Ep 145 | Alec Gillis — Creature FX Artist (Aliens, Predator, Tremors) - The Filmumentaries Podcast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Weirding Way Media.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
Hello and welcome to the Film we Mentors Podcast. I'm
Jamie Benning, filmmaker, author, lifelong fan of sci fi and
fantasy movies and behind the scenes stories, and this is
the show where I talked to those artists and technicians
who helped create the films I grew up loving and
probably we grew up loving today. My guest is Alec Gillis,

(01:06):
creature effects designer and filmmaker and founder of Studio Gillis
as well as ADI Amalgamated Dynamics, Inc. With Tom Woodruff
Back in the day. Alec began's career working under the
legendary Stan Winston before going on to co found creature
Effects at ADI with Tom Woodruff Junior. Together they helped
create some of the most memorable practical effects in modern cinema,

(01:28):
and across a career spanning more than four decades, Aleck
has worked on films including Aliens, Predator, Alien Three, Tremor's
Death Becomes Her, Starship Troopers, and many more, helping shape
the modern era of practical effects to this day. In
this conversation, we took about how a childhood encounter with
Ray Harry Housen's work on Jason and the Argonauts set

(01:51):
him on his path. His early days building stop motion
puppets in his parents' garage and working with Roger Corman
alongside a young James Cameron, his years at stan Winston Studio,
and what it was like creating creatures for films like
Predator and Alien three. This interview was recorded remotely, but
as you're here, we start talking about the Joe alvesdoc

(02:12):
that I'm continuing to make, so I did actually interview
Alec in person. I got to visit Studio Gillis, which
was fun. There in Los Angeles. We spoke to him
about his work on Jaws three D, and we also
interviewed Jared Rivett, a local horror expert, about some of
Joe's work as well for the documentary. Aleck was so accommodating,

(02:33):
so friendly, such a great guy, really really top guy.
So thank you Alec for your time doing this interview
and for your time and patience with us when we
visited your shop. So a little bit more about the
Joe Alves documentary. We headed off to LA in the
middle of February. You know, we had the hope of

(02:56):
getting Steven Spielberg more on that in a moment that
didn't happen, But what we did get was interviews with
Alec Gillis. As I mentioned, we also spoke to and Dowsonberry,
who was one of the main cast in Jaws two.
That was fun. I also managed to book Rick Carter
for an interview. He actually came up to Joe's house

(03:17):
and he sat there with Joe and we miked the
two of them up and just kind of got a
couple of cameras on them and observed them from a
distance and they just chatted about their time working with
Steven and Rick had some wonderful things to say about Joe.
Then we did a sit down interview with Rick again,
very gracious man, very generous with his time, Very grateful

(03:37):
for that as well. We also managed to go to
Leah Thompson's house and interview Leah about her first film,
which was Jaws three D, Joe's first and last film
that he directed. That is so that was fun. She
couldn't have been more friendly and warm. She signed my
Turkish Jaws three D poster. I don't know why I

(03:59):
have a Turkish one. I just quite like the fact
that it's a bit different, and she signed a Howard
the Duck picture for me, saying to Jamie good Duck lovelier,
which I will cherish for some time. Yeah, we just
had the best time out there, and believe it or not,
I managed to book Dean Cundy and thanks to some

(04:19):
very kind folks, some friends of Joe Als and his
wife Jerry, they let us shoot at their house out
in Pasadena, so Dean didn't have far to go because
he lives in Pasadena too, and is what he and
his wife Tisha turned up and we had a good
sit down interview with him for a good hour and
a half and again he signed a couple of things
for me. I've got a Jurassic Park license plate signed,

(04:42):
and Paddy, my co director, got a huge Escape from
New York poster signed as well, So that was really fun.
And again another gracious individual, very nice to have a
chat with him. Had a few jokes with him as well,
and he was talking enthusiastically about his work with Joe
and Escape from New York and I wish i'd could
get him on the podcast. Actually I might try and
do that because he's got so much experience in so

(05:04):
many films. It was really wonderful to talk to him.
We also want to shot some b roll at Willow
Springs Racetrack. That's where Joe started his short racing career,
and he has a wonderful story about taking a Hollywood
legend up there to have a race in his car.
And we also went to Suppulvida Dam, which is where

(05:25):
Joe picked for Escape from New York. Obviously it's been
used in a bunch of other films buck Eru Bandzai,
I think it was in a night Rider episode, but
it was very cool to be there. So we had
this amazing five six days just purely adrenaline fueled wake up,
get breakfast, write questions for the interview, coming, drive to

(05:45):
the location, do the interview, come back, shoot some b roll,
transfer the footage, have some dinner, collapse in bed and repeat.
And then I came straight from that to a day
and a half later working on the Australian Grand Prix
for Formula One, so working on Australian time but here
in the UK remotely, so I was already kind of

(06:09):
on an eight hour time wonk and then another eleven
hour's difference for Australia, so I have to say I
was pretty exhausted. Hence the reason I didn't get the
last couple of episodes out because I then went straight
from that the following weekend, after you know, seeing my
family for a bit, then working on the Chinese Grand

(06:30):
Prix in the middle of the night. So it's a
pretty crazy month this month of March because I'm working
on three Grand Prixs a formula e. I've got a
couple of days work at home as well, and yeah,
trying to get all the documentary footed transferred, backed up,
mirrored onto drives, transcribed. I just haven't had time for
the podcast. So again, apologies for not getting these episodes out.

(06:52):
Thank you for your support, Thank you for understanding. I
will be making up for it in the coming months.
I do have several guests in the bag back. Of course,
they require editing, transcribing, doing the intros and outros of
social media, the artwork and all of that stuff. So
I just didn't have the time. Between working ten hour
twelve hour shifts and sleeping when I could, there just

(07:14):
wasn't any other time. Again, thank you to everyone who
donated to the GoFundMe for the Joe Alves project. We
are getting there. We are getting there slowly, And the
amazing news is is that Steven Spielberg has agreed to
sit down with us perhaps in the fall this year,
after the release of his film, which he's obviously focusing
on right now, deep in post production on that, I

(07:36):
would imagine. I think he's out at south By Southwest
at the moment, so maybe there is a version that
they're screening there. So yeah, very exciting because that elevates
this project to something else, entirely different. So we're still
looking for people to come on board as the executive producers.
If you're a distributor or you know a distributor that
might be interested in helping us get this film out there,

(08:01):
a film about a Hollywood legend and his amazing physical archive,
then please get in touch info atfilmomentaries dot com. Likewise,
if you've got an idea for somebody I could interview,
just send me an email at that same address, info
at filmomentaries dot com. Right, I'm going to stop jabbering
on now, but I'll be talking to you again after

(08:21):
the interview. But here's my interview with legendary creature effects
artist Alec Gillis, and I'll be back as I said
at the end for a little bit more jabbering on Alex.

(08:49):
So many other people that I've spoken to on this
podcast can sort of cite this moment where they suddenly
found the magic. Is there a particular moment or a
particular film that you can remember seeing that turned you
onto this stuff?

Speaker 3 (09:01):
Yeah, it probably hit me in a couple of blasts.
One of my earliest memories was my father waking me up.
I think I was about five years old, and he said,
come out here, you got to see this, And it
was the network premiere of Jason and the Argonauts on
our little TV. And it was right at the moment
when the guy is scattering the teeth of the hydra

(09:23):
and the skeletons come up. That was really like that
just boggled my mind. I was like hooked, and my
dad knew something about the techniques and he was explaining
to me that they're only this big. And then the
next big, big blast was four years later, I suppose,

(09:44):
when the original Planet of the Apes came out and
my brother and I my mother would just drop us
off at the matinee show and we would watch it
three times that day, hide under the seats and just
keep watching it and she go up our later, but
it's really that movie is so ingreat to me. So

(10:05):
I got basically that's my career, right, like creature stuff
and makeup e stuff. Between those two films, I didn't
do stop motion. I wanted to initially, but but I
changed tact.

Speaker 2 (10:20):
So what I age with that would being you mentioned
two points there, But were you like that sweet spot
whether they say that, you know, if you're eight to
twelve you find that thing. Yeah, love, if you end
up doing it, you've you've got the dream life kind
of thing.

Speaker 3 (10:32):
Yes, So there was you know, five, I got the
got the bug and knew I loved, you know, fantastical movies,
and then by uh by nine, I was smitten with
it all. But it was then actually, at about age
eleven or twelve, that I saw an interview with Ray

(10:53):
Harry Els in Castle of Frankenstein magazine. Yeah, I'm you know,
paging through the magazine at the newsstand and I'm seeing
most of my favorite creatures and then I go, oh,
there's a guy who does this, and that in my
mind said I want to be that guy. So that
was sort of the So there were three.

Speaker 2 (11:14):
Moments those were the Catalyst. It's funny, isn't it. People
talk about Ray Harry Housen movies. They forget about the
directors of these movies. I mean, I know, Jason the Lgonims,
is it don Don Chafficky chaffee. H Yeah, you think
about It's funny like you just have Ray Harry houses
have been bleazoned on your brain.

Speaker 3 (11:34):
And that makes him one of a kind. I think
he was an not without being a director. You know,
he'd do his five panel sketches, beautiful drawings. He'd go
in with the idea, him and Charles Sneer would pitch it,
get the green light, and then they hire a director.
The interview directors hire them and uh you know, and

(11:55):
but it's it's Ray's movie. And I think that is
so fascinating to me, and so outside the system and
the normal way of doing things that he really was.
He's sort of to me. I did get to meet
him in the in the nineties and and uh, you know,
I spent some time Tom Tom Woodroff when we were

(12:16):
working on Alien three. Tom just picked up the phone
book and started looking for Ray Harry Housen because we
were in London, right and he's like, how many people
are named Harry Housen And there it was. He was
in the phone book. So Tom called him and said, yes,
we're working on a film, you know, because now we
had some clout, you know, some stature. And Ray invited

(12:39):
us over. So we got to go over and see
his menagerie in his cupboard, meet his wife Diana, and
and and one of my fondest memories was when he
was he wanted to show us a videotape of some
animators that were completing some of his puppet films. This

(13:00):
one was a tortoise in the hair thing. I should
know who these guys are because they did a great job.
But he said, I think you'll be impressed. And he
was trying to get his VCR to work. He's trying
to get his video player to work. He couldn't quite
and he's like, where's the remote control? And I was
like it was so endearing, and I just thought, this
is awesome. I don't have to worry about not because

(13:24):
sometimes I don't think of myself as super tech savvy
like a lot of people. I don't need to be that,
you know, to do this stuff. But he told us
in that visit that, you know, really he never felt
like an insider in the movie in the studio system.
He always felt outside. And there was a moment where

(13:44):
he was pounding on the arm of his chair complaining
about studio execs, saying they don't know their asses from
a hole in the ground. And I thought, Oh, there's
the firebrand, right, that's the guy that I think Rape
Bradbury wrote about in that little novella where Harry Housen

(14:06):
is a character and that Yeah, so he was an
independent filmmaker. I think he doesn't quite get his deserved
acclaim for that.

Speaker 2 (14:16):
But it's one thing, though, to sort of say, there's
this guy that does this and you found it in
a magazine, but then to say to yourself, I could
be that guy. I mean, where were you brought up?
Where were you growing up at this time? Were you
near the Hollywood system.

