd say I'm.
I couldn't say how many times Iwent up and, oh, I've had
enough, get out of here and Ididn't like the way the industry
was changing.
But then you think about it.
No, that's the way it is.
It always goes through changesand it's an amazing business to
be in.
Where are you going to beworking with dozens and dozens
(26:59):
of creative people that carewhat they're doing and want to
get to long and they want to alladd something to it and there's
layers, so it's so complicatedand it somehow fits and you get
it all at the end and you thinkit's the end, but no, it's just
the end of the day.
And then you get all thosepieces together and it's the end
of that.
And then you get all thosepieces together and your movie's
(27:21):
done and then it ends up in thetheater and it's another end.
You know it's great.
It's a really amazing businessto be in.
Jennifer Coronado (27:29):
Well, and something's interesting too is
like sometimes you work onsomething and you're so in it
and then you finally see it as awhole and maybe you have some
distance from it and you're like, oh, I hadn't even realized
that about this movie, I createdsomething that I hadn't even
expected, based on what I wascontributing to it, which is an
exciting part of it as well.
What do you do when a directorand you don't agree on a pass?
Dennis Muren (27:57):
You just do it.
First of all you want to hearmaybe he's got an idea that's
really good and this is not yourway of doing it.
But if there's something you'remissing, then I always bring it
up and they'll always listen tome and they'll always say well,
I want to try it like this andwe'll go ahead and do it that
way Always.
I'm not going to go againstanybody like that.
Who am I?
(28:18):
He's the director.
He may see things where theremay be an accident with it, you
know.
So I haven't had that.
I can think of any big argumentabout anything.
You know it's because thedirectors, their job is much
more complicated than what I'mdoing.
I'm just trying to get thedaily done.
I'm trying to get these greatseven or six seconds or three
(28:38):
seconds.
They're doing that with 2,000,3,000 shots of five versions of
each of it, with all the actorsand everything.
They know all that.
They know what they can saveand what they can throw out and
how my work can be cut ortrimmed and put a certain way
with a certain type of music andit'll work.
And I recognize that skill thata good director and editor and
(29:02):
score and everything is going tomake my stuff look great, so
I'm not hung up on just mycontribution to it at all, it's
the whole thing.
Jennifer Coronado (29:11):
Yeah, because it is a collaboration, right,
it's an orchestra piece thateveryone's playing their
different parts in, so you can'tbut in some way.
Dennis Muren (29:19):
We don't know what the other parts are going to do
with it, and I'm fine with that.
Maybe it's a jazz piece, yeah,oh, hey, look, he cut the end of
that.
Oh, he cut it in half.
Oh, he cut the end of that.
Oh, he cut it in half.
Oh, my god, now it's telling adifferent story.
It's better, you know.
Jennifer Coronado (29:32):
So it's all sorts of things one of the fun
things too, I think, you see,that is the discovery of
accidents, right?
Uh, when you make a mistake onsomething, you're like, oh,
that's actually better.
I'm glad I made that mistake,because now it's contributing.
I wasn't expecting.
Dennis Muren (29:48):
Could be.
Yeah, I don't remember any ofthose, but I probably did have
those.
I don't have memories of those.
Jennifer Coronado (29:54):
Are you telling me you've never made a
mistake, Dennis?
Dennis Muren (29:56):
I'm sure I have, but then I've got to turn it
into an asset because we've gotto get it done.
Jennifer Coronado (30:02):
You've had a long career and you saw the
transition from the morepractical optical side of visual
effects into computer graphicslike Jurassic, terminator 2.
And you talked about.
Sometimes the changes in theindustry can be challenging, but
did you ever find like thetechnical evolution challenging,
or was it something you're likeall right, man, let's do this,
let's go for it.
Dennis Muren (30:23):
I have never been interested in the technology
from the olden days, from havingthe cameras and loading the
cameras and building this andgetting the pyro right.
I never cared about that.
It's always been the image, theend result.
That's why I had no problemadapting the motion control,
because I was trying to flylittle spaceships when I was a
(30:44):
kid and they never moved right,you know, didn't look like they
fit in the star field.
The stars never looked right.
So you know, when it came to todoing complicated and stuff
that we were doing at ilm with50 people or 100 people, the
models you're getting you'rebetter than anything I could do
and everything is better than Icould do.
That's why the idea of being asupervisor or whatever they were
(31:05):
calling, which is really we'redirecting, but the academy said
we couldn't be called directorsin the 1940s, so we're just
supervisors.
It's great to have that amazingcraftsmanship and skill and all
the art that everybody'sputting into it and being able
to manipulate it in a certainway, following the director's
(31:25):
advice most of the time, butputting my own into it you'd be
able to get whatever it is.
It's just terrific.
But the tool didn't matter.
It was frustrating, likedigital.
I think digital could havehappened five years earlier, but
it was slow.
There was no film person, asfar as I'm concerned, in there.
There was championing thegetting digital, like comping
(31:49):
and digital rendering, to lookreal.
That had a background enough tosay this works and that doesn't
work, and this works and thatdoesn't work.
So after the Abyss I took a yearoff, but it wasn't to do that,
I was just worn out.
I got to take a break.
But of course you can't do thatand I started reading a
computer graphic book that waslike 1,600 pages, made for
(32:12):
doctorate degree kids going intocomputer.
I didn't understand the word ofit, but I understood it was not
magic and it was.
If you could specify anything,you could pretty much write a
tool for it and do it.
The fact you could havesomething 20 stops too dark or
500 stops too bright or whatever, you could do it digitally.
It all depended on how brightthe light was or how dark, and
(32:35):
you were telling it how brightor dark to make it.
Was it a laser light?
It didn't matter, you could doanything with it.
So I just said my God, that'samazing.
I think I can.
I'm not afraid of it.
I think I can adapt to it aslong as there's people that know
how to do that.
I think I'm gonna adapt to itas long as there's people that
know how to do that.
I had people long ago say youdon't want to learn this stuff,
you want to be the boss of this.
You know it takes too long tolearn it.
(32:56):
Whatever it is, this wasphotographer camera work.
You don't want to be a cameraguy, he said, you want to be the
boss.
I heard a camera guy told methat.
So that's what I did.
Then I got in and I worked ontrying to solve the input-output
because we didn't have any wayto After the Abyss.
The work was so great we stillhad to do optical composites,
(33:17):
which were not quite there.
They're very hard.
You almost can't do them.
So I put all my effort in for awhile to solve the digital
problem, which we'd havesomething from Kodak that had
the wrong specification.
We'd been using it for threeyears to try to film it out.
Kodak was making this tool toscan in home photos that you
(33:39):
shot from your negative cameraand they had a resolution of
4,000 pixels, and that's whyeverything was going nowhere,
because there was no hardware tostore data that big.
And that's one of the firstthings I questioned.
I said why do we need that?
Well, kodak says here's thedocument.
So I said yeah, but that's astill photo, you know well, they
(34:00):
will imagine on a big screen.
And I said yeah, but imagine ona big screen going through a
projector and it's shaking 24times a second.
It's blurring everything.
So we did a test at 2000 and itworked and that whole problem
went away.
So then, which was major, thatcould have been five more years
to solve that, but then.
So then we went in and I justworked on getting the colors
(34:22):
right and narrowing the colorthing down and then we had no
output device and I ran aroundand managed to track down.
I think it was a $20,000 unitmade by management software for
making business slides, and whatit was is a really beautiful
quality CRT, like your TV set,but much better than your TV set
(34:46):
, and they had an Acme animationcamera shooting on it,
photographing that, and it wasall in a box, three feet tall
and a foot on each side and aplug-in, and you could buy it in
a work and they were making itfor business slides On a
computer, somebody would makethe pie chart and show how much
your sales are going to be andyou could give that to put it in
(35:10):
this machine and it would, onthe screen, make that image.
And then the camera, which wasnormally actually meant to shoot
movies, being an Acme, theywere doing one frame at a time,
saying I'll get you 500 framesor 5,000, and cut it up and you
have 5,000 slides for the 5,000salesmen that are going out,
that need all those slides.
(35:31):
And the quality was great.
And I was thinking, my God,could this possibly the quality,
the color, the granularity thatyou saw on a TV screen?
Maybe it doesn't show on thisbecause it's such a it's a
military quality tube.
And we did a test of it.
We managed to get a frame fromsomething we scanned in the back
(35:53):
of the feature and the thingworked and that was it.
We had the input, we had theoutput, and ILM already had the
middle part, the imageprocessing, along with Photoshop
, which we didn't really use forthat, but we used a little bit,
but that was it.
I could put that into T2.
And suddenly you've got stuffthat there's nothing you can see
(36:14):
.
That's a flaw about it.
There's no matte edge.
You could look at it, compositeit on the screen and change
this and add that and make itbetter and embellish it and
surprise it and add all thisstuff, and then that, of course,
led to everything else.
