Light & Magic

I remember the first time I got to Kerner,

and the first time I saw, you know, the fact they had

really great junk food everywhere.

And I saw how really smart and creative

and talented everybody was at ILM.

It was all analog in those days.

You did everything with your hands.

I kind of looked at Kerner as a kind of college campus

in a way, it was like we were a bunch of freshmen,

and we were four years away from graduating from anything.

Because we were all so young.

It was a great place to hang out with a lot of like-minded people.

We all love movies and we loved talking about movies.

There was a sense of nerdiness to all of us

because it was ILM, not the NFL.

And that kind of mindset,

that kind of a fun house, a playhouse for me,

I never wanted to leave that place.

Because they understood how to make magic

and how to have fun at the same time.

This is great.

George showed up in Mobile, Alabama. Right in the middle of Close Encounters.

He had just finished Star Wars.

And he had a terrible time on Star Wars, at least you did in your head,

I don't know how bad it was in real life.

George was all depressed, saying, "This is terrible, look at these stills.

"Look how my movie's lit, I'm really upset."

I look at these stills and it was gorgeous lighting.

It was just incredible. "God, George, you're depressed."

We had dinner at my house that night.

He said, "This is terrible and it wasn't what I wanted."

And we were sitting on the rocks that are in Close Encounters.

I said, "Why don't we just trade a point?

"I'll give you a point of Close Encounters,

"you give a point of Star Wars.

"And we'll see, we'll cover our bets, you know?"

Who was to know, George, that we were gonna throw so much money away?

Right. Well, I figured I had it made because I felt, at that point,

my picture was such a turkey.

Star Wars was opening in May of 1977, and George didn't want to be in LA,

so we went to Hawaii and we spent a week together.

He said to me, "So what's the next movie you're going to make?"

And I said, "I've been trying for, like, years to get Cubby Broccoli

"to hire me to do a James Bond film."

Do you expect me to talk?

No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.

The second I said James Bond, he said, "I got something better than James Bond."

And he pitched me the story called Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I said, "I've got a James Bond film for you.

"It's great. It's about an archaeologist.

"He finds ancient artifacts that are religious or supernatural,

"and kind of always in over his head."

He was going to be a rogue adventurer that stops at nothing

fighting the Nazis to get his prize.

-I'm going after that truck. -How?

I don't know. I'm making this up as I go.

Hyah! Hyah!

But it's basically a Republic serial like Star Wars.

We want to have a cliffhanger every reel.

No!

And then he said, "Okay, well, if you do it,

"you've got to commit to doing it three times,

"because I want to make a whole series of these films."

Trust me.

He said, "I'll do it."

It was just like that.

I said, "Okay, well, let's make a deal."

I said to myself, "Well, look, if I'm going to go into business,

"there's nobody I'd rather go into business with, nobody I trust more."

I remember that Steven said, "Here, read this.

"Tell me what you think and don't talk to anybody about what the script's about."

I had not been in the business a long time,

so it's not like I was used to reading a lot of screenplays,

and I remember sitting there leafing through this.

I hadn't seen anything like this in a movie before,

and I kind of closed it up and I sat back

and all I kept thinking to myself was, "How are we going to do this?"

It was so exciting.

Raiders was kind of like a bridge between fantasy and real movie.

So Raiders was, you know, I mean, it was taking place in the Nazi era,

but the opening of the ark and all that was still kind of fantasy world,

you know, in a sense.

And so we had to make that work on screen.

You start to hear a rumble. Almost like Old Faithful about to erupt.

And the rumble increases, the hum increases.

And then, the next phase of the effect occurs,

which is where a rather gaseous, a bluish-green gaseous veil

spills from the ark and starts to crawl down the steps.

It'll be between Steve and the special effects

and me workin' out the final decision about how it's gonna finally look.

We're dealing with a kind of special effect with a new look.

Something a little more ethereal than what we've been doing in the past.

And shooting the ghosts in Raiders,

it's a real complicated issue with that kind of a shot.

And when you're talking about "What does a ghost look like?"

Steve Gawley came up with a very clever idea.

Because we were using a cloud tank to manufacture the clouds.

You use warm, clear water on the top and salty water on the bottom that's cold.