Speaker 3 (14:30):
I didn't feel like I was near the Hollywood system,
but I did grow up in the shadow of the
matter Horn at Disneyland. I could see the fireworks from
my bedroom window. So I spent a lot of time
at Disneyland, and I think, you know, I didn't really
realize it until some time later that being again, you know,

(14:51):
it was a wonderful time when your mom would drop
you off at the gates of Disneyland, the happiest place
on earth. You'd run in with a single book of tickets,
which you'd burned through in an hour, and there's really
no lines, you know at that time, and then you
had just run around the park for another ten hours
until it closed. So you know, I was looking at

(15:14):
animatronics and just getting right back on the Pirates of
the Caribbean, you know, with as many tickets as I had,
or or the Haunted Mansion, and really because those things
felt there were immersive experiences. They felt like you were
in a movie and those animatronics were performing for you,
and and it was really very fascinating to me. So

(15:36):
I do kind of credit Disneyland for a fair amount
of my interest in the fantastical and robotics.

Speaker 2 (15:43):
And there's something about the couple of things you described there.
I think for me that you know, being dropped off
at Disneyland and being dropped off at the movie theater,
they're both sort of experiences of discovery as well, aren't they.
I don't think kids of my kids generation kind of
have had that, whether I mean I had it in
my time, definitely just going out on my BMX bike
further than I should have gone, and in the woods

(16:04):
and building camps and stuff. But I think, you know,
you're that little bit older than me, where we did
just kind of drop kids off and say you're on
your own, and we were sort of left to discover
these things, and it's so much more enriching, I think
to that to discover those things.

Speaker 3 (16:20):
Isn't that funny? That's an interesting way of putting it,
because getting out and going somewhere, going further than you
should physically geographically is exhilarating and thrilling, and then pulling
back and like going a little further next time or whatever.
Whereas today they're going way further in terms of the

(16:40):
dangers of the cyberspace, but in the safety of their home,
so there's an oction that they're safe. Yes, yeah, in
reality they maybe they're being exposed to more dangers.

Speaker 2 (16:52):
Yeah, yeah, I think you're right as you were describing
that they are going further and further. I can sort
of remember that feeling like I shouldn't be here, a
little bit beyond the border of where I should be,
you know, wrong side of the tracks kind of thing.
But when when did you sort of you mentioned about
stop motion not happening for you? What happened there?

Speaker 3 (17:09):
Then?

Speaker 2 (17:10):
Was it a hobby? For a while?

Speaker 3 (17:12):
I was into it, you know, initially that was what
drew me in, and I was doing you know, little
playmation things, and then I came consumed by how to
make a stop motion puppet that looked just like something
rare areas and would do you know not the same design?
But I had, And so I'm going, you know, looking

(17:33):
at any magazine famous bosses of film land might have
a picture of Hares imposing next to an armature or
the King Kong armature, and you're, okay, I see those balls?
What are these things? You know? How do I make
a version of this with hardware store items and or
do it out of wire or what have you? Foam
lay text? You know, how do I you know, where

(17:55):
do you figure it out? In a pre YouTube tutorial era?
How do I figure this out? And that was a
big part of the of the exploration of going further
and further is like, oh, I found out you know,
there's an R and D Latex up the five Freeway.
You know, how do I get there can I get

(18:16):
my mom or my dad to drive me there. Uh
pick up a gallon of foam latex, which I won't
tell my mother I'm going to be cooking it in
her oven yet, but.

Speaker 2 (18:29):
I find yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (18:32):
Figure so. And luckily, uh, you know, I had two
supportive parents. They did get divorced right around you know,
when I was eleven, and divorce was fantastic for me
because they both felt bad. So, you know, my mom
got me a Minolta super movie camera that had stop motion, setting,

(18:52):
slow motion, fast motion, an intervalometer. I got to have
the intervalometer because I got to click it one frame
at a time, so I'm not jiggling the camera. And
then my dad would take me to he was a
he was a military guy, so he would take me
to the military base and we would we would watch
totally inappropriate Italian horror movies. And I remember I remember

(19:14):
a double feature of When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, which
is the one I wanted to see, and Torso, which
I think was a ful chep movie, which which had
like girls in bikinis getting sowd in half and and
those were good to see because I realized, yeah, I'm
not into that. I don't. I don't. I don't love that. Yeah,

(19:35):
I love.

Speaker 2 (19:37):
You found your niche or your niche as you would say.
And I mean you're talking about a very specific hobby.
It's not like you know, today kids might be they
might all have a PlayStation or whatever, or they might
be going to soccer. This hobby at this time for
you was a matter of finding this very occasional magazine
or like a Dick Smith makeup kit or something for Christmas.

(20:00):
It's interesting, so many other people I spoke to do
like Ken Ralston, Dennis Muir and who that little bit
older than you as well, sort of came through in
a very similar way because I didn't discover the Harry
House and stuff until it was on TV here at Christmas.
It was always being shown at Christmas. And you know,
had I gone on the right trajectory, I'd be in
a similar industry to you right now, I think. But

(20:21):
it didn't happen for me, but it happened for you.
But it's even smaller group of people that actually made
it into the industry.

Speaker 3 (20:27):
Well that was the that was the sort of those
barriers to entry of you know, how do you figure
out how to do this? How do you? How do you?
I could talk to a counselor in high school, you know,
who would say, what do you want to do? You
know that before they just before you graduate, they take
an interest in that suddenly, and so mister starts I
believe was his name. Uh, You're like, what do you

(20:49):
want to do? I was stop motion animation, and he
looked at me blankly, and he go, how about welding?

Speaker 2 (20:54):
Yes, not on his list, welding, right, yeah.

Speaker 3 (20:56):
Okay, welders make six dollars an hour. And uh, and
I remember going pish posh, you know, I'm going to
be the next Ray Harry Hols. And and now I
think I look at it, and then, you know, when
we need welders, I'm like, God, damn, they're expensive and
they're working too.

Speaker 2 (21:13):
I always think with those like we, you know, we
call the careers advisors over here. I remember having to
fill in this form and it came out that I
should be a telecommunications engineer or something, which is what
my uncle's doing at the time. Totally did not want
to do that, but I think it should be almost
like jury service, you know, like you get a let
through the post one day and it says you've got
to go to a school and talk to kids about
careers because the people who are in the job of

(21:33):
careers advisor, who were they to advise you on a career?
You know?

Speaker 3 (21:38):
Oh, well, this is where my snarky uh, you know,
self satisfied self was And that's part of what like
doing this hobby that nobody I knew was doing it
and it was so hard to find information that it
made you feel special. It made you feel like and
when you're a teenager, you know, you revel and you know,

(21:59):
having no and understand you or like, I'm not even
going to talk people about this when they ask me.
I don't want to because they just won't get it,
you know, and then that gives you a very very
special feeling. But but yeah, I did go in and
mister Stott, I'm thinking, mister Stotts, you're a you know,
you're a history teacher who has been thrust into the

(22:21):
position of guidance counselor because it's that time of year.
So please don't feign interest in my you know, you'll
see someday you see my move my name on the
movie screen. You'll love it. But they were all well, intended,
and now I realize I was being kind of a dick.

Speaker 2 (22:39):
Yeah, but you need that kind of dickish focus to
end up, you need that passion.

Speaker 3 (22:44):
Yeah, I oh, this is what this is. Where Like,
as I've gotten older, I really do. I have worked
on removing my ego from my creative functions, you know,
like working with my people and all that, because I've
seen people with rampant egos in in the movie business,
and you know, it's not it's not fun, and I'd

(23:06):
rather have fun than not have fun. But I also
want to do great work. So then I gravitate towards
who are the filmmakers I've worked with that are calm
and reasonable and even keeled and are still great. And
so that's what I But that said, like wholy death
of the ego sounds all great and everything, but when

(23:27):
you're building your career and you're scrapping and you're competing,
and you have a vision, and you have to have
a fire in your gut and you have to have
you have to have tenacity, and you have to be
sure of yourself. You have to have confidence, you know. Yeah,
And so luckily I've had people who like Jim Cameron

(23:48):
you know, as an early role model for me. And
I saw, you know, how he was with his focus
and his you know, he's a force of nature, you know,
and and and what he accomplished and uh, and I've
seen I haven't worked with him in many years now,
but I've seen in interviews and extended interviews he has

(24:10):
mellowed out. You know a lot of David Fincher has
mellowed out a lot. You know, two very different personalities there,
but very driven. Yeah, yeah, both very driven David Fincher.
Alien three. My god, that guy that was the first
director I worked with that was younger than me.

Speaker 2 (24:25):
I think like his twenties then, wasn't seven.

Speaker 3 (24:28):
Yeah, he was twenty seven, I think. You know, Tom
Wodrif and I were about thirty thinking we were like
wonder kids, and then we're like, holy shit. And that
guy was so self possessed at an early age, at
so unflustered, unruffled by studio kind of combat. He was

(24:48):
just built for it. You know. I don't know that
he enjoyed it, but it was really amazing to see.
I remember once in his office, we were coming over
to show him some designs at Pinewood Student you, and
he had the He had the same office that Gayle
and Herd had on Aliens five years prior. So we
you know, we we see him on the on the

(25:09):
phone from the big picture window outside his feeder up
on the desk and he's talking. He looks totally relaxed.
So we're like, okay, and Barbara, his his office manager,
says yeah, go ahead, he's expecting you, and we kind
of tap lightly and he's finishing a conversation. He's going.
He goes, well, I don't fucking care, put me on
a plane and send me the fuck home. And he

(25:30):
and would go, wow, who is that? He says, ah,
the studio head And we're like, god, wow, I would
be ulcerating and go, you know, lumping jumping through hoops
and yes, sir, yeah, yeah, yeah. So when people I was,
I mean, people don't don't blame him for Alien three anymore.
Now it's settled down and we kind of know the

(25:53):
story despite him not have you know, he doesn't talked
much about it. But but initially when Alien three came out,
and it would frustrate me when people would blame Fincher
for whatever lacking, whatever's lacking in that film or for
its chaos and so yeah, and it was the success

(26:13):
of it and what people like about it is totally
due to David Fincher. Uh and and I don't know,
like a lot of other directors would it would have,
you know, they would have crumpled.

Speaker 2 (26:24):
I think, yeah, a lot of people are very unaware
of the mechanics of movie making. I think people just
assume that you get script, you get a crew, and
you go for it, and you know you've got as
long as you want, almost to do everything you want.
I mean, when was the first time you kind of
got a measure of how movies were? But that was

(26:44):
that back within the sort of Roger Corman interactions. You
then that's where you met Cameron as well, right.

Speaker 3 (26:49):
Yeah, well I met I met Cameron a year prior
to joining with Roger Corman. I met it through a
My wife had a high school art teacher. I mean,
she wasn't my wife when she was in high school,
let me set the records, but when when she was

(27:09):
in high school, she had an art teacher. And so
I was about eighteen or so, and that art teacher
had seen my work and said, oh you should you
should meet this guy. My husband teaches oceanography and he's
got the student who's into the kinds of things you're interest.
So I got the number and I called and we
had a nice chat. And Jip was about six years

(27:30):
older than me, and I went out to Brea and
visited him during his truck driving you know, book you know,
school district, book delivery whatever.