Death Becomes, her was afterthat which was got into the skin
, and then we got into Jurassicand all the other stuff
afterwards.
Jennifer Coronado (36:33):
But here's the thing you didn't have Google
.
It wasn't like I'm going toGoogle these things and figure
out where I could find something, so how did you find that?
Dennis Muren (36:43):
Well, I found them with what's called a telephone.
A telephone it was not wireless, it was not wireless in those
days, but it was asking aroundand I was real cautious.
I thought if we're ever goingto solve this, ilm should be the
one that solves this.
We were so much into the motionpicture business I was kind of
(37:03):
sneaky and I ended up talking toRay Feeney, a really nice guy.
Didn't know him.
He worked at, was doing some ofit, rhythm and Hues, but he he
had the management graphic stuffbecause they were filming out
of rhythm and hughes.
Commercials doing of tony thetiger and all that were all done
with, you know, a cg, but itwasn't of human people and
walking and it was was all likeand you go to a movie theater
(37:26):
and you'd see between the showsyou used to have some crazy cg
thing of the of candy walkingalong and a coca-cola.
It used to be cartoons.
But then for in the 80s it wentinto computer graphics and I
kept looking at this saying howcome we're not used to something
like this?
Does it work?
And everybody was saying it'llnever work, it'll never work.
So anyway, ray didn't think itwas going to work.
(37:47):
I don't think a manager ofgraphics ever thought it would
be able to make a tonal imagefrom black to white of all the
colors necessary and be stableand not like some sort of
flicker, you know electronicthing.
That we didn't know from theway it was built, but the thing
worked and they ended up gettinga good SciTech award for it.
They should have Management ofgraphics for doing that.
(38:09):
For building that.
I should have managed mygraphics for doing that.
For building that.
I have always been on a crusadefor the supervisors to be
choosing the future, not thedepartments that they were into
the future, because that couldhave been happening two or three
or four years earlier.
The soup's got to go in therewith something they say they
know from the shows.
Right, that is needed.
(38:30):
And if it's not there, figureit out.
Jennifer Coronado (38:33):
And it's kind of like when a director comes
in and says I have this thing, Iwant Figure it out for me,
right.
It's that sort of leading, thatdesire leads the innovation,
right.
Dennis Muren (38:46):
Right, or else the supervisor is going to say, oh
yeah, I know, I know somethinglike this, we did it on this
show and know something likethis, we did it on the show and
you know we did that on thatshow and if we put this together
, we'll have the shot.
Great, really.
Is that really great?
Or do you have in your mind anidea like wait, that's going to
look very familiar, I'm going tocome up with something
different.
So you've got to have a goal,you know, and my goal was to it
(39:09):
was the stuff to look likeperfect and be infinitely
flexible and, like my mind is.
Jennifer Coronado (39:15):
Yeah.
Dennis Muren (39:16):
Or was?
Jennifer Coronado (39:18):
No is One of the things that I've always
thought is really interestingabout you is you always have a
really good sense about what anaudience will forgive and where
the focus really is in an image.
But in your time working inmovies, how do you think the
audience's perception haschanged and how does that impact
things now?
Dennis Muren (39:34):
On one hand, I'm surprised that there's so much
weak image out there that theaudience doesn't care about.
The audience is now, but theynever did Before.
Suddenly they'd break into songat a dance number somewhere in
Oklahoma or who knows where itwas.
It was never believable, right.
But because we're in effect somuch and most of the clients
(39:55):
have wanted us to make it lookreally real that it doesn't seem
to matter if it doesn't.
In a lot of films You've got toget 3,000 shots done.
There's not the money to makethem all perfect, and it could
be that even to make it perfectyou've got to slow things down.
So the gravity is correct, orthe character has time to
(40:15):
respond when it hits the groundand gets up, or you have time to
see the bridge breaking theright way or something that
might slow the movie down.
So it could be the director'sgot a point when he just says no
, I just want her faster, Idon't want her faster, and maybe
the audiences don't carebecause they're just in another
space.
I just want her faster, I don'twant her faster, and maybe the
audiences don't care becausethey're just in another space
(40:35):
than I am in.
Jennifer Coronado (40:36):
Yeah.
Dennis Muren (40:37):
You know we all were.
It's like just a change in theculture.
I don't like it because Icouldn't.
I wouldn't enjoy working onthose shows at all, where
reality doesn't matter andyou're almost like letters and
words.
You're just getting this doneand this done that amount of
time and boom and it's done, andjust you know, put it together,
perfect for AI to do that stuff.
Jennifer Coronado (40:58):
Yeah, what do you think about AI?
What's your thoughts on that?
Dennis Muren (41:01):
I don't know, who knows what it's going to do.
I think movies and televisionand music are fashion, and
fashion is based on how we feelabout something three weeks
later.
I love this, I bought this Waita minute and it doesn't seem so
good anymore.
Anyway, oh, look at that overthere.
There's something over there.
I like better Climate changes.
(41:22):
So things go in and out offashion, and I don't know how
their AI or I care if they'regoing to be able to keep up with
fashion.
It's easy to turn out scripts,I think, and to do effects
nowadays how you do memorableones.
I don't know if a computer cando it.
They're not our mind.
It's not our mind, and goodfilmmaking comes from, I think,
(41:43):
a human thinking through the wayhumans are going to react to it
, as the story's told.
Jennifer Coronado (41:49):
A lot of the stuff I see feels very yeah,
that's a cool image, but whatit's compiled together from a
bunch of other things that maynot map together and I it feels
very flat to me like emotionless, and what I love movies is the
emotion that you get out of itright are there filmmakers that
you are excited about now, youhaving worked with the greats
(42:11):
like spielberg and george?
Dennis Muren (42:13):
You know I can't.
I'm sort of so out of thecontemporary stuff.
You know I'm into likecompletely different sort of
things.
The stuff that the Dune guyshave been doing, the work looks
great.
I like some of the Chris Nolanstuff is fabulous in there.
As far as you know, I wish theywould go a little bit farther
than they do, but that's mytaste on it.
(42:33):
But I understand why the holdback or whatever.
But they're great filmmakers,you know.
And of course, steven andGeorge and all those guys and
Cameron.
You know I can't pull anythingout, but I, you know, I'll look
at something.
I don't know if you've seenTangerine.
It's been out for a long timenow.
You know.
Great vision, greatperformances, great writing.
You know, on an iPhone five,give me a break.
(42:54):
And a lot of people thought,yeah, you know.
And Sean Baker was saying, yeah, we're out there, we're
shooting this thing and nobodyyou know the he couldn't even
tell we were shooting stuffbecause the sound equipment was
bigger than the camera so theycould shoot on streets and
everything.
It's better, I think you cansee it in the performances, you
can see the reality in it, butit's uncomfortable for producers
(43:16):
to try something like that.
So they've got to have theircomfort zone.
Everybody's got to be protectedbecause films are so expensive
and if they're not expensiveyou're doing something wrong and
they're not happy making a $3million or a $300,000 movie.
The studios have always wantedto have big successes, but more
so now, probably, than ever.
So it's just a different world.
(43:37):
On the other hand, anybody canmake a film.
I did my little film, you knowwhen it's 16 millimeter, and I
sold it and it played in thetheaters and everything when I,
you know, my second year incollege summer vacation Back
then, if you could do it.
It's so much easier now to doit.
So I'm always surprised thatthere's not more of that going
(43:58):
on, but it has.
It's picking up.
More and more people are makingindie films, really on the
cheap, and I'm glad to see itand also there's so many
perspectives that you can getinto.
Jennifer Coronado (44:08):
That, I think , is so interesting.
Dennis Muren (44:09):
Try telling that to ai.
Let's say I'm in a differentperspective and you'll get into
that.
I think is so interesting.
Try telling that to AI.
Let's say I want a differentperspective and you'll get a
different angle change andthat's all.
I can see my perspective.
Okay, angle.
No, that's not what we'retalking about.
Jennifer Coronado (44:21):
Yeah, I want to see somebody's heartbreak in
an image, like I want to seesomeone in love, or I want to
see someone being powerful.
You want that feeling from it,and so that kind of brings me to
my last question Is thereanything that you want from a
movie that you have yet to see?
What?
Dennis Muren (44:45):
would be your dream thing to see from a movie.
Oh, you have to ask me afterI've had so hard to think about
that.
I don't think so, you know.
And I would think why.
Because it's so easy, at leastwith my experience and my age,
to visualize anything.
I'm not in wow as much as Iused to be.
I used to be in wow.
I've got to be able to do thatmyself, and I used to be in wow.
(45:07):
Oh look, I worked on somethingthat went beyond that, and now I
don't even have to work on it.
But the ideas I have, spatiallycompleted ones in my mind, are,
uh, you know so um rich alreadythat when I see a big film that
works, I'm very satisfied andvery glad that whole group got
(45:28):
together and managed to turnsomething out really big and
great and they did it, and thatthose little things were
terrific or whatever.
