Original subtitles

My first awareness

of phantasmagorical images

was in 1955 on television,

they were running

the 1933 Schoedsack/Cooper

production of King Kong,

and I remember

just being blown away

as a five-year-old by that.

Around that time, LIFE magazine came out

with a lot of Rudolph Zallinger's murals,

in the Museum of Natural History

in New York, of dinosaurs.

I got amazed by the concept that there was another world

before our world, where monsters,

without men, lived.

And then I saw

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.

And then I was

never the same afterwards. You know, it was just like,

"What was that? What did I just see?

Why was it like that?"

It took me a number of years

to figure out how it was done.

I drew, tried to sculpt, pushed clay around,

animated stuff,

with like terrible lighting in my bedroom.

Nobody was interested in what I was interested in.

So, as a consequence,

through most of my formal education

up until the college years,

you know, I was...

You know, I was friendly,

and, you know, liked people and they liked me,

but I had very little in common,

so I spent most of my time alone.

I wasn't into like sports or anything.

You know, I was too dorky for girls,

so I just spent more time alone, you know...

My parents didn't understand what it was that I was doing.

My mother became worried about me,

that I seemed to be obsessed with these weird things,

and I think they went to talk to some psychiatrist.

My dad was a probation officer,

but his avocation was, he was an abstract painter.

So we connected on that level.

There was a little community college,

a junior college in San Marcos, California,

in the San Diego area, called Palomar,

and they had a great art department.

And I became friends with a number of instructors there.

A couple of them were involved with conceptual art.

It was like a curtain had been lifted

and you were free, you were free!

Totally free!

There were no constraints at all,

you could do anything!

I made a number of abstract films,

16mm film, bleaching the film,

and using paint to create abstract shapes.

The conceptual movement,

yeah, it was like...boom.

It was-- It's not like sculpture,

it's not like painting, it's like--

It's filmmaking, it's like...

making stuff with sticks.

But it was ridiculed by a lot of people too,

saying it's not art, because it's not,

you know, a thing that has a price tag on it

and people can't understand that.

During summer of 1967 or something like that,

I went to the beach with some friends in San Diego

and came home and was watching

the science-fiction movie on TV.

In the intermission, the host of the program

had a guest, and the guest was Bill Stromberg,

and he showed his stop-motion movie called Time Tomorrow.

And so I was able to get in contact with Bill,

he was about to embark on his next independent feature

that was based on a Ray Bradbury story

called Sound of Thunder about dinosaur hunting.

So I just started working with Bill--

he would drive down every weekend

and pick me up and take me back to Carlsbad,

like a 30-minute drive,

and we'd work in his garage studio,

and slowly put together

this short 16mm film, and it was great!

Hark! Into the earth!

He was 15 years old at the time.

He came up and started working with me

on Sound of Thunder...

...my very elaborate home movie.

Bill Stromberg was my mentor.

I graduated from 8mm to 16mm,

and so it was the greatest opportunity.

And then I got to work during my summer breaks

at Cascade Pictures.

And who are you?

I'm Poppin' Fresh,

the Pillsbury Dough Boy.

Cascade was a production company

that did television commercials exclusively.

That's where I met Dennis Muren.

Tex Avery was there once we started working,

so that was a huge influence.

♪ Have Campbell's Chicken Chicken! ♪

It was like some kind of graduate program,

because the commercials turned over really quick

and you were doing this here, and you're doing that there,

and it was like this and like that,

and this, and the...

So you learned a lot of shit like really quick.

The first Star Wars was really

the first big theatrical feature film

that a lot of us worked on.

During the time that Star Wars

was in postproduction with visual effects,

we got introduced to George Lucas

through Dennis Muren.

Cascade had closed up,

there was not enough work,

I didn't want to work on big Hollywood movies

where you're working at a studio

all you could do is just touch the camera--

you can't touch a light...

And I was a huge admirer of George Lucas,

from THX and from American Graffiti,

and eventually I got the job on Star Wars.

They weren't making the kinds of movies

that we were interested in doing

in Hollywood at that particular point in time.

So working for the studios

really wasn't that interesting.

But if you wanted to be a part of that system,

you had to join a union,

and there was no union for stop-motion animation

or monster making or whatever.

So what George Lucas did was,

he set up ILM on the outskirts

of the union jurisdiction,

which allowed us to be able to participate.

George wanted to do some insert shots

for the "Cantina"--

he didn't feel he had gotten enough material.

And simultaneously, I was working

with David Allen

on a Bill Stromberg production.

Is the creature ready to unleash its horror

on an unsuspecting world?