Speaker 2 (27:42):
It was, right, Yeah, yeah, I think you know.

Speaker 3 (27:44):
That big brown truck was parked in front of his
house a fair amount. And he had like a little
two or three bedroom house out in Brea, California, and
he was just chalk full of giant. H had a
seven foot spaceship model that he was building because he
was like just on the roads. First guy I ever met.
He said, yeah, I got a script and I just

(28:06):
thought I'd just start making the movie, you know, And
he was shooting. It was he shoot. He was shooting
at sixteen millimeter. He had done the short Xenogenesis at
that point. Yeah. That I think you could see a
really low res copy online somewhere on YouTube maybe. But
I went out to uh To to a movie theater

(28:27):
where his buddy was a projectionist, and after midnight, when
the crowd had left, they ran this and I thought,
holy crap, No, that was a thirty five millimeter film. Sorry,
it was no sixteen millimeter, it was thirty five. I
was doing you know, stop motion in Super eight. So
I'm like, this guy is fully fully filed. Yeah. And

(28:48):
then when I got the call through you know, another
friend of my sisters who was working for Corman. He
had seen my mother's garage where I was you know,
work work turned into my workshop, and he said, I
can get you an interview at Roger Corman's because we're
working on a movie called Battle Beyond the Stars. And
I got I was like, shit, I don't have a

(29:10):
proper portfolio. I don't even know like eh. So I said,
can I bring a friend because I thought, well, Cameron
will make me look good, right, so so you can
see my lack of confidence compared to Jim's you know,
complete confidence. And we uh you know, went to uh,
I think they were in Tarzana. We went at the
freeway and interviewed with Chuck Camisky and the Skotech brothers

(29:33):
Robert and Dennis, tabletop miniature geniuses. We looked around and
it was like, wow, this is a real movie. This
feels like uh you know, you know, we've arrived, right,
But it was a good six months before they called
us back and hired us. And Jim, Jim later told
me that that he he learned, uh I don't know.

(29:56):
Chuck Comisky told him that the reason it took them
so along was that they thought Jim was kind of pushy. Yeah,
a little a little bit much.

Speaker 2 (30:06):
That's probably the most understated description of James Cameron.

Speaker 3 (30:10):
But then, of course, you know, so we we started
working together and and and we were kind of a unit.
They called us Orange County because we were coming up
from the O C. And uh so he would start,
you know, like like he did this beautiful drawing of
Nell the spaceship with the boobs in that movie. And
uh so we started working on that. And I had
some skills he didn't have, like mold making, and you know,

(30:33):
I was into sculpture and mold making, and he was
into sort of more techie plus model building, hard surface
model building and all. So he started sculpting and he
was quite a good sculptor, and and then I was
making the molds and and it was we were doing
it in a very crude way, but it was effective.

(30:53):
And so he would then like go up the wrung
of the ladder, you know, like Okay, he's art directing
now they they're pulling him. Or he's got his own
unit now shooting miniatures. Right, so I have to finish that.
Thank god for Pat McClung, who was a model builder.

Speaker 2 (31:10):
I interviewed Pat for this very Pook Coast.

Speaker 3 (31:12):
Yeah. Good guy, Yeah, great, great guy, And he was
a Pat was a mentor to me and a little
more low key than you know, maybe some other folks around,
and very easy to learn from. He showed me about
air brushing and all that kind of stuff. It's really great.
It was a great experience. And uh and then I
joined Cameron in his effects unit, and you know we

(31:33):
were doing uh motion control. So in that time I
got to build miniatures. I got to you know, camera load,
do bipack matting with magazines. I worked with simple motion
control systems, just linear back and forth. Uh. You know,
we were doing we were we were called in to

(31:54):
help build the sets or help detail the sets, you know,
gluing hamburger of containers on walls and stuff like that. Yeah.
It's basically imitating what we saw in aliens. You know,
TV backs and all that grew them into the Walls
Alien Alien, Yeah, Alien, sorry, Alien, And it was a

(32:15):
and I ended up because of I was I was
going to UCLA Film School simultaneous to working on films
at Corman's and I ended up dropping out of the
film school because Gorman's was a way better film school
and I was paid.

Speaker 2 (32:31):
Yeah, yeah, the important part. But it's so valuable to
be doing that, like all those different disciplines, and there's
different elements of filmmaking and having that time pressure as
well to do it, I guess, and the monetary pressure
and everything else. And I think I think you've talked
previously about learning by kind of finishing off other people's
work as well, like just seeing it through to that

(32:52):
final stage before it goes in front of camera. That
was something that it's an apprenticeship ultimately, isn't it.

Speaker 3 (32:59):
Yeah, it really really was. And when you mentioned, like,
you know, the pressures, I was kind of thrown into
the on set aspect because it's very different to be
in a workshop where you've got some months to build things.
When you're on set and the day costs thousands of
dollars and you've got an assistant director who is yelling

(33:22):
at you and basically being a drill instructor to get things,
to keep things moving, keep things on schedule. You realize,
oh god, this is like, this is an intense I
hated it going on set because it was not comfortable,
way out of my comfort so I had to. But
I knew that I had to if I was going
to go where I wanted to go in the in

(33:42):
the in my career, I had to figure out how
to work on set without you know, getting ulcers, without
you know, and figure out a way to enjoy it.
And really, what that means is you have to be prepared.
You have to have your shit together, and you have
to give no one any ammunition to attack you for

(34:03):
competence or any of that kind of stuff. And that's
a that's a really it's a really like it goes
from a light jog during pre production to a a
forty yard dash and you have to be in shape
for it. Really.

Speaker 2 (34:18):
Yeah, I work in live TV, and you've pretty much
described my my world, you know, because yes, you're you're
you're doing this slow ascent to the moment where you're
going to go live and then it's just this crazy
run down the other side of the mountain and you've
got it has to happen at that time.

Speaker 3 (34:35):
And live live is so scary to me. Still, I
still am like, like, I can you know, if I'm
being interviewed and they're they're cutting to me, I'm fine talking,
But if I have to have an effect prepared that
has to go off just so on live TV or
or in a live event, you know, it's not fun
because there's no second take.

Speaker 2 (34:56):
No, that's right, But you know, I think I've sort
of come to terms the idea that what I do
as a sort of live editor director is there's a
sort of performance. So you have to be It's almost
like you're in a concert or something and you're a
part of the orchestra and you just have to perform
for that finite amount of time. I'm sure for you
as well, like suddenly you've got to fix something on set,
whether it's an animatronic or something. You need to have

(35:18):
all of that knowledge that has got you to that
point and you have to be able to do it
and fix it with the director breathing down your neck.
So there's a sort of performance aspect to it as well.

Speaker 3 (35:27):
I think there is. I guess. I guess the difference
between an orchestra is you you know, your your triangle
doesn't suddenly stop making noise and then some guy is
there saying, hey, sorry, that's not going to work. The
batteries ran. Now you know, I like in it. I
like in it to sort of going into combat. Yeah,

(35:50):
and I don't want to get I don't want to make,
you know, get to a tom Cruise blowback, because it's
not at all one.

Speaker 2 (35:57):
There's a similarity, let's say, but there's an.

Speaker 3 (35:59):
Excitement where you you've got a team, You're like, this
is our moment. It's very much biz right, this is
our moment. Let's go out there knock the socks off
of everybody, and you want it to run smoothly. It
takes in and have people applaud you when you leave.
And that's part of the beautiful thing about what me
and my team do is that we're generally not there

(36:22):
for the entire shoot. We come in and out with
characters with effects, and it's a special time for the
rest of the crew when they come in and they go, oh, hey,
the guys are here, you know, and we walk in
with a predator or an alien or something and everybody's like, wow,
look at that, and they all want to get their
pictures taken and and it's really it's really very special

(36:44):
for us and for everybody. And you know, if you're
a grip, your work is extremely important to a film
or a sound recordist or what have you. And but
people aren't fawning over you. You know, That's what I'm
all about.

Speaker 2 (37:00):
It sort of a raises all the pain that's got
you to that point a little bit. Yeah, yeah, it
helps to helps to sort of soften it. So after
working on Battle Beyond the Stars, was there a period
of time where you weren't doing anything like or did
you just dive straight into the next project.

Speaker 3 (37:17):
I went from Battle Beyond the Stars to Galaxy of Terror.
I did some work on Android. There was maybe another
one or two, but it was sort of like my
role was diminishing a bit at Corman's. And part of
it was because I kept stepping out to do, you know,

(37:38):
go back to film school and I was working on
a film project, you know, a thesis film of mine
that I ultimately when I stopped, I never finished the film,
you know, So I think I was kind of separating
myself from it, and I didn't love that. Career wise,
I thought, well, this kind of sucks. I'm I'm devoting

(37:58):
myself that I could be back with a team of
people that I'm learning from and so on. And then
Cameron got Terminator off the ground. But by that time
I had started working in makeup effect shops, strictly in
makeup effect shops. Prior to that, I was kind of
like in the visual effects world, you know, doing miniatures

(38:20):
and so on. And then I started working at a
place called Makeup Effects Labs. I think I met them
because of Galaxy of Terror. They're the ones that did
the giant maggot that has non consensual sex with a
lady in the Galaxy of Terror, and I got to
know them a little bit. Alan a pone over there,

(38:41):
so you know, I went over and got I got
a job working for them on projects, and I saw
how that business model works, you know. And by this
point I had forgotten about stop motion animation, although Cameron
had said to me that he wanted me to do
this stuff motion on Terminator, and I remember thinking, you

(39:04):
really need to go to someone who does the hell
out of this, not someone who wants to do it.
You know, thank you, but Cameron's very loyal, you know.
And and then he met Stan Winston. He referred me
to Stan Winston to be part of Stand's team on Terminator.
But I had taken a job on Friday the thirteenth,

(39:25):
the final chapter, because you know, we were gonna kill
Jason for good. There would never be any movies made
after that. But so Stan was like, well, come back
when you're available, and I did that around the time
of Invaders from Mars, which rolled into Aliens and and

(39:46):
what else, Monster Squad, the original Predator, you know, amazing
stories episodes. So I had a good run at Stands,
a very busy time at Stands.

Speaker 2 (39:57):
Yeah, and meeting great people along the way. I mean
Friday of the eighth, the final chapter, would that have
been Greg Canmon and Tom si.

Speaker 3 (40:05):
It started as Greg and then Greg left the show
and Tom Savini took over. So I was like, wow,
I got like, you know, these are big names, this
is yeah, this is all good stuff, you know.

Speaker 2 (40:14):
And then that thoughts, and I guess it's difficult as well,
because coming out of the Corman stuff, where you're becoming
this sort of very rounded generalist, working all the different
things to then try and find your specific want and
need in a job, you know, becoming an expert and something.
There is that fine balance, isn't there between becoming an
expert and being a good generalist as well?