But it's not so much a big wowto me because I'm still looking
at it on the screen and I'm inyour mind, you're living it.
Jennifer Coronado (45:45):
Dennis, what are you doing, Aaron?
Thank you for asking thatquestion, yeah.
Dennis Muren (45:51):
It was very simple saying goodbye to work.
I didn't think it was, but Ihad been thinking about it for
like over five years, preparingfor it in 10 years, and what I
decided to do is I wanted to goback to you know, when I was
born.
Right, you're born and you'refive and then you get up to like
15 and you kind of that's areally exciting period of
exploration.
(46:11):
And then you kind of settled insomething when you were 20 or
something like that, and moviesis one of the things I did.
So I thought that's okay,here's the beginning chapter.
Then I got the Hollywood movie,san Francisco chapter.
Now I got my final chapter,which is okay, everything comes
to an end.
What did I miss in that firstpart that I loved?
And it was music.
(46:32):
And I can't play an instrument.
I can play the piano and I cankind of play a guitar, but what
I loved was some classical music, but mostly really good pop
that everybody would just that'sthe most ridiculous thing in
the world From in the late 50s,60s, into the 70s, into the 80s,
(46:52):
into 80s, the synthesizers andI got a set of wearing out and
nothing beyond that, and Iwanted to understand it.
So what I've been doing is I'mjust totally into that and I can
understand it now, and I'm notright.
I don't even know if I'm goingto write it, but I want to
understand it, and thetechnology is there now to do it
, whereas before you'd hearsomething, you have to like,
(47:14):
kind of pulling out that piano.
Can I hear it?
Oh, it's going.
I can't quite tell how thatpiano like is that piano line?
I think is what moved me duringthis part of the song, but then
it comes and goes.
Well, now you can find all thepiano lines, find any song has
been broken down into karaokeversions by expert musicians
(47:36):
just experts and you can buythem like 10 tracks, 15 tracks
of karaoke versions $3.
And they're beautifulreproductions, if you ever
wanted to be able to figure outhow music is made, and you can
do it with classical someclassical music in there too,
the same thing.
So I just I love that, becauseI loved it so much as a kid.
(47:57):
I don't know.
My goal was never, though, to bea performer, and it isn't now,
but I'm hoping to be able tomaybe actually start writing
some simple things.
I tried that a little bit whenI was ILM, but I just got too
bonked with a show and couldn'tand you know I didn't know time,
no time to think about it.
But now I have nothing.
I sort of have nothing but time, which is not true but you're
(48:18):
so busy, but I have a lot moretime than I did when I was
working.
So that's what I'm doing.
So I've got like 200 karaokeversions of 200 of my favorite
songs that I've already got andI and just saying wow, that's
unbelievable.
So I totally appreciate musical.
The musicians arranging writingwhich is almost incidental to
(48:42):
the purpose of those guys weredoing in the first place.
They kind of work, but I guessit's the technical stuff and the
emotional response from it.
Jennifer Coronado (48:49):
That's so interesting because that goes
back to emotional response thatyou had to images when you were
a kid and now you have thatemotional response that it.
That's so interesting becausethat goes back to emotional
response that you had to imageswhen you were a kid and now you
have that emotional responsethat you're pursuing with music.
Dennis Muren (48:58):
Yeah, at full time , like I'd like to be.
I was doing for 35 years or 40years at ILM, right.
So now I'm, I can do it tosomething.
I was also doing it when I wasyounger too, so, and I'm not
that there's a goal or anythinglike that, but it's just, it's
amazing.
It's like a whole new chapterof something I didn't even think
if it had been for technologyand all allowing people and
(49:21):
people wanting to do this stuff,you know.
And then I still would betrying to hear how this song was
made and being, and you know,and I've got them all on track,
I've got all mixers, I got thesliders, I mix them, I try
different versions andeverything.
I'm going to go in and changebass lines and see does that
make an additional emotionalresponse?
Have I made it better or have Iruined it?
(49:41):
Right, but there's no goal inany of this, nothing like that,
just for fun.
The goal is just to move me, meget me like, wow, look at that.
Jennifer Coronado (49:55):
And so it's looking three in the morning, oh
my god, you gave us an hour ofyour time, dennis, thank you so
much.
Dennis Muren (49:57):
Okay, sure, good luck with your stuff thank you
for listening to everyone is.
Jennifer Coronado (50:05):
Everyone is is produced and edited by Chris
Hawkinson, executive producer isAaron Dussault, music by Doug
Infinite.
Our logo and graphic design isby Harrison Parker and I am Jen
Coronado.
Everyone Is is a slightlydisappointed Productions
production dropping every otherThursday.
Wherever podcasts are available, make sure to rate and review,
and maybe even like andsubscribe.
(50:26):
Thank you for listening.
So I saw an alien invasion and a giant dinosaur
tearing apart New York City inthe same year.
I remember hiding behind theseat and my mom saying, okay,
you can look down, you can lookdown.
But when I walked out I saidwait, where is it?
Where's that stuff?
I like seeing that stuff.
Jennifer Coronado (00:16):
Hello and welcome to Everyone Is I am your
host, jennifer Coronado.
The intent of this show is toengage with all types of people
and build an understanding thatanyone who has any kind of
success has achieved thatsuccess because they are a
creative thinker.
So, whether you are an artistor a cook, or an award-winning
journalist, everyone hassomething to contribute to the
(00:36):
human conversation.
And now, as they say, on withthe show, on with the show.
When I think about DennisMirren, the first phrase that
comes into my mind is cinematicvisual innovation.
From his earliest days helpingto pioneer visual effects work
(00:58):
on the original Star Warstrilogy, to his work on ET, to
Terminator 2, to his later filmslike Steven Spielberg's AI and
War of the Worlds, thisnine-time Academy Award winner
represents the best of whatmovies can provide.
So, dennis Muren, welcome.
Dennis Muren (01:13):
Sure Nice to be here.
Jennifer Coronado (01:14):
I want to start very basically.
Where did you grow up, Dennis?
Dennis Muren (01:18):
I grew up in LA, la Cunada, which is near
Pasadena and Glendale andoutside of Hollywood.
But you know there'd always befilm shoots going on.
You'd see a truck parksomewhere.
If there were two trucks, itmeans there was a shooting of a
movie or a TV show.
So I would always, if I wasdriving, pull over and run out
and have a look.
Jennifer Coronado (01:37):
So as a little kid you were kind of
aware that you were living in acompany town and the company
town made movies.
Yeah, it was like that.
Dennis Muren (01:41):
But and the company Town Made Movies.
Yeah, it was like that.
But I was never going to do itbecause I wanted to do special
effects stuff.
I didn't want to do regularmovies and there was no effects
being done really in those daysthere were some commercials
being done in two or threeplaces and I did commercials.
But the big effects films therewas maybe one or two a year,
like Earthquake or ToweringInferno.
They were studio movies.
(02:02):
You had to be in the union todo them and so I just I went
around.
I tried to get work at Disney,at Fox, when I was really young
and everybody just said, sorry,we can't do anything for you
because you're not in the unionand they weren't hiring because
they weren't making very manymovies.
It was a dead end.
I was not looking forward orexpecting to get a career out of
(02:24):
this at all, but it wassomething I loved to do.
Jennifer Coronado (02:27):
I know the War of the Worlds is a film that
you love the original one,right.
So you look at that movie andyou think, oh, I want to do the
things that they're doing.
Was that how you were thinkingabout it?
Dennis Muren (02:37):
No, I think I was about seven when I saw that and
I also saw the Beast from 20,000Fathoms the same year.
So I saw an alien invasion anda giant dinosaur carrying apart
New York City in the same year.
I remember hiding behind theseat and my mom saying, okay,
you can look now, you can looknow.
When I walked out I said wait,where is it?
(02:57):
Where's that stuff?
I liked seeing that stuffReally.
I remember going up to Yosemitewhen they were doing the
firefall, the real firefall upthere, dropping fire, you know,
down 1500 feet at nighttime,glowing in the dark.
I mean it was unbelievable.
And my first trip when I waslike about nine, to new york
city and just seeing, you know,the concrete corridors was
(03:20):
unbelievable, the scale ofeverything.
So I've always been attractedto some sort of spectacle, you
know whether it's in a movie orreal life or something.
But I love the, of course,telling stories, at least effect
stories.
So not necessarily the wholemovies, but I but you know,
movies are something I've alwaysreally liked a lot.
And, uh, I found some friendsin la there are probably a half
(03:42):
dozen of us and all of la thatwere like my, and this is in the
late 50s and early 60s thatcared about these films and we
all kind of found each other.
We were our own group and grewup together and made our little
movies together and showed themto each other and all.
Jennifer Coronado (03:58):
How do you find each other?
How do you go about finding acommunity like that?
