Light & Magic

When I got to ILM, it was really interesting,

because the first impression was like, "Hmm, this is not right."

You're making Star Wars.

It's all this, like, huge Hollywood company.

I get there and I'm expecting all this, like, wow, you know,

all the lights and action and everything.

It's like a dentist's office.

The street that ILM was on is Kerner.

And Star Wars had been a big deal.

And when George moved the business up here,

he wanted to keep it low-key

so that people wouldn't know what was going on and so forth.

We had a door that said Kerner Optical Company.

That was just a diversion so people wouldn't be thinking,

"I don't see Industrial Light & Magic, or I don't see Star Wars anywhere."

They walk past and go on to somebody else, to the auto repair shop.

One of the things that I felt like I could always say

when I was touring people around ILM was...

just by the kind of ratty rundown nature of the building that,

"Hey, we're putting every dollar on the screen."

It's not going into polished brass door knobs.

It's going on screen.

I got handed a script for Pirates of the Caribbean.

I'll admit, my first reaction when I saw the script was,

"Oh, my God, this can't be any good."

I read through it, and the script was pretty good.

And so my next thought was, "Well, what about Hal?"

And so, he slides the script across the desk

and it says "Pirates of the Caribbean."

And I thought, "Oh, it's a movie based on a theme park ride."

I don't know.

How do you make a story out of that, right?

Strike your colors, ya bloomin' cockroaches!

Show 'em your larboard side.

It just seemed like, "Okay, you know, this is what I get handed."

I love making a movie that's not supposed to work.

That's the magic. The adventure is, like, we don't know what's going to happen.

A guy is shooting and poking and firing guns and doing all this stuff.

Gore's whole vision for the project was offbeat and interesting and fresh.

So, yeah, that first meeting,

I came out of there just, you know, a couple of inches off the ground.

It's kind of the punk rock Western, right?

I mean, pirates are kind of rogues.

They have a code, but they're willing to break it.

In a corrupt world, there's no place for an honest thief.

That aspect of the film was what initially grabbed me.

The genre was really nonexistent,

so it was super-exciting to come back to it.

Fire!

I had grown up watching these old classic movies from the '40s and '50s

of wooden boat in a studio tank, and I just loved that stuff.

Suddenly, I had this script

where I had this opportunity to build a tank

and build some big wooden boats and shoot them

kind of like in the Paramount or 20th Century Fox lot.

And I thought, "This'll be huge fun."

Out back here, the stage guys built about a four-foot wall.

Super, super strong. Lined it with plastic.

We filled it with water.

So we're having pirate ships that are 35-feet long.

And these giant sets had to have pyro and model

and stage guys with rigs to pull the ships across and wind.

Talk about exciting.

Fire!

Hey, can I show you something here?

Yeah.

This is your geography.

John and I have a weird psychic connection.

My father was a nuclear physicist, and so was John's.

And we found out years later they knew each other.

I'm usually saying to John, like,

"I need this tool that doesn't exist to do something."

The dynamics aren't gonna be what you want,

and then I'm gonna be trying to get rid of it.

You get a lot more energy from someone like that

when he starts to become challenged.

Action!

One of the big challenges on Pirates 1

was that these pirates are cursed,

so that when they appear in moonlight, they're these desiccated skeletons.

And when they're out of the moonlight, they're actors in their picture costumes.

Action!

And they had to transition from live-action to CG and then back.

And so I thought, "Well, let's just shoot it with the actor,

"and then we'll shoot a clean plate,

"and I'll just paint out what I need to paint out,

"and we'll just kind of deal with it."

Our paint crew got to be really, really good at doing that.

Couldn't resist, mate.

It was important to understand what's actually happening,

particularly as Barbossa transitions in the moonlight

when he's explaining who we are.

It was a tight shot.

And we wanted to work on that shot first

because we just knew it would be challenging.

And if we could nail it, the audience would buy into the effect.

So we did a little trick

where for about a half-second after he transforms into our CG skeleton version,

we kept his real eyes in there.

Then he does a little half-blink

and it switches to all CG from that point on...

to kind of keep that little piece that we knew the audience was staring at

for just a little longer over the border from real to digital.