Speaker 3 (40:36):
Yeah, but I'm glad that I have the generalist foundation,
because you know, I'm not. I feel like when when
people you're less intimidated by things look right, You're like, well,
you know I've I've done something like this. I can
pull this out of my experience. And this is where

(40:56):
I where I love to give people from my crew
opportunities to take things on set because it gives them
a much Now you've got to use this thing, right,
You got to be You've got to break out the
bailing wire. You've got to do all the low tech,
non glamorous things to get that image on screen. And
you're no longer in the perfect ideal building scenario of

(41:19):
constructing things and so forth. And if you've if you've
done the generalism before becoming an a uh what would
you call it, an expert or a you know that
your narrower focus, uh, then you have you can always
reach back into your you know, lowbrow bag of tricks

(41:40):
and get yourself out of messes.

Speaker 2 (41:43):
Yeah, you sort of because you've been in those other roles.
You know how your job, your specific job that you
end up in, impacts other people, don't you. And I
always encourage people in my side of the TV industry
to just come and sit with me and see what
my job is about, and then you'll know why you
can and can't ask for certain things. And yeah, it
just gives people a more rounded overview, doesn't it for sure?

Speaker 3 (42:02):
Yeah? Sure?

Speaker 2 (42:05):
Did you?

Speaker 3 (42:05):
Then?

Speaker 2 (42:06):
Working with Tom Savigni was that? I mean, how much
older was he than you?

Speaker 3 (42:14):
Tom is Tom about?

Speaker 2 (42:16):
Uh he'd been in the industry a little bit longer
than you though, right.

Speaker 3 (42:20):
Yeah, oh yeah, he's at least a decade older.

Speaker 2 (42:23):
Yeah, right, And so did he sort of take you
under his wing to a certain extent?

Speaker 3 (42:28):
Not exactly. There was a funny scenario there where, you know,
we were Greg Cannon's crew. Greg had sing right, and
then Greg left and we're like, wait, Tom, Tom Savigni
is coming in now. And of course, you know much
respect because he worked on the first Friday, the thirteenth,
but he hadn't worked in Hollywood before, so it was

(42:49):
kind of that was the that was the new thing.
Here Tom Savini is coming out to work in Hollywood,
and we didn't know what to expect, you know, we
didn't know if he was a diva or you know,
or if he would like just cast aside everything that
we had done. So there was a little bit of
that petty crew kind of mentality of like, he better

(43:10):
not do this, you know, I hope he doesn't, you know.
And then he came in and he was just such
a fun guy and not interested at all in derailing
anything that we had started on. He wanted to, you know,
he was he was really thrilled to be to have
a team like that. I mean in that our team
was myself, Kevin Jaeger, who went on to great things

(43:34):
in makeup and animatronics, Jill Rockow, who is you know,
a lifelong makeup application artist. Jim Cagele who was my
sculpting mentor and inspired me greatly in sculpture. John Voolich
who's passed away now but went on to become a
very successful I think he started he got into digital

(43:55):
work and was doing really great stuff there. And Larry
Carr was another guy who I had actually met in
Orange County and we had worked on Super eat movies together,
you know. And he was a great generalist as well,
so he had a really good team behind him. And
and then he got to meet tons of people in
Hollywood that and and he didn't you know, he had

(44:17):
no he had no grand illusions. If I may refer
to his book about how things were done. He explained
to me, like, listen, I always wanted to go to Hollywood,
but I was happy in Pittsburgh. And then Hollywood came
to me in the form of George Romero. So he
had to figure out solutions to problems not knowing much

(44:42):
of anything. And it's almost a parallel to what Richard
Taylor at WETA Workshop told me about, uh, you know,
their their movie building Weta Workshops in the New Zealand
film industry. And Richard said that their ignorance was their
greatest asset. They're so clever the stuff that they've come
up with. And Tom Savini was extremely clever. And I

(45:05):
learned a lot about like like, oh my god, you
could do a bullet hit, you know, but with a
with a condom, And there's a trick to it, and
you super glue a button with a piece of monofilament
and it'll pull the goo out and you can get
it to go in directions and at uh wow, man.
You know he would do bullet hits, little squibs on

(45:26):
people and you're like, you put it where like right
on his neck? Did you have? Yeah, just a little
piece of leather underneath it, and it's wow, okay. But
they would trigger it with a battery with a switch.
But rather than like some you know, thing that was made,
he would take an old pack from a Polaroid film
which has a battery in it and it has you know,

(45:47):
that's what that's what.

Speaker 2 (45:48):
Cues the frame up.

Speaker 3 (45:51):
So he would cut it down to its little smallest
thing and give that to the actor and they would
just press it with their thumb and uh they could
cue it so their reaction are perfect. And so I was,
I really I really loved learning that stuff from him,
and you know, had had a great time. I mean,
he's he was a fun boss. He was one of
the fun bosses, which which I think was always something

(46:13):
that I wanted to be. I aspired to. Greg Cannon
was a fun boss as well, and of course Stan
was the king of all fun bosses in my opinion.

Speaker 2 (46:24):
You know, it sounds like, there's so much fun in
that sort of experimentation and invention and that sort of
acceptance that it might fail the first time or whatever,
but you're learning as you do it, right, So failure
is part of part of your world.

Speaker 3 (46:40):
Yeah, you can't have success without failure. You can't. And
I and I'm always scratching my head when when people
are so afraid of failure, they're afraid to look bad,
or they're afraid that, you know, some idea is dumb
and it's going to be judged. And I'm like, it's
only movies, right. We have to deliver something contractually, because yes,
I will get sued if I don't deliver the thing

(47:02):
in and it works in the way that I have
promised and contracted. But until that point, what's the wiggle room?
Do we have room to like experiment a little bit
and try some things, you know? And and I kind
of you know, by this time, I know when I
have to pull the plug on experimentation and just go,
like we this is meat and potatoes time. Now, let's
just do the very best version of this that we

(47:23):
can within the perimeters that we parameters that we now have. Uh,
and we know it's going to be great, you know,
because because we're we're talented, we're experienced, you know, and
let's have fun with it. That's I don't love the
philosophy of like you must shed blood in order for
it to be of value, that as a as a

(47:44):
as a designer or a shop owner, I must ring
I've squeeze these employees blood out of them, and I
and I and I have worked with people like that,
and I just think it's counterproductive and that is more
ego based. I think that's that that appeals to someone's
feeling of control and kind of you know, power, you know,

(48:11):
it makes them feel like an authority or what have you.
And I just I have thrived more in the situations
where people are permissive and give you permission to explore
a little bit, but you are responsible for coming in
on time and on budget and all that.

Speaker 2 (48:31):
Still, Yeah, of course, but I think I think we
have kind of glorified near burnout, haven't we. Like, you know,
I'm working so hard you say to people like, how
you are you busy? Oh, yeah, I'm really busy. I
haven't stopped. And it's as if it's a sort of
boastful thing. But yeah, I've always thought if I was
in a position of authority, that I would want a
team that comes in fresh the next day. You know,

(48:53):
I've done jobs recently that have been like nineteen hour days.
You can sustain that, and you're building up to the
big day of life transmit and you're all burnt out,
you know.

Speaker 3 (49:02):
Yeah, so then when it comes time to execute, you
have no class on the tank. Stan Winston told me that,
you know, was probably the uh well, he was definitely
my biggest influence in terms of less about technique. I
call him my mentor, and that's true, but it was
less about teaching me technique of sculpture or mull banking,

(49:23):
or tricks of the trade or what have you some
of that, but much more about the people aspect of it.
Stan used to say, you know, he used to work
with clay. Now people are his clay, which I thought
was when I heard it, I thought that was sort
of a self aggrandizement and what people are clay, how dehumanize,
But what he meant was that he's working he prefers

(49:45):
to work with the human aspect of it because he's
he mastered the technical aspect of it, and that's what
he would say to us. He would say, like, you know,
if we have to work over time and I have
to pay you guys extra time and a half double time,
what have you? Then I have failed in organizing this project.

(50:06):
So we're so he was confident that we'd be able
to get the job done without the overtime. We would,
of course go into overtime, but that's where you know,
being organized and not just you know, chaotic, and it
helps the artist because you know, artists want to like
be given a focus. Right, here's your task, this is

(50:27):
what you've got to do. Let's see what you got go.
You know, they want to be able to focus on
it and not be whipsawed by upper management who doesn't
have their shit together and is you know, there's always
a there's always some emergency fire to be put out,
and you can never focus. It's a chaotic, disruptive environment.
And I don't think that's for me. That's that's not

(50:49):
what I ever enjoyed or what I want to promote.
And Stan was the guy who taught me it didn't
have to be that way. You know. He says, like,
if I work you sixteen hour days every day, I
do that, I get less and less of you pay
more and more for less, So go home and go
to sleep. We'll tackle it in the morning. You know.

Speaker 2 (51:10):
Yeah, yeah, what was you said? James Cameron was very
loyal Was it that loyalty that brought you in on Aliens?
Do you think like, because by this point you've done
a few more movies. Yeah, he was ready to do
his next and he thought of you.

Speaker 3 (51:24):
Well, I was already part of Stands because he that's loyalty.
He wanted me on Terminator and I was unable to
and Stand's like, well, you've got Cameron's stamp of approval,
so you're good with me. You know, I'll come back
as soon as you can and we'll get you going.
And that what a great feeling that was to walk
in to a crew that included Shane Mayhon, John Rosen, Grant,

(51:50):
Tom Woodriff, who I would form Amalgamated Dynamic, Rick Lazarini
came on, Richard Land's a mechanical guy, Shannon Shay. These
were all people that went on. You know, most of
those guys stayed with Stan through the you know, Jurassic
Park and all of those big giant movies that those
guys did, and now Shane Mahan runs Legacy, and so

(52:15):
it was just great to be at that level. And
then all of a sudden, from having looked in from
the outside at all these cool things that were being done.
Rob Boteen's work, a great hor of his work, you know,
Steve Johnson over at Boss Films on Ghostbusters was doing
amazing stuff. Rick Baker, of course, these were all the

(52:36):
pillars of practical effects. But Stan had only done Terminator.
He had done like, you know, the autobiography Miss Jane
Pittman and the Cookies Christmas Special, so you knew something deeps,
you know, so you knew that there was talent there,
but he wasn't like doing the massive stuff like those
other guys. And so to come into his team and

(52:59):
be part of it in those big formative movies where
all of a sudden, you know, people, aliens comes out
and we are like on top of the world, and
we felt like as a team, we have arrived. And
you know, even like Invaders from Mars, which had those
goofy uh uh, you know, big creatures in them, but

(53:21):
they're bold and they're fun and they're they're pushing the
envelope and and and that was that was That was
a really exhilarating time.

Speaker 2 (53:31):
I bet Cameron was one of the more difficult directors
to work for though, because not because he's you know,
a bad person, but because he's so driven and he
also knows everything about every little manushai in everybody's job.
I mean, I've worked with directors like that and sometimes
it does go south because they're micromanaging everything. What was
it like working for him? Really demanding?

Speaker 3 (53:52):
I imagine, Yeah, he he was very demanding, and you
know he was he could be a rough you know,
have a rough delivery. But as Stan said, you know,
he said, I don't always love the way Jim approaches people,

(54:14):
handles people, but I know that everything that we're doing
is going to be fantastic because Jim's vision is unlike
any anyone else's and he will get us there. And
so like you know, Jim designed the Queen Alien. He
sat down pen and you know, colored pencils and black
paper and designed the Queen Alien. He came up with

(54:36):
the idea of putting the two people in, you know,
two guys inside it so that you could have four arms.
We're uh spending it from a crane and then on
the other side of that, he designed the powerloader, you know,
and we'll put a big guy inside the body of
it and we'll we'll hang it by two wires that
will disguise as the antennae of the of the powerloader.