I was juggling both jobs--

I was working on creating the Crater Lake puppet,

and also working on the Cantina scene,

under the auspice of Rick Baker, who George hired.

Rick got a bunch of us together,

that he knew through Cascade Pictures,

a bunch out-of-work stop-motion animators

to do the Cantina scene.

Well, all these guys can make small sculptures--

they can make face masks,

they can make full-body costumes if they want to,

they can draw, they can paint,

and it would be perfect for them to be able

to switch from doing little stop-motion and puppets

to be able to make costumes for the Cantina,

it made total sense.

We built a number of masks,

kind of refurbished things over existing masks

that Rick Baker had.

We made like 20 monsters in like five, six weeks,

something like that.

And then when it came time to shoot,

George invited us to come down and play the monsters.

While we were making the masks,

George would come by once a week

and check things out.

At that time, he saw a puppet

that I had brought in to the studio--

a stop-motion puppet--

which gave him the idea

to do the chess set scene

as a stop-motion scene.

Previously, I think he was going

to do it just with actors in masks,

and I think Michael Crichton

had just came out with Westworld,

and I guess there was something similar.

In Futureworld,

if you can afford to go there, you're lucky.

When Westworld came out,

there was a chess game in it with people in big costumes

and George was all, "Oh shit!"

Anyhow, that's where the idea

of doing it with stop-motion came from,

he had seen little things that Phil and I,

even you do, wave under his nose,

and he and Gary went,

"Why don't we do it with stop-motion?"

As opposed to the guys in the costumes?

In the costumes. Because he was really--

At least that's my memory of it,

he was pretty deflated-- they had taken his idea

and ruined it.

So this was the original armature

that I had inside the puppet

that I made when I was a teenager,

that George saw when we were doing the Cantina scene.

There was a scramble to make this number of figures

in a very short period of time.

I can't remember what it was,

Phil thinks it's a week,

I think we probably had to do it

more in like two weeks.

But it was all a real scramble,

and it was right at the tail-end of the shooting,

so we were under a lot of pressure

to get this thing done as fast as we could.

I think we shot it over about three days,

in the evenings. It was part of the night crew.

I realized, when we saw some of the footage from it,

oh, this was the movie I really wanted to see as a kid.

And it was, but you never know how many people feel that.

None of us had any idea when we were doing this

in the first place what would happen

with Star Wars and careers and everything like that.

It was really nice to see something take off

on such an extraordinary level.

I never expected to be part of anything like that.

I could have sworn it was Ray Harryhausen

that did the chess scene

when I first saw Star Wars-- the original--

and I even stayed for the credits

to see Ray Harryhausen's name, and you know,

it wasn't Ray Harryhausen,

it was Jon Berg and Phil Tippett.

New heroes, all of a sudden,

because I had no idea who they were.

People often time talk about Phil

as sort of the heir to Ray Harryhausen,

and I think that's true in a lot of ways,

because he definitely has that character understanding

that Ray had.

To me, what makes Phil equally as interesting

is that he has a contemporary aesthetic to him--

like, each movie that he did...

Like when you saw the chess set,

there was something different about that,

even though you knew that it was stop-motion,

but the fact that it was presented

in a high-tech environment as a hologram

was a very interesting spin on it.

You know, maybe Phil didn't come up with that,

but he definitely used his techniques

to the very best possible way for that moment.

The popularity of Star Wars

drove all of the subsequent media stuff.

Whatever celebrity kind of blew off of that

was irrelevant to me.

You know, I didn't care about that stuff.

I came to United States

to go to a graduate school, and I was studying painting,

and after that,

I didn't really know what to do.

I was sort of hanging around San Francisco,

and doing odd jobs and generally being kind of illegal,

because my Visa ran out.

So I actually met a French guy

who had a car

and he was just here for a little bit of time

and he said...

"Come with me to L.A.

"and if you do that you can take my car

and I'm gonna go back to Paris."

He was actually a cameraman.

And the night we got to L.A.,

we met somebody

who I had been in college with,

who actually knew Phil, and said,

"Oh, you have to come to my friend

Phil Tippett's house."

So we went there that night, and I met Phil,

and he was in a house with his friend who is a composer,

listening to Beethoven incredibly loudly,

and in his house, there were shelves

with beautifully sculpted clay dinosaurs.

It was actually very, very impressive.

It was L.A. at sunset, with thick smog,

so the colors in the sky were amazing,

and there was just like this man

with this red, wild hair

and listening to wild music,

and I pretty much fell in love like that.

The next time I saw Phil, actually,

was at Dennis Muren's house in Glendale.