Dennis Muren (04:02):
There was a magazine, famous, monsters of
Filmland, that you could find ata few stores.
I found a copy of it on a tripto San Diego.
There weren't many places youcould find it and I wasn't
interested as much in themonsters as the special effects
and that's where you'd seepictures of King Kong or War of
the Worlds or something, becausethere was no way to see the
picture again unless you see themovie again, and then you had
(04:24):
to stay and see it a second timeto try to see it.
You couldn't stop it.
I tried shooting still photosin the movie theater and
sometimes it worked.
I shot still photos andeventually 8mm movies off the TV
.
I wanted to hold those images inmy head and we all have the
same stories.
I mean, we're just comparingnotes.
Recently we all said, yeah, wealways thought everybody could
(04:47):
hold an image in their head, butwe learned because we wanted to
see it so much and we've had todo that, just years and years
of having to do it.
Right now you know you can justgrab a freeze frame of
something, look at it and studyit and see 20 versions of it and
everything.
It's much easier.
I think you can probably learnmuch faster now than you ever
could, than we ever could,because there's so much
available.
Jennifer Coronado (05:12):
I had someone say to me once and I can't even
remember who it was that theythought that you, as an
individual, see the world in adifferent way than other people
do.
And when I hear you talk aboutthings like going to New York
and those big corridors rightand the fire fall, do you?
And obviously you know how yousee the world, but you don't
know if you see it differentlythan other people because you
live in your own experience.
What do you think someone wouldsay you see the world
differently.
Dennis Muren (05:34):
I guess they see me from the outside and are
comparing me to other people orsomething I don't know.
And you know, I thought that alittle bit that everybody could
pre-visualize stuff and theycan't just, realizing that
within a couple of years,realized that not everybody
could do that and I'm sureeverybody in some skill probably
goes through the same sort ofthing.
Because you only know, you onlyknow what you are, who you are.
Jennifer Coronado (05:53):
You know, I don't know thank you for
answering that esoteric question.
I appreciate it.
I know like in the 60s and 70sthe studios were struggling,
right, so they had initially hadtheir own visual effects units
that were attached to thestudios.
You talked right, so they hadinitially had their own visual
effects units that were attachedto the studios you talked about
getting into the business wastough.
I think you were looking atbeing some sort of doctor at one
(06:13):
point, weren't you?
Dennis Muren (06:14):
I think that sounds great.
Being a doctor sounds great.
Unfortunately, I had no skilland no experience being a doctor
and I was looking through theLA Times for a job and saw
inhalation therapy and I saidwhat is that?
And I looked at it and said youknow, it's how to treat people
you know who've had lungproblems like pneumonia or
something to breathe again.
(06:34):
And it said it's very easy tolearn and you can make.
I think it was $1,200 a monthor something like that and I
thought, okay, I guess this iswhat I'm going to want to do.
I don't want to work in afactory or something like that.
I just would get bored with.
This would be a little moreinteresting.
So I was about ready to do thatand we had a sort of a lucky
thing happen at Cascade, whichis a company doing commercials
(06:57):
Pillsbury, dolboy and all.
They were struggling for like10 years and finally closed up
but managed to restart theeffects department under a
friend of mine, jim danforth,and I got hired there to be the
head cameraman of the place, ofbeing effects cameraman really
what it was.
So I got from the union doingthat.
I decided I wanted to get inthe union instead of being an
(07:19):
outsider.
That's the rebel.
I'm never going to join theunion, but if you really want to
work, I wanted to, so so I gotin that way and then that group
we all folded in one year.
Cascade was amazing.
It was like the MGM oftelevision commercials.
They had like three or foursound stages.
You know big stages inHollywood for in commercials all
(07:39):
the time Things you've heard ofand you could go through and
learn everything about how tolight hair you've heard of and
you could go through and learneverything about how to light
hair.
Phil Kelson, my boss, he knewhow to take a silver dollar and
make it look like it was worth amillion dollars only in the
lighting, how to light somethingin such a way to make it much
bigger than it ever was, and Isaw examples with people doing
(08:00):
that, with models, people doingit with cans of soups and stuff
like that faces, you know.
So you kind of learn the tricksof lighting and photography and
all that, which is what I wasreally interested in.
And somewhere around this time Ialso got onto a or I pulled my
car off at a school in HollywoodI can't remember quite where,
(08:20):
it was Los Fios where they wereshooting a lot of movies.
They're always shooting there.
So I got out there and ran upjust to see what was going on
and I'd been doing that a fewtimes and I noticed that the
film crews, that there seemed tobe a place that was very
important and that was where Icould see, oh, we have cameras
there, okay, okay, no-transcript, other guys are.
(08:53):
So I always thought, if I evercan do it I don't want to be one
of the guys cleaning up ordoing this or building that.
If I could do it, I don't knowif I could, but in that group
and I also had noticed the fewtimes that guys were nice enough
to invite me to a shoot, a bigminiature shoot.
I went out to 20th Century Foxtank in Malibu a couple of times
(09:16):
and watched Bill Abbott LBAbbott shooting stuff with a
crew of 40 people and wavemachines and a big spectacle,
and it was a whole deal.
They were nice people in theworld and I'd realized I mean,
the most important job in doingeffects is the cameraman,
because he has the button andBill would not shoot anything
until it was right in his mindand so I always was thinking you
(09:39):
know that's the job I'm goingto want.
If I ever do effects.
It's a union.
You know, if you're in a union,that's where it's got to be.
So I decided, okay, I'm goingto be a cameraman.
I kind of knew I'd like, butalso, if it ever happens to me,
he's the guy with the finalbutton and I've got ideas in my
head about how things shouldlook.
So I had no problem imagininglooking at a storyboard or an
(10:03):
idea Instantly.
I have imagining looking at astoryboard or an idea instantly.
I have a visual view of it inmy head all right away.
Whenever anybody's talkingabout it, I do that.
So that's the job I wanted.
So after so that's what I got inthe union I had a chance to get
into the union that said I'lldo it, be a cameraman.
That that closed up, cascadeclosed up.
And three months I heard aboutStar Wars that was being done in
(10:26):
the San Fernando Valley.
I knew some friends that wentto actually talk to George about
doing the effects and theydidn't.
They said nothing's going tocome with this film.
He wants to do it, throwingmodels by the camera and
everything, and it needs to becontrolled.
And stop motion was the way wewere all doing stuff in those
days.
I was in the very archaic filmschool, still using techniques
(10:47):
from the 20s and 30s becausethat's all my little group ever
knew, and at that time Georgewas not talking to John Dykstra
or anything.
He was not talking aboutanything.
So I heard the film look likeit was actually going to happen
and I approached them to work onit and managed to get hired on
it.
Jennifer Coronado (11:05):
How do you get the chutzpah to do that,
like you just approached?
Hi, I'm Dennis.
I want to work on your movie.
What is it?
What motivates you to get tothat point?
How do you get there?
Dennis Muren (11:14):
You know, I was out of work, three months out of
work.
I'd always I'd ever seen before, and not knowing quite how it
was ever done, that's where itwas happening.
And I said, okay, I'm justgoing to have to do it.
And I heard John Deister, who Ididn't know.
(11:37):
I got their number somehow outthere or probably from my
friends that had visited Georgeand Gary, and said, oh, that's
not going to be anything.
They probably had a phonenumber, I don't know, or maybe I
called Gary or something, notknowing him either.
But I tracked down where it wasand just called up and they
said, okay, come on in.
And that's the way I rememberit.
(11:59):
Now Phil Tippett says heremembers hearing somebody who
was working out there about himand said Dennis, recall this guy
and try to get work out there.
But I don't remember that partof the story at all, so I don't
know which it was.
Probably both happened actually.
So anyway, I ended up gettingonto the show and the good thing
about it was, if I'd gone intoa big Hollywood film it would
(12:21):
have been lost, because all theold techniques, you have to
learn them.
All the gear, you have to learnthem.
Nobody knew anything about howthis was going to be done,
except John had an idea for thetechnology but none of us knew
about.
Literally, how do you movethese motors with a knob, you
know, and you may have 12 motorsdoing a complicated shot with
all the camera moves and themodel itself on a movie in front
(12:44):
of a blue screen.
You know 30 or 40 seconds torecord one motor and then you
got to do it for each axis andyou put it all together and you
want a really nice motion.
That's got.
I always put in spaceships.
I put a skid into them Wheneverthey're going, like airplanes
do they sort of skid I put intoeverything.
I do something you can relateto.
(13:04):
I'll find something in therethat makes it human, but it
makes the programming of thosestuff harder.
But I picked it up really fastand I think it was because John
Dykstra knew that I'd done stopmotion.
He'd seen the stuff I'd doneand thought this guy understands
unusual film speeds or he cando stop motion one frame at a
time, but imagine, at 24 framesa second he could probably do
(13:27):
this.