(54:59):
It's all brilliant, right, Like, you can't argue with that,
and so and the other thing about Jim is that
he'll in the moment flair. I should speak at past
tens because I think that he's he's he's changed. But
this is this is like he can flare, right, he
could flare, but you always know that, you know, there's

(55:19):
a million battles he's fighting with others, you know, with
the studio, things you're unaware of, and all you have
to do is strip it down and not take it personally.
It's never personal. I feel that way working with Paul Verhoven, right,
Paul Averhoven is another super passionate, meticulous, brilliant man with
delivery as well. Yeah who who? And by the way,

(55:43):
you have not lived until you've had Paul Verhoven one
inch away from your nose, looking in your eyes, grilling you,
you know about whether or not the puppet is going
to perform to his expectations and it's fantastic. I just
I enjoyed every moment of those. I know people get
rattled by it. I've been rattled by difficult personalities, you know.

(56:06):
But you know it's Joel Silver threatened to sue us,
you know that sort of thing, you know, And that's
a little scarier because I didn't didn't have a creative
connection with Joel Silver. You think, well, yeah, he might,
he might do that, he might try that, which would
be really a drag to go through. But if it's
if it's just someone who is passionate about the work

(56:28):
and wants the very best work possible, then I don't know.
I just always think my crew is standing right over
there watching me react to this aggressive you know, venting,
and we're gonna have a big laugh about this over
cocktails tonight.

Speaker 2 (57:13):
I guess as well become for those you know, a
couple of directors you mentioned, you know, Cameron and Vhoven.
The actual film for them, what ends up on screen
is such a massive compromise compared to the vision in
their head. They must be constantly frustrated by the realities
that are involved in trying to get that thing on screen.

Speaker 3 (57:34):
Yeah, when you, Yeah, depending on your imagination and how
invested you are, like generally, you know, Cameron writes the scripts,
you know, at least you know, I know he's got
writers now with the Avatar movies. But he's very deeply
passionate and committed to his vision and his words and
his you know, worldview and all that stuff. So yeah,

(57:57):
you could see that. But Cameron also told me as
a bit of a device, he said, if you get
if you shoot high, aim high, and if you get
seventy percent of what you're going for, your winning. And
I thought, well, that's a very practical, mitigating kind of
way to look at it. It's more about degrees of
success rather than you know, one percent off and you're

(58:19):
a failure everything. So and I think that's a that's
an artistic mindset that I discourage in my place, is
like that it's a it's a success is a sliding scale,
you know, and and and we can always make something
out of it, you know. Only the only way it's
a failure is if you just don't deliver, if you quit,
if you don't deliver, if you walk away from it,

(58:41):
you know.

Speaker 2 (58:42):
But yeah, no, that's a good WAYE to think about it.
So you're only withstand for a couple of years, right,
two and.

Speaker 3 (58:49):
A half years, and it felt like ten any projects
that were coming in and and a lot of short schedules.
That's another thing is that stamp. You know, we would
beg Stan to get us longer schedule. So probably the
you know, the story that I've told about the Original
Predator is that when uh, Joel Silver came to Stan

(59:12):
to basically save the picture by uh, you know, rebuilding
the creature, redesigning and recreating the creature, and uh, you know,
we begged Stan not to take the job because we
only had eight weeks to do it, and uh, this
was like we're it's like too much. We're going to
destroy all of the goodwill that we have created on

(59:35):
Aliens and it's going to look like that like Aliens
was the exception, and uh and and this is what
we're capable of. And Stan said, sorry, guys, you don't
get to tell me what we're doing and what we're
not doing. We're doing this. And you know, Arnold had
come to him to to say you got to you
gotta save this, you gotta and and that I think

(59:57):
really appeal that call to action really appealed to stand
and and I thought, you know, it was it was like,
oh God, how are we going to do this? And
then we did it and and that was a great
learning experience for me to sort of embrace challenges and
not be fearful.

Speaker 2 (01:00:17):
I mean, you know, within reason, but you know, yeah,
I'm great for Stan's studio to sort of be known
have a reputation of being able to do that as
a fixer almost, you know, coming in and saving a movie.
Did you see that original suit light in person?

Speaker 3 (01:00:31):
No? I never saw it in person. I've seen the
same things that everybody have seen, which are the documentaries
and stuff. I do have issue with with some of
the way that was presented. I can see where they
would see that it was impractical and so on, but
the kind of you know when people on the on
the production side say, you know, and then there we

(01:00:53):
were shooting in Mexico and we opened the crate and
we said, that's what it looks like. And I'm thinking, well,
even in nineteen eighty seven, you know, you could get
you never saw a drawing, you never no one showed you.
We would mail videotapes to Stand wherever he was to

(01:01:15):
show him tests and he would watch and it would
take two weeks for him, you know, to see it,
but he would see it. So this idea that production
had no idea that it was a big surprise, and
it was a total fail. I think that maybe what
what happened was being you know, on the on the
creature side. But I'm always going to defend the creature builders. Right.

(01:01:38):
They may have said like, Ooh, wouldn't it be cool
if this thing had stilt legs for instance, you know,
and it could, Well, that's not very practical if you
think about it beyond just a workshop cement floor and
you think about a jungle, there's not to be able
to do much with that, right, And this is this
was where Stan had a benefit in his eight weeks
of design and build. They came to him they said,

(01:01:58):
here's the things that didn't work. You know, the guy
can't see very well. He doesn't have his feet under him,
you know, he's you know, and so Stan's like, great,
he's gonna be flat footed. We're gonna put we're gonna
use contact lenses. There was a moment where Stan was
designing a much more prominent forward face, you know, lion

(01:02:18):
like face, that would have had to have had mechanical eyes.
And he looked at the sculpture and realized, oh shit, no, no, no,
we got to change this, and so he had Matt Rose,
who was sculpting the hid, sort of unceremoniously take a
wire and cut the face off, take this much clay out,
mash that face back in there. And that's to me

(01:02:39):
why when I look at I see the I don't
want to offend any Predator lovers because I love the
Predator too. I've worked on so many movies. It's a
great character, and all hail Stan Winston and Kevin Peter
Hall and Steve Wagon, Matt Rosse blah blah blah blah.
I'm done. But when I look at the design of it,
I see that that hid kind of mashes right in

(01:03:02):
there right, And a lot of people just think that's perfect.
But I know the clay right, like you would have
paid this back a little bit because this prominent head
had this out and then it mashed down. So I
never felt like we got to truly balance forms. And
of course I've been raked over the coals enough over
my various predators that I can't argue with anyone it's

(01:03:25):
a matter of taste. Stan happened to create a pretty
goddamn perfect creature.

Speaker 2 (01:03:31):
Yea later, still, yeah, he's you know, yeah, absolutely. So
when you mentioned about ADI with Tom, when did it
become apparent to you that there was a gap in
the industry that you could fill the requirement for.

Speaker 3 (01:03:48):
Well, it was Our intention originally was not to go
out and you know, form a company that would compete
with Stan. We had written a script that we admitted
to Gail and Herd's company, and Gail called us and said, hey,
everybody's talking about your script. They're telling me you got
to read this script, and we were saying, that's awesome.

(01:04:10):
Our plan was we wanted to create a film that
Stan could direct, but this was an anthology film, so
there could be like we wanted to direct also, so
like Stanton, you know, whatever you want, you take the
lion's share. Stan will give us two little episodes, two
stories within this, and we'll do the creature and it'll
be a Stan Winston production. And that just didn't track

(01:04:34):
with Stan. It didn't. It wasn't part of his wasn't
really on his radar. And that's when I realized, ah, okay,
he said I really need you guys out there, you know,
Megan monsters, And I thought, okay, that's the latex ceiling
I'm not going to get. I will not be in
if I stay with Stan, I will not be able

(01:04:54):
to advance my career beyond what is worthwhile, what has
value to hit. And even though that had been had
provided me with a livelihood and tons of opportunities, which
I was grateful for and still am, I thought, ah, okay,
I think I have to step aside. I was never
really I didn't really come here to be a lifer,

(01:05:18):
you know, and there were other things I wanted to
explore and do, and so so I left and with
stance blessing. It was a great It was a great
exchange that we had. And then two weeks later Tom
left and we thought we were going to be working
on this movie that Gail heard was going to produce,
and you know, naive, We were naive, and the writers

(01:05:41):
strike happened and Gail said, I can't be talking to
non union writers and I'm not. We're not pursuing this,
and we were like, hey, you know, but we placed
too many eggs in that basket. Anyway, it was a
very naive. It was a good lesson, and then we
looked at each other and said, what do we do?
Do we go back to stance that doesn't sound you know?

(01:06:02):
I know, so we we just decided to form a
company and we kind of, you know, we did, uh
George Romero had a TV show called what was that
called Monsters Maybe I can't remember exactly, but we did
a couple of those little episodes just me and Tom,
you know, working out of Rick Lazarini's workshop and subleasing,

(01:06:24):
and and then finally Tremors came along, uh, which was
a gale heard connect to the guys, uh, you know,
Ron Underwood and Steve Wilson, Bret Maddock, and then we
you know, we got that gig and used those funds
too well. We we sub let let sublet space from

(01:06:46):
k and b our friends Howard and Greg Howard Berger,
Greg Nikato and Robert Kurtzman and hired them to sculpt
and all that kind of stuff. And so we were
kind of vagabonds for a bit, but then we then
we did secure a workspace of our own finish that job.

Speaker 2 (01:07:04):
You know, I was talking to Greg Well via email
just today. Actually he's been involved in one of my
projects that I'm working on. I'll delete that bit out.
I'll tell you about that later. Yeah, so I'm aware
that we're already done an hour here, are you right
for another fifteen twenty or you got career?

Speaker 3 (01:07:21):
Man, I'm in a blast. Sorry, if I can compress
my answers to.

Speaker 2 (01:07:24):
No, no, it's great. This is going to be a
double episode already, which is a good thing. So Tremors,
you said kind of like this sort of saved you
in a way that you you had this big gig,
was there? Am I right in thinking you had a
kind of several months after that where there was nothing around.

Speaker 3 (01:07:45):
Oh after after Tremors? Yeah, yes, several is closed. Seven
is more like seven months where we were like what
did we do? Did we piss people off? What's going on?
What would what?

Speaker 2 (01:07:57):
You put that down to?

Speaker 3 (01:07:59):
Ulical nature of things? You know, Stan had given us
good advice. He said, like, don't you know, stay the
course because you know, if you're talking to people or
things seem like it's that deals are coming together, there's
a lot that has to happen before someone reaches out
to you, you know, and and and they and the
people that do reach out to you and you have

(01:08:20):
an opportunity. They may not be greenlit, you know. So
it's not like it's not a normal job, and it's
not really. I always say it's not for the faint
of heart because it's free lance, you know, and you
never especially if you're carrying overhead. I'm carrying overhead right now,
and it's been very, very slow for a very long time,

(01:08:40):
which is why this is going to be a double episode,
because I have plenty of time.