And so those layers would stay separate.

And then you would inject a mixed temperate with a little device,

and then you would just wait for the cumulus clouds to develop.

So we have the tank available. So Steve came up with the idea

of putting a rod on a ghost, like a rod puppet,

and then he ran it in the water and made it go back and forth.

And so the water made the silky tendrils, like, flow really nicely

with silk and these tendrils,

and then it was shot high speed. So it really slowed it down.

And then they could speed it up and slow it down as they wanted to.

On Raiders, I was learning visual effects, and I didn't even know...

I knew what a matte painting was, but I didn't know how you did it.

So it was really exciting for me to go up to San Francisco

and go to this sort of nondescript industrial park.

And there was all this fun stuff going on,

and great creative people.

I went to ILM and I said, "I want a face to melt.

"I want Toht's face to melt."

But I have no idea how to melt a face.

I leave it to the geniuses at ILM.

Steven had had it storyboarded several times.

And he wasn't happy with how it was turning out.

He gave me three separate sequences of storyboards.

He said, "You know, I like this idea, and I like this idea from this one.

"Make one sequence out of it.

"And then just do whatever you want," which was great fun.

Wait.

I'll tell you everything.

Yes, I know you will.

Toht, here's his head, this is what's left.

Basically, this skull, we sculpted the muscles and the different layers

of what would actually be in the face

out of this dental alginate, the thing, the stuff that the dentist uses

to take molds of your teeth. And using the heat lamp

and by putting heat on this alginate, it naturally melts.

And by shooting at one frame a second,

it appears to melt, but you don't see all the drops.

I mean, it was like an unbelievable effect shot, you know.

Now!

The ILM portion of Raiders

made a lasting impression on me.

And I knew instantly I really wanted to work with ILM for the rest of my career.

In the category of visual effects, the winners are Richard Edlund,

Kit West, Bruce Nicholson, and Joe Johnston for Raiders of the Lost Ark.

-Thank you. -Thank you.

It was a nondescript place, but it was full of exceptional people.

And we all got to know each other quite well

because we often live up there for four or five months.

You know, these people become your family.

We would go up there a lot, and we would be at the 4th of July picnic.

We spent a lot of time together.

It really was a family environment.

It was a great atmosphere. I loved going to work.

I loved being there.

Working with the crew, people side by side.

And they had parties that were for crews and everything, all of us.

There was just something here about the people and the spirit.

The mixture of art and technology.

And we were always pushing to try to come up

with some other way to make just amazing shots.

So that it would look fresher, more realistic.

It's a rare thing to have a company like this that's supported by a film director.

What I remember more than anything was just being in awe

of the people who work there and the conversations we would have.

And that incredible feeling when all you've got is an idea

of something that you think could happen

and be exciting and thrilling in whatever movie we were working on.

-(SCREAMING) -(E.T. EXCLAIMING IN FEAR)

Stop! Stop!

Stop!

E.T. was pretty much, you know, that was my first time

working really close with Steven.

The show was, I always thought it was a very pictorial show.

Steven wanted these beautiful moments visually.

So I made sure that when we were doing the bicycles,

if they had effects in them or whatever,

or the landing site of the ship coming down

or anything that was an effect, that it looked like it was shot

at the perfect time of day, with everything amped up a little bit.

The colors are a little bright, you know, the back light's a little too strong...

That it's just got this glow to it.

We didn't have a lot of money to spend,

and obviously we're spending most of our money

figuring out how we're going to create the character of E.T.

But the takeoff and the landing of the bikes,

we were trying to figure out how to do and we were out of money.

And so I called Dennis and I said, "All right,

"you know, we've got to figure this out,

"'cause we can't add this to the effects budget."

And he said, "Well, we should just do really poor man's process kind of thing.

"You know, we'll just tie ropes to the bikes,

"and we'll just pull them through the shot."

Well, we literally pulled the bikes through the frame.

Dennis never would just push something

as the shot or how to do the shot,

just because it could be done.

He always was in service to the story.

I just looked for a way to be able to feel something back from the shot.

Does the shot have energy?

Is that the best view of the ship?

I mean, does it look majestic?

Ah-ha!