John was absolutely right.
So I really took to it and ittook us all a while but I
managed to do it.
So that was it, and then I hadfour days off after that and
went right into Close Encounters.
Jennifer Coronado (13:39):
Well, that's a totally different speed of a
film, right, star Wars is verydynamic and very energy driven,
and Close Encounters is verycontemplative and it leads you
down a slower path.
So how do you approach those,being a novice, cause you had
just done one movie?
Dennis Muren (13:55):
First of all, nobody's I'm not figuring
everything out.
That kind of is coming fromdirect the director, whether
it's George or Steven, and thesupervisor, whether it's John or
Doug Trumbull.
They've got a strong opinion onhow it's going to be.
Half the work had already beendone on Close Encounters, so
right away it's a lyrical movie,it's almost spiritual.
It's all more illumination oflight, slow motions on things.
(14:17):
I don't have any problem doingthat over Star Wars.
It's not like Star Wars is whoI was.
The motions that was was just.
You just adapt to the show andyou learn over a time.
Because anyway it wasn't.
That wasn't difficult if theyhad everything worked out.
All I was really on, mostly onclosing counters, was like a big
babysitter.
I made sure the shots got setup right, followed all the
(14:39):
lighting stuff that had alreadybeen laid out by richard yersich
and dougumbull according towhat Stephen wanted.
So it was six months of that toshoot.
I don't know how many shots.
It ended up being themothership in the movie.
I had no idea that's what I wasgoing to be doing.
I thought I was going to be inthe corner somewhere, you know,
and it wasn't until a few days Irealized oh, this is the end of
(15:00):
the movie.
Okay, that's, I'm fine doingthat anyway.
That was great.
And meeting I never worked withdoug before, of course, and but
meeting steven was fantastic,so after jaws, you know.
So I so in that short span Imet both george and steven, two
amazing filmmakers that werelike about my age, they were all
contemporary and they were allwonderful to work with.
(15:23):
They all had strong visualopinions about things and they
could just make decisionsinstantly.
And I had a visual connectionBecause I think we all are the
same age or we all grew upwatching the same stuff.
Jennifer Coronado (15:37):
Yeah.
Dennis Muren (15:38):
And even though they're writers also, they're
also visual.
That's why they want to get inthere and make these visual
movies.
It was neat, it was neat.
Jennifer Coronado (15:46):
It's really interesting because, going back
to what you said earlier abouttaking pictures in the movie
theater, trying to capture thatfeeling, A moment, just capture
an image, something you couldlook at and you could study it.
Dennis Muren (15:57):
You could look and see the composition, anything.
Jennifer Coronado (15:59):
And, like you've said, it's not like you
can do now and go on YouTube andfreeze frame something and find
like an old Godard movie, andgo through step by step, like
you had to capture it Right.
All of you, as filmmakers atthat time were doing, was like
I'm capturing something, I'mcapturing a visual, I'm
capturing an emotion, I'mcapturing so much so.
(16:20):
Yeah, so you did CloseEncounters, and then where did
you go?
Dennis Muren (16:26):
then we kept thinking.
I was thinking george has gotto do another star wars, but he
was the same.
I didn't ever see him after theshow was over.
I don't think I might have seenhim somewhere, I don't know,
but not on the sequel of starwars or anything.
But we started hearing that hemight do another one.
But I went back to work withjohn dykstra, who had not gotten
along with george, and he wasdoing balisar galactica, which
(16:50):
was all based on Star Wars sortof thing, and I'm thinking, my
God, what the hell is this?
And it's an amazing example ofwhat Hollywood can do.
You look at Star Wars.
You've got a template for howto tell these stories.
And you look at Galactica,which has some good things but
also has some old things in it,and they actually have a
template to look at when theydid Galactica, but they missed a
(17:14):
lot of it, of what was going onin Star Wars to keep that
really going.
So it was not a very satisfyingsix months that I was on that
show, tried some really neatshots, though I was getting more
and more visual and moreaggressive about compositions.
I did some very interestingthings in it that I learned a
lot about motion control.
(17:35):
With that six months on CloseEncounters, I had a chance to
think about what we'd done onStar Wars and what worked and
what didn't work.
And I tried it on Galactica andreally had it all figured out
how to program the stuff andwhat you can be thinking
visually, spatially, more thanlike sort of flat planes moving,
like in 2001, sideways.
It's more complicated stuff.
(17:56):
Along came an opportunity to goup north and I moved from LA
then up to San Francisco andsaid goodbye to my friends and
family.
I brought four or five of myfriends up with me Tom Sanamon
and Phil Tippett and John Bergand Ken Ralston and a couple
others.
We all came up and worked on ittogether and that was the
hardest show I've ever worked onand maybe the most.
(18:17):
It might be the most satisfyingI think so, but it was so hard
and just rewarding because itwent everywhere that Star Wars
didn't go there were so manydifferent planets with different
types of effects on them didn'tgo.
There were so many differentplanets with different types of
effects on them and I wascredited as the effects
cameraman, but I was really aneffect supervisor on the show
along with Richard.
(18:37):
So I decided let's do the stopmotion, let's do the asteroid
sequence.
This way, I laid out mysequences, whichever whatever
they were, and started at thebeginning, really for the first
time, being able to say startingwith how I imagined the end
result, backing up and lookingat the technology and how then
we could do it as efficiently aspossible without breaking the
(18:59):
bank and making shots that werelike you had never seen before.
Jennifer Coronado (19:03):
Yeah, you talk about complexity.
So, like Empire, jedi, complexshows, right, but you've worked
on shows that had simpler thingsto solve, right, like where it
doesn't have 15 differentplanets or it doesn't have a
really complex effects sequencethat you have to figure out.
How do you shift your brain tosolve the smaller problems and
(19:24):
the bigger problems, and whichone's more exciting for you?
Do you find peace in solvingthe small problems?
Dennis Muren (19:30):
I don't know.
Everything has to look real andeverything has to be compelling
and on top of it, everythinghas to be emotional.
So how do you make a shotemotional?
Because the big advantage wegot over photography is that we
have time going by, so theemotion can change during the
shot.
So I tried to build all thatinto it, the simplicity.
I had that all in Empire.
(19:50):
I had the Walker sequence,which I consider a simple
sequence.
It was all stuff that youinstantly figure out, with big
backings and sets and stopmotion, and that was pretty
straightforward.
You get the asteroid sequence.
You can't tell what the hellyou're looking at.
In the first few dailies it wasso complicated visually it's
like this is never going to work.
I can't tell the story and thenthat's where you have to figure
(20:12):
out how you move objects andlight objects and fine framing
to be able to tell that storyclearly.
So I go either way.
You know it's something thatcould be really simple.
I suppose it'd be like et.
You think that would be asimpler show.
Maybe it was, but we got intoshots like that or that.
I made sure, like the bikes areflying off into the setting sun
(20:34):
, that the light in that lookedlike your memory of the moment,
not like what it really lookedlike, but everything's
heightened a little bit.
The colors are a little bitmore colorful, because that's
what I think kind of movies are.
Anyway, they're like yourmemory as opposed to a
documentary and all the peopleworking on them.
They're all adding stuff too,so I'm going to add something
(20:54):
that I think is going to helpthe show so I can shift back and
forth between hard and easyeasily.
Jennifer Coronado (21:03):
It's interesting because I think
about Stanley Kubrick's films,for example.
He just does such intricatecolor mapping for mood in the
work that he does and you knowyou have that shot in ET where
it's the heightened reality andwhat a kid would feel like if
they really were riding a bikeup in the sky right.
Dennis Muren (21:19):
Yeah, and what your memory is of it like just
after it happened.
What's your memory?
Jennifer Coronado (21:24):
Do those ideas come to you kind of
immediately, or do you marinateon them, or do you get those
light bulb moments, or is it acombination of it?
Dennis Muren (21:31):
It can be any of them.
It's not like a dawning, like Ihave a checklist, okay, I got
to figure the lighting out here.
I mean, you know, you get intoit and you say, oh, I see where
this is going and it seemsappropriate.
Other times it's you just thinkthis is the way you're going to
put it into the film.
But the thing is we've usuallynever seen the film in advance,
so we don't know if we're rightor not and I'll be on the set a
(21:53):
bit and I'll be able to talk tosteven a bit.
But it's not.
Like.
You know, there is the kubrickcolor design for everything like
that.
I don't think I'd even be goodat that, so I see it more as a
shot by shot thing and thatseems to work.
You know I I was to a certainextent copying Alan Daviau's
lighting that he was doing in ETfor the live action.
(22:15):
So it all did seem to fit, butjust doing this other bit to it
that he probably would have donetoo if he was lighting
something like that really big.
So I'm aware of those thingsthat are going on.
But again, if you think aboutthe fact that you've never even
seen the movie, it's amazingthat they all come together, but
it's because we all think a lotabout it.