Speaker 2 (01:08:46):
And then Alien three came along? Was that the next Yeah,
so Alien.

Speaker 3 (01:08:53):
Three came along. They had approached Stan about doing the
the quature effects for it, and he told them he
would do the creature effects, but he wanted to direct
the film and they already had Vincent Ward on the
job and Stand true to his word, said well then,
you know, I'm not really in a position I'm not

(01:09:14):
going to do it. And Mike Joyce over at Fox said, well,
these guys, you know, did Tremors and that was pretty
good and maybe they could do They worked on Aliens,
and so they came to us. It was a very nice,
seamless sort of segue. You know, we said you did you?

(01:09:36):
We said, do you think we're still with stan Or.
They said no, no, no, we know you're your own
company and you went to Stan right, Yes we did, okay,
you know, so so that came along and then Vincent
Ward left that show and David Fincher came on and
we got on great with David right off the bat.
We did all Vincent, but he had a different vision

(01:09:58):
for it, I believe. And that was a very exciting
project and and you know, we packed up and moved
to London again five years after after Aliens, back to
Pinewood Studios and it was really, uh fantastic and uh
got to work with some Oh my god, that the
crew we had on that. We had Stephen Norrington who

(01:10:19):
would go out direct death Machine and Blade and lea
extraordinary gentlemen. We have h Dave Elsie who has won
an Oscar too, I don't know, Mark Coolier also another
winter Dave Anderson on the American side, Uh, has won
a couple of Oscars. Gino Acevito, who did all the

(01:10:39):
beautiful complex jobs and then went to Wetta and contributed massively.

Speaker 2 (01:10:44):
Still out there, isn't he, I think? Yeah, last time
I spoke to him anyway, Yeah, So did you enjoy
your time in London.

Speaker 3 (01:10:51):
Loved it. I'm a total Anglo file and and I
and I loved everything about it. And uh, I still
I got a really bad chest infection because you know,
I'm a southern California boy. I'm a hothouse flower. So
so I occasionally I will it will flare up, and
I'll I'll cough up and I go, there's my London

(01:11:12):
flum London. Yeah, yeah, I'm got.

Speaker 2 (01:11:16):
The same trouble.

Speaker 3 (01:11:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:11:20):
I didn't know that Alien three was disliked by people
when I saw it. I think I saw it in
the cinema first. I used to go like twice a
week and see like double features and things, and then
I had it on VHS and then it wasn't until
the Internet came around I was like, oh, people don't
like this movie. I always thought it was. What I

(01:11:42):
liked about it was that it was different enough from
the other movies and it had taken a different tack
and it definitely had a like a real sort of
energy about it.

Speaker 3 (01:11:50):
I liked it.

Speaker 2 (01:11:51):
I've always liked that movie.

Speaker 3 (01:11:52):
Yeah, yeah, I have too. I think you know, in
the UK, I've found that people liked it more. The
Americans were hoping to for a bigger batter ass or
sequel to Aliens. You know, they wanted the war movie again.
We had some concerns when we you know, read the
script that it was sort of trying to go backwards

(01:12:15):
one person, no guns, what you know, and and a
single alien is what I mean. But it was very daring.
Fincher was a fantastic daring I really have appreciated their
choices of directors. You know, Jean Pierre June is an
interesting choice to direct an alien film. And I thought

(01:12:37):
they at a studio level it it was. It always
impressed me that they'd take some chances on who's directing
these these movies. But you know, my favorite is the
first film, uh uh. And and so you just never know.
But but the boundaries have to be pushed. You have
to try things in order for end risk that certain

(01:12:59):
things are a work or not work. And and and
I always appreciated the studio for you know, Fox for that.

Speaker 2 (01:13:07):
You know, yeah, I think if they'd have just repeated
the same or made it bigger than people who would
have moaned about that as well. It's like you know,
Return of the Jedi people a well, it's just like
the first movie, and there is another Death Star and
all of that. Well, yeah, I agree to a certain extent.
But if you'd have gone off Peace and David Lynch
had directed that film, people will probably be going, what's this?
This is nothing like Stars, you.

Speaker 3 (01:13:26):
Know, right, And then many years later after it's a yeah,
after it's a bomb, then you would have the people
appreciating it in a cult way. But yeah, the love
for Alien three has grown over the years. This is again,
this is like, you know, levels of success. I'm old
enough now to know, you know, Tremor's was a bomb
at the box office and now it's beloved. And you

(01:13:49):
always now that there's the Internet, you always have the
loud voices that are that are there at the beginning,
and then they sort of disappear a little bit, and
then the there's a swell of appreciation for the for
the films. And that's why I always think, eh, I'm
not really gonna like it would be great if these
movies made tons of money so that we can make

(01:14:09):
more movies and that people are just you know, happy
all the way down the line. But that I think
is too much to expect. And for me, I don't
mind being associated with movies that didn't resonate in their time.
But it's interesting to come back twenty years later and
see how they are.

Speaker 1 (01:14:25):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:14:25):
Yeah, it's interesting how they still stand out, isn't it, Because,
like you say, at the time they flopped, maybe they
were before their time or the culture wasn't right, you know,
in this sweet spot of the time. But it's we're
still talking about these movies all these decades later.

Speaker 3 (01:14:40):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:14:41):
Yeah, And you know you talked about we talked just
a minute ago about you know, films sort of pushing
the boundaries and being different. But death becomes us kind
of a bit of a weird one in your catalog
of movies. I mean, not many comedies involved really up
to that point. It must have been a bit of
a blast to work on.

Speaker 3 (01:14:58):
It was fantastic And again was you know when when
when I mentioned, you know that you've got those very passionate, loud,
difficult personalities in directors. Robert Zemeckis to me working with him,
he's on the list of people who, uh just you know,
are consummate professionals. He's a gentleman, uh knows everybody's job,

(01:15:22):
as you said, uh, and and is even keeled and
gets a result that nobody else gets and has his style.
And I mean, you know, back to the future. You know,
we were just over the moon to work with Bob's
amicas and Death Becomes are I don't believe that was
a box office hit either. And it's an odd movie. Uh,

(01:15:45):
it has only resonated further and further as we get
I mean, the number of people who do costumes of
the two of building on Meryl Streep. It's it's fantastic.
I mean, you know, a musical on broad Way, you know,
talks of now a reboot or a sequel or what
have you. And it's also an iconic it's a gay

(01:16:12):
icon iconic movie. And that's a very interesting segment because
you can't you know, I don't think a lot of
my my resume is specifically you know, I don't know, well,
we've had a lot of different things. We do. We
have it some comedies in the Santa Claus movies are
very different from an alien movie. And I just like

(01:16:34):
appealing to you know, a wide variety of audiences. This
guy right here, go.

Speaker 2 (01:16:40):
And describe it for us as well, because some people
just be listening, Oh okay, this this is a.

Speaker 3 (01:16:46):
Sort of odd character from a music video, a rap
video that a that abteen Bagheeri directed and it's just
a super strange character, sort of a bodyguard kind of
character that follows the artist as he wraps and and
it's very violent and all that kind of stuff. And

(01:17:06):
it's so cool for me, Like I'm not the demo demographic,
but suddenly I have street cred among followers and this
is dope, and I go, dope is good, isn't it?
And but it's again, I love reaching out across borders,
international borders or cultural borders. And and when your work,
uh is inspires people or delights people, it's just it's

(01:17:28):
really like that. That's a that's a joy to me.

Speaker 2 (01:17:32):
Yeah, it's amazing, Like through your career, just how that
kind of culture of appreciation has grown in you know,
the conventions and the cost play and you know, we
now have people directing TV shows and movies that are
the people that are inspired by your work as well.
Now that's that's sort of third fourth generation almost.

Speaker 3 (01:17:51):
Well, like Dan Trachtenberg on bad Lands, Predator Prey and
Predator bad Lands, Hey right there, pray and Dan is
a guy who is an encyclopedia of knowledge of films.
And we had his podcast, I think or YouTube channel
whatever it was, and he loves the history of it.

(01:18:14):
And I have to like restrain myself when we're together
because you know, we always end up talking about like,
you know, stories about you know, you know, like this,
you know, we're talking about stories, and meanwhile, there's a
whole zoom meeting waiting to resume, the resume the actual
conversation of making a movie. But and Dan is another

(01:18:36):
one of those people who is inspirational to me because
he's he tells an emotional story. He's an aster craftsman,
and he's so even keeled, he's kind. He wants to
hear ideas there you know, one thing will lead to another.
He'll stay, wait a minute, go back and what was
that thing you said? You know? Or right I go
that that's a dumb idea. No, no, no, I want

(01:18:57):
to hear it. And that might be a dead end
right there, or it might inspire something else. But it's
really like for me at this point, you know, being
being uh, you know, everybody's effects dad or grandpa, I
don't know which. It's a very nice time for me
to be working because a lot of those sort of

(01:19:18):
you know, I am not an upstart. I do not.
I now have a deep resume, you know, so there's
a built in respect. And Stan Winston used to talk
about that. I'd be like on set, I'd be like, Stan,
how come they don't listen to me when I when
I say do this? But if when you say it
they hoped to. He said, it's the gray hair. It's
the gray hair, which means it's the experience. It's the

(01:19:41):
you know now the gray hair, and it's pretty nice. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:19:45):
I suddenly became that guy at work in the last
few years. I looked around and say, shit, yeah, I'm
the older guy here. How did that happen? Look of
the younger guy?

Speaker 3 (01:19:53):
Wild? I know if you cant sometimes it like meetings,
you know, like you catch yourself in a reflection on
a win, know, or on a picture, and you go, oh,
my god, that's me. I used to be the youngest
person in the room.

Speaker 2 (01:20:04):
I have the advantage of having lost my hair in
my twenties, so I now look the age I've been
for twenty odd years. You know, I'm fifty next year,
so you know, I've grown into that. So this is
the sweet spot, right, This is as good as it
gets for me.

Speaker 3 (01:20:16):
You've got you've got the facials.

Speaker 2 (01:20:19):
Yeah, yeah, I guess we can't really talk to you
without talking about, you know, the the annoying argument of
practical versus CG. And of course it isn't a binary thing,
and they are tools. But I sort of see your
work as something that whilst in the nineties, you know,

(01:20:39):
you're pumping out these movies and these TV shows practically,
and then we had the sort of switch to CG
after Jurassic Park, I see your your craft is becoming
more and more of a kind of a niche thing again,
like as an artisan thing. People come to you because
there's a there's this sort of history of x te's

(01:21:00):
that you have, and that your craft does a very
specific job.

Speaker 3 (01:21:05):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:21:05):
I think people there has become a bit of a thing,
hasn't there in marketing and the press. Ah, there's no
CG in this film. No, it's Top Gun. Of course
they've replaced ninety percent of everything outside the window or
it's the f one movie and they've done pretty much
the same, but equally having those practical elements in there.

(01:21:25):
I still think, particularly when it's a character driven thing
as opposed to a set extension or a vehicle or
something like that. I still think, I mean, I've probably
got more of a discerning eye than the average audience,
being somebody who's been into this stuff for many years.
But I still think it's very necessary to have that
practical thing on set, not just for the viewer, for
the performers, for the lighting, all of those exact where

(01:21:49):
do you sit on that?