You best start believing in ghost stories, Miss Turner.

You're in one.

And it really worked.

-(LAUGHS) -(ALL LAUGHING)

Hal had started as a stop-motion animator.

He really connected with the work.

My upbringing, uh, the most important part of it was on a ranch in Colorado,

about a million miles from anything film-related.

That gave me a strong identification with Luke Skywalker,

both in terms of the fantasy narrative of Star Wars

and being far, far from the bright center of the universe,

or whatever Luke says about that.

Well, if there's a bright center to the universe,

you're on the planet that it's farthest from.

-(HELICOPTER WHIRRING) -(ROARING)

I was living on a pretty steady diet of midnight movies,

horror, sci-fi, fantasy, mystery...

most of the old Universal horror films,

everything by Ray Harryhausen.

The sort of birthplace of the idea of being an animator for me

was seeing the original King Kong on TV.

I was outraged at Kong's treatment in the film

and asked my mother to help me draft a letter to the local TV station

who I held accountable for his death.

In 1988, I started on Will Vinton Studios doing stop-motion clay animation.

And they were blowing up

because they had gotten this account, the California Raisins,

which were kind of a blip on the cultural radar in the '80s.

My goal was to ultimately come down to the Bay Area

and work for ILM.

So joining ILM ultimately was huge for me.

We were huge fans of Ray Harryhausen

and Jason and the Argonauts.

But a lot of that stuff's locked off. They're miming.

We didn't want to lock off the camera.

We wanted to liberate the camera.

When you've got, you know, 70 characters interlaced

and you're handheld and they're all doing this sort of choreography,

you want to make it feel like there is no plan,

that you're literally reacting.

That guy's head's bouncing across the floor,

that's just happening, so you want to respond intuitively.

That was probably the biggest challenge.

The only thing that really made sense

was to go ahead and shoot the actors in their picture costumes

and then match move them as closely as we could.

But that process was really fraught and difficult and error-prone.

There were times when the characters were only going to be the skeletons

where we did do some motion capture.

We just shot it on our stage here with some of our animators playing the roles.

All right. Looks good.

We were right in the finishing months,

and Ray made one of his period visits to ILM,

and he sat at my desk and I showed him some of the shots from Pirates.

And he had a big smile on his face.

He just got a big kick out of it and really enjoyed it.

For anyone who grew up on Ray Harryhausen,

and particularly folks who then subsequently did stop-motion as a job,

you know, nothing could be more perfect.

So, by the time Revenge of the Sith came along,

you were already in a digital pipeline.

-But George kept pushing the envelope. -Well, yeah.

Revenge of the Sith is when we really started to use a lot of digital doubles.

In this particular shot,

we're going to have to create a digital Obi-Wan.

Here you can see we start putting in the cloth sim,

so we're thinking about how the cloth is going to be reacting to the throw.

And here's the final shot.

We now have a digital stunt double doubling Ewan McGregor.

George was always pushing the envelope

in terms of what he wanted from his fights.

And Revenge of the Sith had, I think, more sword-fighting in it

than any of the other films.

Anytime you see someone leap or jump or flip,

it's highly likely that it's a fully digital character.

The other thing we did was head replacements.

So there's a fight between Palpatine and Mace Windu...

where Ian, as amazing as an actor he is, he was like, "Guys, I can't... I..."

He could barely... You know, he can't swordfight.

So they had a stunt double doing it,

but then it didn't look enough like Palpatine.

So we had a digital head that we put on.

So that was some of the big innovations that we were doing.

The scale of the show, it kept growing.

Not unlike the Star Wars to Empire to Jedi.

I think on Episode I, it was just under 2,000 shots.

And then, Episode II was a little over.

And I think Episode III was like 2,500 VFX shots.

So I was trying to work out technique for all the sequences.

This is a very, very succinct collage of early ideas for Mustafar.

And as we developed it more, things got a little bit darker.

What's interesting now is that the model shop is doing a build

that's not too dissimilar to this, uh, at a very large scale.

When I was presented, you know, "Here's the storyboards for Mustafar,"