We all talk a lot about it too.
Jennifer Coronado (22:37):
And the story drives it right.
Dennis Muren (22:39):
It should always be, oh yeah the story, yeah, but
the story certainly drives theemotion.
That's where you want to getthe idea.
Okay, this does have to be anuplifting moment, has to be a
satisfying but still dangerousmoment, or this I'm seeing has
to be a moment that looks likewe're never going to get out of
this.
Oh, we are.
Oh wait, no, we're not, andthat's all going to happen in
(22:59):
two and a half seconds.
So and I'll try to fill inthose things, because that stuff
often the director won't evenknow what he wants in the shot
he's done some storyboards.
They're usually not in theboard.
The board will have an examplekind of the camera view with
some kind of you see the threatsor whatever it is going on, the
emotion in it.
But how you fill up those twoto five seconds is pretty much
(23:23):
up to me and that's where Ithink all my liking movies and
loving them and seeing them andfeeling them and enjoying the
reality of life and how itchanges in relationships.
I make sure that stuff's inthere because it's opportunities
.
It's like an actor's, the wholething is opportunities.
You've got five seconds to dosomething.
You've got a two-minute shot.
What are you going to do withit?
(23:43):
What's an actor going to dowith it.
You're not just standing theresaying your words, you're adding
something to it.
And most departments do it.
Camera guys do it, I do it,actors do it, writers certainly
do it, everybody.
Jennifer Coronado (23:56):
Yeah, I see it sometimes in acting
performances where there's justa singular gesture that someone
makes and it could be verysimple and very small, but it's
just the perfect moment and theperfect gesture for what you're
trying to indicate in that scene.
Everybody does that in theirdifferent roles.
Dennis Muren (24:15):
And what you may not be aware of, and I'm not
really aware of very much, ishow that character is creating
that whole role so that whenthey decide to do the gesture,
it stands out.
Are they big, are they small?
Are they distant?
For the entire role, for allthe regular scenes, they're
talking and listening.
That's all a decision.
It's so complicated whatthey're doing and then to think
(24:39):
some of it can be figured out.
They could have a script that'sfull of notes and everything,
but ultimately it comes down toinstinct, which it probably does
to me and most people too.
Do you feel it as you're doingit and whatever?
That's important, to have anemotional connection to yourself
, and it's a goal.
Maybe it's not a clear goal, ormaybe the goal is not to be
(25:01):
clear, but just for more of youare acting.
Yeah, I don't go into much.
I know some folks do, but itaffects people do, but I don't
go into it not knowing what'sgoing to happen.
I, some folks do, but itaffects people do, but I don't
go into it not knowing what'sgoing to happen.
I pretty much at the beginning,want to know what's going to
happen and I may want to trythis.
We're not sure how it's goingto play out, but I pretty much
know the feeling.
(25:21):
I want to get from it no matter, and I don't care how we get to
it, and if it's a, theirsurprise is great, but not like
a serendipity sort of thing atall.
Jennifer Coronado (25:29):
Here's a question for you.
Sometimes, when you're doingsomething creative particularly
you're in a creative industryand you do it as your job right
it can sometimes feel like a joband you lose a little bit of
spark around the initial joythat you had around it.
And have you ever hit that wall?
And have you ever?
And how do you overcome that?
(25:50):
Because everything has its upsand downs, right.
Dennis Muren (25:53):
Yeah, I think all the time.
After doing Empire Strikes Back, I said that's everything I
ever wanted to do in movies.
That was it.
But I didn't want to leavebecause I was enjoying it.
And I got to Dragon Slayerafter that and I'd never done
anything.
I love dinosaurs and stuff likethat.
I thought I'd love, love themby.
Really it's neat to see them onthe screen.
But he got a chance to dosomething.
(26:14):
So, yeah, that goes all thetime.
You have to keep yourselfmotivated and the nice thing
that we've got at ILM is I couldpretty much do a show a year
and the directors were oftendifferent, so you've got
different challenges all thetime and different people to
work with and crews and goalsand everything.
So there is new stuff that youneed to come up with and you
(26:36):
want to, but all the time, yeah,I'd say I'm.
I couldn't say how many times Iwent up and, oh, I've had
enough, get out of here and Ididn't like the way the industry
was changing.
But then you think about it.
No, that's the way it is.
It always goes through changesand it's an amazing business to
be in.
Where are you going to beworking with dozens and dozens
(26:59):
of creative people that carewhat they're doing and want to
get to long and they want to alladd something to it and there's
layers, so it's so complicatedand it somehow fits and you get
it all at the end and you thinkit's the end, but no, it's just
the end of the day.
And then you get all thosepieces together and it's the end
of that.
And then you get all thosepieces together and your movie's
(27:21):
done and then it ends up in thetheater and it's another end.
You know it's great.
It's a really amazing businessto be in.
Jennifer Coronado (27:29):
Well, and something's interesting too is
like sometimes you work onsomething and you're so in it
and then you finally see it as awhole and maybe you have some
distance from it and you're like, oh, I hadn't even realized
that about this movie, I createdsomething that I hadn't even
expected, based on what I wascontributing to it, which is an
exciting part of it as well.
What do you do when a directorand you don't agree on a pass?
Dennis Muren (27:57):
You just do it.
First of all you want to hearmaybe he's got an idea that's
really good and this is not yourway of doing it.
But if there's something you'remissing, then I always bring it
up and they'll always listen tome and they'll always say well,
I want to try it like this andwe'll go ahead and do it that
way Always.
I'm not going to go againstanybody like that.
Who am I?
(28:18):
He's the director.
He may see things where theremay be an accident with it, you
know.
So I haven't had that.
I can think of any big argumentabout anything.
You know it's because thedirectors, their job is much
more complicated than what I'mdoing.
I'm just trying to get thedaily done.
I'm trying to get these greatseven or six seconds or three
(28:38):
seconds.
They're doing that with 2,000,3,000 shots of five versions of
each of it, with all the actorsand everything.
They know all that.
They know what they can saveand what they can throw out and
how my work can be cut ortrimmed and put a certain way
with a certain type of music andit'll work.
And I recognize that skill thata good director and editor and
(29:02):
score and everything is going tomake my stuff look great, so
I'm not hung up on just mycontribution to it at all, it's
the whole thing.
Jennifer Coronado (29:11):
Yeah, because it is a collaboration, right,
it's an orchestra piece thateveryone's playing their
different parts in, so you can'tbut in some way.
Dennis Muren (29:19):
We don't know what the other parts are going to do
with it, and I'm fine with that.
Maybe it's a jazz piece, yeah,oh, hey, look, he cut the end of
that.
Oh, he cut it in half.
Oh, he cut the end of that.
Oh, he cut it in half.
Oh, my god, now it's telling adifferent story.
It's better, you know.
Jennifer Coronado (29:32):
So it's all sorts of things one of the fun
things too, I think, you see,that is the discovery of
accidents, right?
Uh, when you make a mistake onsomething, you're like, oh,
that's actually better.
I'm glad I made that mistake,because now it's contributing.
I wasn't expecting.
Dennis Muren (29:48):
Could be.
Yeah, I don't remember any ofthose, but I probably did have
those.
I don't have memories of those.
Jennifer Coronado (29:54):
Are you telling me you've never made a
mistake, Dennis?
Dennis Muren (29:56):
I'm sure I have, but then I've got to turn it
into an asset because we've gotto get it done.
Jennifer Coronado (30:02):
You've had a long career and you saw the
transition from the morepractical optical side of visual
effects into computer graphicslike Jurassic, terminator 2.
And you talked about.
Sometimes the changes in theindustry can be challenging, but
did you ever find like thetechnical evolution challenging,
or was it something you're likeall right, man, let's do this,
let's go for it.
Dennis Muren (30:23):
I have never been interested in the technology
from the olden days, from havingthe cameras and loading the
cameras and building this andgetting the pyro right.
I never cared about that.
It's always been the image, theend result.
That's why I had no problemadapting the motion control,
because I was trying to flylittle spaceships when I was a
(30:44):
kid and they never moved right,you know, didn't look like they
fit in the star field.
The stars never looked right.
So you know, when it came to todoing complicated and stuff
that we were doing at ilm with50 people or 100 people, the
models you're getting you'rebetter than anything I could do
and everything is better than Icould do.
That's why the idea of being asupervisor or whatever they were
(31:05):
calling, which is really we'redirecting, but the academy said
we couldn't be called directorsin the 1940s, so we're just
supervisors.
It's great to have that amazingcraftsmanship and skill and all
the art that everybody'sputting into it and being able
to manipulate it in a certainway, following the director's
(31:25):
advice most of the time, butputting my own into it you'd be
able to get whatever it is.
It's just terrific.
But the tool didn't matter.
It was frustrating, likedigital.
I think digital could havehappened five years earlier, but
it was slow.
There was no film person, asfar as I'm concerned, in there.