Speaker 3 (01:21:51):
Yeah? I think you know, people, I think I got
around twenty fifteen. You know, when the we do a
movie called Well Sorry twenty eleven, We did a movie
called The Thing twenty eleven, and a lot of our
work was replaced by digital. It's sort of last minute.
And you know when that happens in Hollywood, nobody calls

(01:22:12):
you and says, hey, listen, here's the what we're doing,
and here's the You just don't get the call.

Speaker 2 (01:22:16):
You just you know, you find out.

Speaker 3 (01:22:18):
Yeah, yeah, you find out at the screening at whatever,
and that's the way it goes. But that movie, that
was a low point for me where I thought, well,
it's all digital now, I don't know, and Tom and
I seriously talked about hanging it up at that point
because it was happening to Rick Baker and everybody.

Speaker 2 (01:22:37):
That must have been a real gut punch. So to
have done the work, not even to like you haven't
even isn't the tender stage here where you're sort of saying,
are we going to do it this way or that way?
You've done the work?

Speaker 3 (01:22:47):
Yeah, no, it was. It's not a good feeling when
you're an artist and a crafts person and you, you know,
have have spent a lot of studios money and put
something on film and then the only thing that you
can think of is it wasn't good enough right for someone,
for someone. And I don't believe that it came from
the director. I don't believe that the director made that

(01:23:09):
because he was very much into the the the We
were retaining the feel of the Carpenter film, you know.
But what we did once the movie came and went
and people were asking, they were you know, I was
reading online right like they must have eighty I must
have screwed up and blah blah blah. So we put
out a video and it got millions of views, and

(01:23:31):
you could read the comments that were heartbroken that that
work was not in the film, and and that's when
I realized, oh, people are people are still appreciative of this.
It's at the studio level that they don't appreciate it. Well,
what do we do about that? Right? And and how
do we how do we stay in business? How do
we apply our craft if the if the gatekeepers don't
want to spend the money on it, you know, it

(01:23:53):
is because we were finding directors were very interested in
having that the real stuff in their film. But but
it was a studio it was a sort of a
business model, and and some of the some of the
studio execs that we talked to said, well, we just
don't want to pay for it. Twice we don't want
to We don't want to pay you to do the
effects in pre production. And then when we go get

(01:24:13):
response cards from of test audiences and have to reshoot
the ending or whatever. Uh now it has to be digital,
and so we're just gonna wait on all of it.
And the digital people are like, oh my god, that
means we get all this stuff dumped on us in
the last minute before our release date. Uh So it
wasn't working for anybody. So now I think what's happened

(01:24:36):
is that the studios. As you mentioned, the studios realize
that it's that that it's important to the audiences. Enough
audience is now saying, hey, that looks phony, this looks
this sucks. They're listening to the Internet, which they didn't
used to do. Point where they go like, oh, and
it's a good promotional tool to be able to claim

(01:24:56):
that it's it's practical. And you know some of the
student have gotten in trouble for faking things to look practical.

Speaker 2 (01:25:04):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:25:06):
But so for me, that was a long winded way
of sort of getting here. For me, I've always been
a proponent of a mixed bag that you know, even
going back, we worked on Wolf in the early nineties
for Mike Nichols, another spectacularly kind person director, and we
wanted to we were working with Sony Image Work, Sony Digital,

(01:25:29):
and we were like, can you if we were to
make if we were to put Jack Nicholson in a
makeup and you put the tracking markers on, could you
stretch his face out? Could you give a face that
is just not an effect of it stretching, but just
could you just change it drop his forehead back to it.
And they were like, oh, not yet. We can't do
that yet, so we've always been looking for ways to

(01:25:52):
integrate the practical and the digital, and now that that
has come about, and it's a really great time for
both arts and I think both a line now. Like
I just I just had this a presentation at the
Visual Effects Society with Michael Ralla, who did The Sinners,

(01:26:13):
and he did so much work based on Mike Fontaine's
beautiful makeups on that where he made it bubble, but
to him, it was all about retaining the practical elements,
scanning things, shooting and augmenting, but not destroying to the

(01:26:33):
point where you know, Mike Fontaine looks at it and says,
I can't tell what I did and what digital's doing.
And I think that's a really nice place to be
because it the practical work anchors it in reality to
your eye and to your brain, and after that you
stop questioning, how's this done? How's it You're not knocked
out of the movie because it looks either like a

(01:26:56):
stiff piece of rubber, nor does it look like a
a non existent cartoon that's floating in space in the realm.

Speaker 2 (01:27:04):
You know, Yeah, I wonder if I was just thinking
as you're saying about The Thing the twenty eleven movie
that you know they didn't want to do it twice
because then you would have had to do it twice,
whereas now you can have a practical and you can
augment it. There are tools have advanced over that what
last fifteen years, I guess where you have got those
options so you can get the advantages of both worlds.

(01:27:25):
You can have a perhaps the Thing on set, you
can have design fixed, and then you can tweak it
later on, but not relying on post production solving the
problem necessary, but using it to its full.

Speaker 3 (01:27:39):
Ye. That has been and I think that may have
been in play on The Thing, where you know, like
in every shot there was some specifically intentionally designed area
that would have to be digital, right, like the like
you know, if the guy's the guy's next stretching, you

(01:27:59):
know we can do that, right. We can do a
mechanical torso, but we're going to put it on a
boom arm and he's got no legs. You're going to
do digitally growing transitioning legs and then it's going to
walk towards its victims. Right, So you're going to have
the torso is going to be practical. The legs are
going to be digital, but then there's the tracking issues,

(01:28:20):
right and if that if it's quite I don't know,
I'm speculating, but I know these are the sorts of
conversations I've had with the effects supervisors, like, well, then
we're just going to get rid of everything in the
shot and do it all digitally because it's much easier
and more effective to put the whole thing in rather
than try to track arms onto a pre existing thing. Yeah,

(01:28:44):
as you say that, times have changed and and that's
a good thing.

Speaker 2 (01:28:48):
Yeah, yeah, you're talking about the thing. You had a
response to that, and that you win and directed a movie.

Speaker 3 (01:28:56):
Oh yes, yeah that was Yeah. So when I looked
at all the comments and we literally got millions of views,
I thought, well, again, you know, like, how do we
how do we get success? Do we walk around moping
and saying this was a failure and feeling shitty, or
do say, hey, look there's a market, there's an audience
out there, people who might want to contribute. Way. It'll

(01:29:20):
be a low budget movie, of course, so it's never
going to be on a scale of a of a
of the thing or whatever, but maybe they'll maybe they
would like a movie that we say we guarantee that
there that we will not use CGI to create the creatures.
We will do digital removal of rigs. You know, I

(01:29:41):
think I put an eyeblink in one at one moment
on a creature, but it was a two D effect.
It wasn't three D animation. And uh. And I actually
rejected some really great digital work that Steve Norrington did
for me. He's a spectacular digital effects artist being a director,

(01:30:01):
and he showed me this and said, look, this is
this is like digital tracked onto a guy's body. And
I said, I think it looks better than our practical
but I have to keep my promise, so we have
to use So there I rejected.

Speaker 2 (01:30:18):
I got yourself into a corner.

Speaker 3 (01:30:20):
They So that's where I was like, well, you know,
for this exercise for Harbinger Down, we're saying we're not
using it. But I don't know that I would really
want to to do that on every It's kind of
a fun challenge to be purist like that. But you know,
I shot it on digital. I did a whole bunch

(01:30:40):
of digital stuff. We did digital compositing, we did you know,
so it's not really super purity. But it was enough
to say, these are rubber monsters in camera and Lance
Hendrickson is going to fight them. Yeah, that was the fun.

Speaker 2 (01:30:56):
How did you find the experience of directing the like?
I mean, obviously you've done some directing in the past,
but you know, helming something is a different thing altogether.

Speaker 3 (01:31:07):
Yeah, very different. But it was a lot of fun.
It was a lot of fun. And it was like
I got to bring to bear all of my Roger
Corman skills. And I mean we were doing things really
down and dirty, you know, in a warehouse to make
it look like the uh, the the the the you know,

(01:31:28):
the North Atlantic or the what's the ocean up there?
I've already forgotten all the details.

Speaker 2 (01:31:32):
You become an expert for a while and then you
just lose it.

Speaker 3 (01:31:35):
Yeah, I don't need to remember a lot of but like,
you know, scrounging around like Corman's to build the set,
like where we'll go to a junk yard or or
the uh. You know, we'll find bits and pieces to
create an engine room. And some of that stuff's made
out of cardboard. You know, you never know it and
uh and you know when you know, here's the deck

(01:31:55):
of the ship, which is like, you know, we designed
the deck of the ship after one of the old
clunker beater ships from Deadliest Catch, the TV show, because
I knew I could get cheap footage from that of
them pulling TRAbs just to establish the world. So all right,

(01:32:16):
then to match that, I need to have a deck
of a ship that looks like that, and we did
this sort of stunted version of it. And as long
as you're shooting that way and then you're shooting that way,
it kind of looks like it's double the size in
your mind. So all those tricks were super fun. And
then it was fun to just have a bunch of
enthusiastic actors and a bunch of enthusiastic affects people who were,

(01:32:38):
you know, in a sweltering warehouse in Chatsworth making it
look like it's a frozen sea. You know.

Speaker 2 (01:32:47):
But that's sort of filmmaking at its core, isn't it
knowing what you need to do to achieve what you
want to achieve.

Speaker 3 (01:32:53):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:32:53):
I spoke to Ken Rauston a couple of years ago,
you know, and he's talking about they're booting hundreds of
asteroids for the Empust strikes back and he's like, looks
like a potato. I'm just going to put a potato
in there and comp that in because it does the job.
You know, nobody's going to see it, and it was
a bit of fun. But it also it's just having
that mindset, isn't it about the problem solving?

Speaker 3 (01:33:13):
And then this is what I love? Like those that's
a great story too. This is what people love. This
is like, you know, when we were not really getting
into AI, but this is one of the things I
think that is missing from AI. As effective as it
can be and it's photo real as it can be,
it's missing the human story. It's missing the like who
are you going to who will you interview when the
AI movie comes out? And what are they going to

(01:33:34):
talk about? Is there going to be a couple of
people talking about their prompts? And you know, it doesn't
sound where's the hardship and and the and the you
know what's They're going to be working in a cubicle,
you know, and that's that's it. They're not going to
be out in the middle of the desert digging trenches
like we had too on Tremors and you know, they're
not going to have fires on the set where you
have to be evacuated and all that life threat stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:33:58):
Yeah, exactly. One of my now friend I call him
a friend, we call each other friends, is Nelo roodis
jamiro one of the designers on Empire and Jedi and
a bunch of other stuff. And he says, you know,
there's nothing as sort of scary and as tantalizing as
that blank piece of paper or you know, that piece
of clay or whatever it is, because you know, he
says to me, like he has to go through maybe
one hundred to one hundred and fifty sketches before the

(01:34:21):
finished sketch of whatever he's designing, be at Speeder Bi
Corps or you know, a character in a movie comes
out of him, you know, and that iterative nature of
it is part of the creative process, isn't it.

Speaker 3 (01:34:34):
Yeah? I agree. I agree. We'll see helped shake down.