And I got very drunk,

and I asked him to marry me

on the balcony

of Dennis Muren's house

and he said yes!

Quickly after that episode,

he was actually working, or about to work,

on this project, Timegate.

So the clay dinosaurs and stuff were actually for that.

I was sort of game for anything,

so I kind of signed up as a production assistant,

and it was actually really fun

because we were sort of trying to prep to do a movie.

I do remember shooting some tests out in the desert.

So that was sort of interesting, but Timegate kind of fell apart,

basically it didn't actually turn into a movie.

And then came along Piranha.

Originally, I called Rick Baker

to see if he would do the film Piranha.

And he said no, he would not do the film Piranha,

but he said,

"You should call Phil Tippett

and here is his phone number."

Jules had a studio in Los Angeles--

a very small room, not much bigger than this room--

where she was doing her paintings.

And the Piranha job came up

and Jon Berg and I rented it.

We called it The Fish Factory.

This is the original clay sculpture

that Phil made for Piranha.

A mold was made off of this

and all the subsequent rubber piranhas

came out of that mold.

I designed and sculpted piranha fish

and then molds were made,

and Jules did some designs for coloration.

Phil, who was with his adorable wife Jules,

worked on the fish, of course,

which were very difficult

under our circumstances,

and also on some creatures

that were in the laboratory.

I just do remember making

tons of fish and painting them,

and my job was to actually mix up gallons of blood

to throw in the water

when the fish were thrashing around--

the rubber fish on sticks.

You know, she got insurance,

she hired a crew,

she got all the materials,

she produced the visual effects for Piranha.

This was a really cheap movie shot in Los Angeles,

in a swimming pool,

for which we all had

to learn to scuba dive.

And in the movie,

Phil is my scuba diving buddy.

We have a scene together where we play scuba divers,

and he gets eaten by piranhas,

and then later, a water skier goes by him,

and there's the body-- is underwater with bubbles

and blood and that's all... that's Phil!

I was a huge stop-motion fan

and I didn't know how many movies I was going

to get to be able to make in my career

and I really wanted to have

stop-motion in the picture.

And Kevin McCarthy's mad doctor

has created a lot of weird stuff,

so we could have a sort of a Ymir-like creature.

The Ymir in Ray Harryhausen's 20 Million Miles to Earth

is one of his major achievements.

And it's a reptilian creature on two legs.

And that was something that,

I think Phil felt that he could do.

Jon Berg made an armature,

I sculpted a puppet and cast it in foam latex,

and I animated a couple of shots with this creature.

This was designed by Phil Tippett.

It's a stop-motion whatchamacallit,

which we used in a sequence in the picture--

Explain how that's done.

Well, we move it this much and take a shot,

and this much and take a shot,

and the sophistication is mainly

in the lighting, which is very important,

and the number of movements that you can do,

and not knock him over and have to start over.

Very soon after that, I think,

then came the big move up to the Bay Area,

when George Lucas decided to set up, you know, ILM.

So we moved to San Francisco.

I just never saw Phil,

he was just consistently working

'cause it was for Empire Strike Back.

For The Empire Strikes Back,

Dennis Muren convinced George Lucas

to, you know, consider doing stop-motion.

This Tauntaun creature was in it.

And I said, "How the heck are you planning on doing this?"

It was a snow lizard in the script.

Previously, the Tauntaun was gonna be a guy

in a suit somehow.

It was clear that it was not gonna work,

so I just pushed on and said,

"We really should do the stop-motion."

I'm a big fan of stop-motion,

but the advantage of it is the control.

So you've got control over everything.

So George said, "Okay, let's do it that way."

And so he hired me, initially,

to come up with some designs for the Tauntaun.

And I spent like two or three days just doing

like a dozen sketches: It could be this, it could be that,

it could be that, it could be this,

it could be that...

So I sent all these drawings up to him

and he picked one,

and asked to see a three-dimensional model of it,

and I made a three-dimensional clay sculpture of it,

and he said, "Yeah, that's a Tauntaun."

I was hired by Phil and Jon Berg,

late 1978, to work on The Empire Strikes Back.

I worked on the Tauntaun armature with Doug Beswick,

a very fine animator and a good friend.

The basic principle behind stop-motion

hasn't changed for like 80 years, really.

You build a model of some kind,

you would have a start pose,

and then you would shoot a frame of film,

walk up and make a little move,

go back behind the camera,

shoot another frame,

come back, make another little move,

go back and so on and so forth.

What we tried to do was to think sculpturally.

You know, think of this as a moving sculpture.