There was championing thegetting digital, like comping
(31:49):
and digital rendering, to lookreal.
That had a background enough tosay this works and that doesn't
work, and this works and thatdoesn't work.
So after the Abyss I took a yearoff, but it wasn't to do that,
I was just worn out.
I got to take a break.
But of course you can't do thatand I started reading a
computer graphic book that waslike 1,600 pages, made for
(32:12):
doctorate degree kids going intocomputer.
I didn't understand the word ofit, but I understood it was not
magic and it was.
If you could specify anything,you could pretty much write a
tool for it and do it.
The fact you could havesomething 20 stops too dark or
500 stops too bright or whatever, you could do it digitally.
It all depended on how brightthe light was or how dark, and
(32:35):
you were telling it how brightor dark to make it.
Was it a laser light?
It didn't matter, you could doanything with it.
So I just said my God, that'samazing.
I think I can.
I'm not afraid of it.
I think I can adapt to it aslong as there's people that know
how to do that.
I think I'm gonna adapt to itas long as there's people that
know how to do that.
I had people long ago say youdon't want to learn this stuff,
you want to be the boss of this.
You know it takes too long tolearn it.
(32:56):
Whatever it is, this wasphotographer camera work.
You don't want to be a cameraguy, he said, you want to be the
boss.
I heard a camera guy told methat.
So that's what I did.
Then I got in and I worked ontrying to solve the input-output
because we didn't have any wayto After the Abyss.
The work was so great we stillhad to do optical composites,
(33:17):
which were not quite there.
They're very hard.
You almost can't do them.
So I put all my effort in for awhile to solve the digital
problem, which we'd havesomething from Kodak that had
the wrong specification.
We'd been using it for threeyears to try to film it out.
Kodak was making this tool toscan in home photos that you
(33:39):
shot from your negative cameraand they had a resolution of
4,000 pixels, and that's whyeverything was going nowhere,
because there was no hardware tostore data that big.
And that's one of the firstthings I questioned.
I said why do we need that?
Well, kodak says here's thedocument.
So I said yeah, but that's astill photo, you know well, they
(34:00):
will imagine on a big screen.
And I said yeah, but imagine ona big screen going through a
projector and it's shaking 24times a second.
It's blurring everything.
So we did a test at 2000 and itworked and that whole problem
went away.
So then, which was major, thatcould have been five more years
to solve that, but then.
So then we went in and I justworked on getting the colors
(34:22):
right and narrowing the colorthing down and then we had no
output device and I ran aroundand managed to track down.
I think it was a $20,000 unitmade by management software for
making business slides, and whatit was is a really beautiful
quality CRT, like your TV set,but much better than your TV set
(34:46):
, and they had an Acme animationcamera shooting on it,
photographing that, and it wasall in a box, three feet tall
and a foot on each side and aplug-in, and you could buy it in
a work and they were making itfor business slides On a
computer, somebody would makethe pie chart and show how much
your sales are going to be andyou could give that to put it in
(35:10):
this machine and it would, onthe screen, make that image.
And then the camera, which wasnormally actually meant to shoot
movies, being an Acme, theywere doing one frame at a time,
saying I'll get you 500 framesor 5,000, and cut it up and you
have 5,000 slides for the 5,000salesmen that are going out,
that need all those slides.
(35:31):
And the quality was great.
And I was thinking, my God,could this possibly the quality,
the color, the granularity thatyou saw on a TV screen?
Maybe it doesn't show on thisbecause it's such a it's a
military quality tube.
And we did a test of it.
We managed to get a frame fromsomething we scanned in the back
(35:53):
of the feature and the thingworked and that was it.
We had the input, we had theoutput, and ILM already had the
middle part, the imageprocessing, along with Photoshop
, which we didn't really use forthat, but we used a little bit,
but that was it.
I could put that into T2.
And suddenly you've got stuffthat there's nothing you can see
(36:14):
.
That's a flaw about it.
There's no matte edge.
You could look at it, compositeit on the screen and change
this and add that and make itbetter and embellish it and
surprise it and add all thisstuff, and then that, of course,
led to everything else.
Death Becomes, her was afterthat which was got into the skin
, and then we got into Jurassicand all the other stuff
afterwards.
Jennifer Coronado (36:33):
But here's the thing you didn't have Google
.
It wasn't like I'm going toGoogle these things and figure
out where I could find something, so how did you find that?
Dennis Muren (36:43):
Well, I found them with what's called a telephone.
A telephone it was not wireless, it was not wireless in those
days, but it was asking aroundand I was real cautious.
I thought if we're ever goingto solve this, ilm should be the
one that solves this.
We were so much into the motionpicture business I was kind of
(37:03):
sneaky and I ended up talking toRay Feeney, a really nice guy.
Didn't know him.
He worked at, was doing some ofit, rhythm and Hues, but he he
had the management graphic stuffbecause they were filming out
of rhythm and hughes.
Commercials doing of tony thetiger and all that were all done
with, you know, a cg, but itwasn't of human people and
walking and it was was all likeand you go to a movie theater
(37:26):
and you'd see between the showsyou used to have some crazy cg
thing of the of candy walkingalong and a coca-cola.
It used to be cartoons.
But then for in the 80s it wentinto computer graphics and I
kept looking at this saying howcome we're not used to something
like this?
Does it work?
And everybody was saying it'llnever work, it'll never work.
So anyway, ray didn't think itwas going to work.
(37:47):
I don't think a manager ofgraphics ever thought it would
be able to make a tonal imagefrom black to white of all the
colors necessary and be stableand not like some sort of
flicker, you know electronicthing.
That we didn't know from theway it was built, but the thing
worked and they ended up gettinga good SciTech award for it.
They should have Management ofgraphics for doing that.
(38:09):
For building that.
I should have managed mygraphics for doing that.
For building that.
I have always been on a crusadefor the supervisors to be
choosing the future, not thedepartments that they were into
the future, because that couldhave been happening two or three
or four years earlier.
The soup's got to go in therewith something they say they
know from the shows.
Right, that is needed.
(38:30):
And if it's not there, figureit out.
Jennifer Coronado (38:33):
And it's kind of like when a director comes
in and says I have this thing, Iwant Figure it out for me,
right.
It's that sort of leading, thatdesire leads the innovation,
right.
Dennis Muren (38:46):
Right, or else the supervisor is going to say, oh
yeah, I know, I know somethinglike this, we did it on this
show and know something likethis, we did it on the show and
you know we did that on thatshow and if we put this together
, we'll have the shot.
Great, really.
Is that really great?
Or do you have in your mind anidea like wait, that's going to
look very familiar, I'm going tocome up with something
different.
So you've got to have a goal,you know, and my goal was to it
(39:09):
was the stuff to look likeperfect and be infinitely
flexible and, like my mind is.
Jennifer Coronado (39:15):
Yeah.
Dennis Muren (39:16):
Or was?
Jennifer Coronado (39:18):
No is One of the things that I've always
thought is really interestingabout you is you always have a
really good sense about what anaudience will forgive and where
the focus really is in an image.
But in your time working inmovies, how do you think the
audience's perception haschanged and how does that impact
things now?
Dennis Muren (39:34):
On one hand, I'm surprised that there's so much
weak image out there that theaudience doesn't care about.
The audience is now, but theynever did Before.
Suddenly they'd break into songat a dance number somewhere in
Oklahoma or who knows where itwas.
It was never believable, right.
But because we're in effect somuch and most of the clients
(39:55):
have wanted us to make it lookreally real that it doesn't seem
to matter if it doesn't.
In a lot of films You've got toget 3,000 shots done.
There's not the money to makethem all perfect, and it could
be that even to make it perfectyou've got to slow things down.
So the gravity is correct, orthe character has time to
(40:15):
respond when it hits the groundand gets up, or you have time to
see the bridge breaking theright way or something that
might slow the movie down.
So it could be the director'sgot a point when he just says no
, I just want her faster, Idon't want her faster, and maybe
the audiences don't carebecause they're just in another
space.
I just want her faster, I don'twant her faster, and maybe the
audiences don't care becausethey're just in another space
(40:35):
than I am in.
Jennifer Coronado (40:36):
Yeah.
Dennis Muren (40:37):
You know we all were.
It's like just a change in theculture.
I don't like it because Icouldn't.
I wouldn't enjoy working onthose shows at all, where
reality doesn't matter andyou're almost like letters and
words.
You're just getting this doneand this done that amount of
time and boom and it's done, andjust you know, put it together,
perfect for AI to do that stuff.
Jennifer Coronado (40:58):
Yeah, what do you think about AI?
What's your thoughts on that?
Dennis Muren (41:01):
I don't know, who knows what it's going to do.
I think movies and televisionand music are fashion, and
fashion is based on how we feelabout something three weeks
later.
I love this, I bought this Waita minute and it doesn't seem so
good anymore.