Speaker 2 (01:34:38):
I had a look at some generitive AI stuff the
other day. I've got so this project that I'm working on.
This is where my listeners will roll their eyes because
I'm always talking about it. I'm doing a documentary about
Joe ALVE's the production designer right been working on it
for a few years now because it's just a side
project that I'm sort of self funding with my buddy

(01:34:58):
who's co directing it with. And we've got some amazing
photos of him and he there's one in particular where
he's stood next to Paul Newman and Paul Newman's in
Joe's racing car. Right, he let him have a go
of his racing car. That is the moment that launched
Newman's racing career because he just fell in love with
racing this car, right, And Joe tells this great story

(01:35:20):
about how he took this turn up at Willow Springs
and he span and he thought, oh my god, I've
killed the biggest movie star in the world. They shouldn't
have been there at the beginning here because Hitchcock. They
were on a Hitchcock movie, and you know, it would
have ruined both their careers, you know, if he'd have
been hurt. And he tells this great story and got
this wonderful photo and I just put it in as
a prompt, like, you know, make it look like that

(01:35:42):
the guy in the car has just spun and smoke's
come up and he's adjusting his goggles. And Joe comes
running up and asks him if he's okay. Thirty seconds later,
it's there, and it's terrifyingly. I mean, it's weird. At
a certain point, it doesn't. It looks uncanny, but there's
a good sort of fourth seconds that just looks incredible.
But I just couldn't ever bring myself to put that

(01:36:02):
in the film, because just a slow push in on
an amazing photo is far more emotional, I think than
anything that AI can do currently. Obviously, it's accelerating at
such a pace at the moment. Goodness knows where it's
going to be when we get to the point where
we actually finished this film. But I was really sort
of taken aback by how uncanny it looked, and equally

(01:36:27):
how photo realistic it looked. It's still somewhere in this
strange space that just doesn't feel right, and morally it
doesn't feel right, you know, because I'm taking work away
from someone. I'm also using natural resources, you.

Speaker 3 (01:36:40):
Know, from the out resources thing is interesting. Nobody talks
about that, do They're they're building nuclear reactors in order
to power AI.

Speaker 2 (01:36:52):
Yeah, yeah, I mean you were just dealing with a
bit of latex and a few nasty chemicals, and that's.

Speaker 3 (01:36:58):
Right, and we actually our own lungs purify the air
by sucking those chemicals in and processing it, and then
you can just bury our corpses with icle in a
concrete so that I worked on Jaws three D.

Speaker 2 (01:37:13):
By Well, this is what I was just going to
ask you. Yeah, so obviously Joe, Joe is a prideful man,
and he talks about, you know, shooting on Jaws and
second unit on Jaws two and working with Carpenter and
escape from New York. Jaws three d's is a sort
of area we didn't get into a great deal because
I still think, you know, maybe eighty nine was he

(01:37:34):
ninety this coming year, but he still has that sort
of that's that should have been his directorial career kind
of taken off. Of course, that was the beginning and
the end of it. But what was your experience on
Jaws three because that was one of your early movies.

Speaker 3 (01:37:48):
Yeah, it was early. That was after my Corman era
and my uh Chuck Kamiski, who had hired me at
Corman's and ran the visual effects department at Corman. He
he was the visual effect supervisor on Jaws three D.
He brought the Scotech brothers in, you know, a lot

(01:38:08):
of dry for wet stuff, smoked stages, and lots of
miniatures and things like that, and all that stuff was
looking quite good. And I was supervising the construction of
a I think it was about a three or four
foot long mechanical shark that was shot dry for wet
and it was a it was a pretty it was

(01:38:30):
a guy. It was. I was very proud of that,
you know. I sculpted it and art directed it. And
uh we had a guy named Dave Nelson who was
a nice guy from Manchester who did He had done
the faces in Kujo and you know, he was a
friend of mine and he mechanized it. Was the lead
mechanical engineer and it would you know. It had this

(01:38:52):
sort of cam operated thing where you could just turn
it on Rhea static slower faster for swimming, and it
had radio control fins, you know, with tips, a mouth
that could open and close, you know, radio control, and
you could mount it like a spaceship on a on
a and push the camera past the dollie or put
it on it, you know, and it was it was,

(01:39:12):
it was cool. And then to my knowledge, there was
a legal dispute between Private Stock Effects, which I think
was not Chuck's company. I think he was employed by them.
There are other people who know this story better than
I do. Probably brothers know it better than I do.

(01:39:34):
But at some point all of the assets were seized
from Private Stock Effects and sent to another company and
they had to finish the film, and I think that's
what accounts for some of the not so great looking
uh V effects in it, including the shot of my
shark which kind of slide sideways towards the and then

(01:39:58):
the glass breaks and it's right, you know, that's so
far and that ends up on I've seen it every
once in a while on the number one worst effect
in film history, and that's my shark, and the shark
isn't performing. I think probably what happened was this, these

(01:40:19):
poor people at this other company looked at it and go,
what the fuck? How do we deal with it? Right?
How do you plug it in? How do you hook
it up? You know, it's got a bundle of cables
coming out of what and maybe they didn't even get
all the parts. I don't know, So they just had
to do what they had to do, and uh so
as a result. I'm very proud to be connected to
that particular shot, but that was all, you know, I

(01:40:41):
was only involved in in you know, I was never
on set. I was I was never around any of
the actors. I don't know the ins and outs of
of uh of of all that, but I was grateful
for the opportunity.

Speaker 2 (01:40:54):
What do we currently find you working on? And what
has been the most recent project in h how's that coming?

Speaker 3 (01:41:00):
Urined? I would say that my most recent project is
Studio Gillis. You know Tom Woodruff who I had an
amazing successful company with the Magamated Dynamics for thirty four years.
Tom retired, I think right at the right time, and
I thought, you know what I'm gonna keep doing, and

(01:41:23):
here I am, and but you know, honestly, since here
if I'm just gonna repivot so you can see a
little bit more of the room. But we Studio Gillis
was formed three years ago and we do all of
the same you know, creature effects we've always done, and

(01:41:43):
we have been working on some really cool stuff including
Alien Romulus and bad Lands design for for bad Lands
and Smile too. We did that for Parker Finn and
we've we've been working on some really cool, interesting projects

(01:42:04):
and uh and then also we have our sister company
is pro Makina, which is also our production company. We
have a film that we produced that you can find
on Amazon to purchase. This is my little plug I'm
going to put my radio blog voice on right now.
It's called Wellwood and it's a It's got a ton

(01:42:26):
of practical effects and other effects as well, and it's
kind of a tragic sci fi horror love story. It's
it's a really interesting little film. We shot in New Orleans.
But the other aspect of pro Makina is that it's
a miniature effects company. So pro Makina did miniatures for

(01:42:50):
for Alien Romulus as well as for the Fantastic four
First Steps. They built the Excelsior it. So this is
part of my dream of going back to my Corman
roots of having everything under one roof at you know,
having all your practical effects needs met right here. And

(01:43:13):
we had and I run well. I don't run much
of pro Bacana because it's a separate company run by
my daughter Camille Balsimo and her husband read columns and
they have been working with Ian Hunter for about seven
years Ian Hunter, who is famous for his miniature effects,

(01:43:33):
including you know, he's won a couple of Oscars for
Except Interstellar and or No First Man An Interstellar. He's
a brilliant guy that I've known since Alien Resurrection. So
I'm very excited about that and trying to, you know,
keep the practical effects craft healthy and alive and do

(01:43:54):
interesting work. And that's the goal, and so far we're
doing okay. I'm hoping that things open up a little
bit in the in the industry and we can show
even more of what we do.

Speaker 1 (01:44:08):
Well.

Speaker 2 (01:44:08):
Listen, I appreciate your time today. I mean we've been
talking for an hour and forty one minutes here. I
feel like we could easily have quadrupled that. We've missed
a lot of stuff from your career. This is a
double episode, as we said earlier. Bit it's still about
a quadruple episode.

Speaker 3 (01:44:24):
It's more aliculous than anyone's interested in. I'm sure, no,
not at all. Not all.

Speaker 2 (01:44:28):
I mentioned that I was talking to you today on
social media and a lot of people chimed in and said, oh,
I can't wait to hear that episode. So I'm going
to have to rush this one out in the New Year,
and oh good you put you ahead of the cube.
But no, I appreciate your time today and I hope, yeah,
I hope I can meet up with you next time
I'm out.

Speaker 3 (01:44:45):
Thank you, absolute pleasure, and hope hopefully someday I'll come
to your neck of the words. I would love to
get out there again soon.

Speaker 2 (01:45:12):
So I hope you enjoyed my conversation there with Alec Gillis.
As I said, what a great guy, just so welcoming,
so open, so friendly, so many great stories. We had
a wonderful time with him in La interviewing him for
the Darhals dot talking about his work on Jaws three D.
More on that later, Yeah, Hughes, thanks Alec for taking
the time to sit down and chat and for sharing

(01:45:33):
so many of those great stories the Roger Corman days
through right through to now you know, the modern era
of creature effects. He really is a legend in the industry.
If you enjoy the Filmiamentaries podcast, I would like to
help support the show. You can do that over Patreon.
Just head to patreon dot com forward slash Jamie Benning
j A M I E B E double N I NG.

Speaker 3 (01:45:52):
That's me.

Speaker 2 (01:45:53):
Your support helps me keep producing these interviews, traveling to
record them, sometimes in person where possible, and digging deeper
into behind the scenes stories of the films that we
all love. You'll also find a bit of bonus material,
early access to episodes, and a few other bits and
pieces over there on Patreon. As I said in the intro,
if any of you have got any friends or colleagues

(01:46:17):
that you think this Joe Al's documentary might suit in
terms of being an executive producer or helping us fund
the project, or helping us produce the project. You know,
I think the quality of what we've produced kind of
speaks for yourself. If there is a real that we're
not releasing publicly, We're just releasing it to people who
might be involved or you know, we might want as contributors.

(01:46:38):
So there is that to send out if anybody wants
to take a look in terms of anyone that can
help us get to the next stage. And now that
we've hopefully got this Spielberg interview lined up in the
fall or in the autumn, as I would say, yeah,
this brings the project into a different realm altogether, very
exciting times. I'm smiling here. You might be able to

(01:46:59):
hear it in my voice.

Speaker 3 (01:47:01):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:47:02):
It's nine point thirty here. I've been up since three
am because I've just finished the Chinese Grand Prix, so
I think I'm going to go back to bed. But
I hope you enjoy the podcast, and there'll be another
one later on in the month. I've got a few
of them lined up at the moment. I'm undecided about
which one I'm going to release just yet, but it
might be Don Bee's former Lucasfilm employee again, another great

(01:47:23):
guy with some great stories. If you have five minutes,
please leave a review of the podcast. I know everybody
says that and it's a bit of a drag, but
my goodness me, it really does help. And I would
love to get this podcast to more ears, and you
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is you patrons on Patreon that are helping me continue

(01:47:46):
to do this. So if you can leave a review,
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I hope you can do so. For the next episode
of the film, we mentor this podcast.

Speaker 1 (01:48:42):
We are getting way media

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Ep 145 | Alec Gillis — Creature FX Artist (Aliens, Predator, Tremors)

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Ep 145 | Alec Gillis — Creature FX Artist (Aliens, Predator, Tremors)