Anyway, oh, look at that overthere.
There's something over there.
I like better Climate changes.
(41:22):
So things go in and out offashion, and I don't know how
their AI or I care if they'regoing to be able to keep up with
fashion.
It's easy to turn out scripts,I think, and to do effects
nowadays how you do memorableones.
I don't know if a computer cando it.
They're not our mind.
It's not our mind, and goodfilmmaking comes from, I think,
(41:43):
a human thinking through the wayhumans are going to react to it
, as the story's told.
Jennifer Coronado (41:49):
A lot of the stuff I see feels very yeah,
that's a cool image, but whatit's compiled together from a
bunch of other things that maynot map together and I it feels
very flat to me like emotionless, and what I love movies is the
emotion that you get out of itright are there filmmakers that
you are excited about now, youhaving worked with the greats
(42:11):
like spielberg and george?
Dennis Muren (42:13):
You know I can't.
I'm sort of so out of thecontemporary stuff.
You know I'm into likecompletely different sort of
things.
The stuff that the Dune guyshave been doing, the work looks
great.
I like some of the Chris Nolanstuff is fabulous in there.
As far as you know, I wish theywould go a little bit farther
than they do, but that's mytaste on it.
(42:33):
But I understand why the holdback or whatever.
But they're great filmmakers,you know.
And of course, steven andGeorge and all those guys and
Cameron.
You know I can't pull anythingout, but I, you know, I'll look
at something.
I don't know if you've seenTangerine.
It's been out for a long timenow.
You know.
Great vision, greatperformances, great writing.
You know, on an iPhone five,give me a break.
(42:54):
And a lot of people thought,yeah, you know.
And Sean Baker was saying, yeah, we're out there, we're
shooting this thing and nobodyyou know the he couldn't even
tell we were shooting stuffbecause the sound equipment was
bigger than the camera so theycould shoot on streets and
everything.
It's better, I think you cansee it in the performances, you
can see the reality in it, butit's uncomfortable for producers
(43:16):
to try something like that.
So they've got to have theircomfort zone.
Everybody's got to be protectedbecause films are so expensive
and if they're not expensiveyou're doing something wrong and
they're not happy making a $3million or a $300,000 movie.
The studios have always wantedto have big successes, but more
so now, probably, than ever.
So it's just a different world.
(43:37):
On the other hand, anybody canmake a film.
I did my little film, you knowwhen it's 16 millimeter, and I
sold it and it played in thetheaters and everything when I,
you know, my second year incollege summer vacation Back
then, if you could do it.
It's so much easier now to doit.
So I'm always surprised thatthere's not more of that going
(43:58):
on, but it has.
It's picking up.
More and more people are makingindie films, really on the
cheap, and I'm glad to see itand also there's so many
perspectives that you can getinto.
Jennifer Coronado (44:08):
That, I think , is so interesting.
Dennis Muren (44:09):
Try telling that to ai.
Let's say I'm in a differentperspective and you'll get into
that.
I think is so interesting.
Try telling that to AI.
Let's say I want a differentperspective and you'll get a
different angle change andthat's all.
I can see my perspective.
Okay, angle.
No, that's not what we'retalking about.
Jennifer Coronado (44:21):
Yeah, I want to see somebody's heartbreak in
an image, like I want to seesomeone in love, or I want to
see someone being powerful.
You want that feeling from it,and so that kind of brings me to
my last question Is thereanything that you want from a
movie that you have yet to see?
What?
Dennis Muren (44:45):
would be your dream thing to see from a movie.
Oh, you have to ask me afterI've had so hard to think about
that.
I don't think so, you know.
And I would think why.
Because it's so easy, at leastwith my experience and my age,
to visualize anything.
I'm not in wow as much as Iused to be.
I used to be in wow.
I've got to be able to do thatmyself, and I used to be in wow.
(45:07):
Oh look, I worked on somethingthat went beyond that, and now I
don't even have to work on it.
But the ideas I have, spatiallycompleted ones in my mind, are,
uh, you know so um rich alreadythat when I see a big film that
works, I'm very satisfied andvery glad that whole group got
(45:28):
together and managed to turnsomething out really big and
great and they did it, and thatthose little things were
terrific or whatever.
But it's not so much a big wowto me because I'm still looking
at it on the screen and I'm inyour mind, you're living it.
Jennifer Coronado (45:45):
Dennis, what are you doing, Aaron?
Thank you for asking thatquestion, yeah.
Dennis Muren (45:51):
It was very simple saying goodbye to work.
I didn't think it was, but Ihad been thinking about it for
like over five years, preparingfor it in 10 years, and what I
decided to do is I wanted to goback to you know, when I was
born.
Right, you're born and you'refive and then you get up to like
15 and you kind of that's areally exciting period of
exploration.
(46:11):
And then you kind of settled insomething when you were 20 or
something like that, and moviesis one of the things I did.
So I thought that's okay,here's the beginning chapter.
Then I got the Hollywood movie,san Francisco chapter.
Now I got my final chapter,which is okay, everything comes
to an end.
What did I miss in that firstpart that I loved?
And it was music.
(46:32):
And I can't play an instrument.
I can play the piano and I cankind of play a guitar, but what
I loved was some classical music, but mostly really good pop
that everybody would just that'sthe most ridiculous thing in
the world From in the late 50s,60s, into the 70s, into the 80s,
(46:52):
into 80s, the synthesizers andI got a set of wearing out and
nothing beyond that, and Iwanted to understand it.
So what I've been doing is I'mjust totally into that and I can
understand it now, and I'm notright.
I don't even know if I'm goingto write it, but I want to
understand it, and thetechnology is there now to do it
, whereas before you'd hearsomething, you have to like,
(47:14):
kind of pulling out that piano.
Can I hear it?
Oh, it's going.
I can't quite tell how thatpiano like is that piano line?
I think is what moved me duringthis part of the song, but then
it comes and goes.
Well, now you can find all thepiano lines, find any song has
been broken down into karaokeversions by expert musicians
(47:36):
just experts and you can buythem like 10 tracks, 15 tracks
of karaoke versions $3.
And they're beautifulreproductions, if you ever
wanted to be able to figure outhow music is made, and you can
do it with classical someclassical music in there too,
the same thing.
So I just I love that, becauseI loved it so much as a kid.
(47:57):
I don't know.
My goal was never, though, to bea performer, and it isn't now,
but I'm hoping to be able tomaybe actually start writing
some simple things.
I tried that a little bit whenI was ILM, but I just got too
bonked with a show and couldn'tand you know I didn't know time,
no time to think about it.
But now I have nothing.
I sort of have nothing but time, which is not true but you're
(48:18):
so busy, but I have a lot moretime than I did when I was
working.
So that's what I'm doing.
So I've got like 200 karaokeversions of 200 of my favorite
songs that I've already got andI and just saying wow, that's
unbelievable.
So I totally appreciate musical.
The musicians arranging writingwhich is almost incidental to
(48:42):
the purpose of those guys weredoing in the first place.
They kind of work, but I guessit's the technical stuff and the
emotional response from it.
Jennifer Coronado (48:49):
That's so interesting because that goes
back to emotional response thatyou had to images when you were
a kid and now you have thatemotional response that it.
That's so interesting becausethat goes back to emotional
response that you had to imageswhen you were a kid and now you
have that emotional responsethat you're pursuing with music.
Dennis Muren (48:58):
Yeah, at full time , like I'd like to be.
I was doing for 35 years or 40years at ILM, right.
So now I'm, I can do it tosomething.
I was also doing it when I wasyounger too, so, and I'm not
that there's a goal or anythinglike that, but it's just, it's
amazing.
It's like a whole new chapterof something I didn't even think
if it had been for technologyand all allowing people and
(49:21):
people wanting to do this stuff,you know.
And then I still would betrying to hear how this song was
made and being, and you know,and I've got them all on track,
I've got all mixers, I got thesliders, I mix them, I try
different versions andeverything.
I'm going to go in and changebass lines and see does that
make an additional emotionalresponse?
Have I made it better or have Iruined it?
(49:41):
Right, but there's no goal inany of this, nothing like that,
just for fun.
The goal is just to move me, meget me like, wow, look at that.
Jennifer Coronado (49:55):
And so it's looking three in the morning, oh
my god, you gave us an hour ofyour time, dennis, thank you so
much.
Dennis Muren (49:57):
Okay, sure, good luck with your stuff thank you
for listening to everyone is.
Jennifer Coronado (50:05):
Everyone is is produced and edited by Chris
Hawkinson, executive producer isAaron Dussault, music by Doug
Infinite.
Our logo and graphic design isby Harrison Parker and I am Jen
Coronado.
Everyone Is is a slightlydisappointed Productions
production dropping every otherThursday.
Wherever podcasts are available, make sure to rate and review,
and maybe even like andsubscribe.
(50:26):
Thank you for listening.
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