Stop-motion's a lot like sculpting.

You're like building a performance

by doing little moves,

you know, and people say, "Oh, this is tedious,"

and it's like, "Well, it's as tedious as sculpting is,"

you just build these things up, bit by bit by bit.

When you shoot ordinary stop-motion,

every frame is a very clear frame,

it's very sharp, there's no blurs.

Which I particularly like, aesthetically.

But as the B-movies, you know,

the Ray Harryhausen movies were rolling

into like the "A" Star Wars type pictures,

it was imperative to try

and get the look of things more photographic.

If you looked at frames of a horse running, there's blurs.

We needed to find some way to put blurs

into the stop-motion,

it had a better chance of looking real.

For example, we have this light here.

So if, for some reason,

say you wanna do some stop-motion on this light,

you'd move it to there and you shoot a frame,

and then you move it to there and you shoot a frame

and you move it to there and you shoot a frame.

And when you run it,

it looks like it's moving by itself.

That's hand animation.

If you replace this little joint here--

instead of with your hand, and you put

a little motor there--

that can turn this by plugging it in,

turning power on to get it to do that,

then you're controlling the motion,

that's why it's called motion control.

And the motion is controlled by a computer,

just how far to move that.

So the Tauntaun,

when it was running across,

we had a rod attached to it,

and the rod was attached to a motor,

and as each frame is actually being shot,

between the time Phil animates,

the motor slides the whole puppet along

like about an inch.

And so, the whole thing is blurred,

and even if the blurs aren't quite right,

at least they add something to it.

Most of Phil's designs were creatures,

and soft, organic things.

He never wanted to design any kind of hardware stuff.

Joe Johnston's design of the walker

was very complicated.

Jon Berg has a great engineering mind,

and so, they worked together to figure out

all sorts of complicated things,

since what you were actually going to be seeing on film

was going to be the actual physical armature--

it's not covered over by rubber or anything.

During the design process of the snow walker,

I found this brochure that had been published by U.S. Steel.

And it was these paintings by Syd Mead,

and there was one panel--

it was a walking truck, basically--

and it was walking through the snow.

I saw this thing, and I'm gonna adapt it

to an armored transport.

I think the success of the snow walker

is that it walks like an animal

and yet it moves like a machine.

It's one of the best examples

of what stop-motion can do.

Dennis came up with this idea

of doing it super old-school

and freeing up the camera,

and shooting the white, big background paintings,

that Mike Pangrazio was doing.

When it was called for,

three walkers to be in the same shot,

Jon Berg and Doug Beswick and myself were the animators.

They animated it like it was one mind

animating the thing.

They're all moving the same,

which is really amazing.

They all look like-- The machine itself

is dictating how it moves, not the animator.

For some of the bigger strafing shots,

we build trap doors in like really large sets,

on the main stage,

and for every frame, we would pop up

and animate the walkers

and then go down and the frame would be shot.

And then Phil contacted me

about coming up for a year to work,

specifically, on a film called Dragonslayer.

I didn't know a lot about it, but he said,

"We're gonna do a really cool dragon."

The design of the dragon,

of Vermithrax Pejorative in Dragonslayer

was really an interesting process.

There had been an artist on board

who had done a design sketch,

and Phil kinda said, "This is our starting point."

And he really, really was interested,

and intent on designing the ultimate dragon.

Most of the inspiration

was taken from the script.

It needed to be very old and very crotchety

and very mean-- it had lived too long...

And it was a classic mythological character

that was this malevolent force of nature.

That's an abstraction,

but you have to start somewhere.

And so I would look at a lot of reference material

of big lizards, like Komodo dragons and things like that,

and looked at their foot fall-- I did a lot of research.

He knew the emotional response

that he wanted to portray in the dragon.

I built the armatures on Dragonslayer.

We were able to hook up

motion control equipment.

They came up with the term go-motion.

I always thought it was kinda funny.

Like, "Stop. Okay this..."

Now, stop-motion and now you have go-motion.

The go-motion thing was very counter-intuitive.

Instead of kind of intuitively sculpting in time,

you had to have a very clear previsualization

of what the thing needed to be,

and kind of abstractly break that down into axes

until it all came together.

It broke down to three basic puppets.

Phil did this incredibly cool go-motion

walking dragon, which was used a lot in all the cavern scenes.

Ken Ralston did a much smaller flying dragon

which was done mostly in white shots.

And I wind up doing a large hand puppet

for some of the closeup shots.

And then to see it all come together on the screen was great

and as almost everybody seeing the film says

when that dragon comes walking down that cavern

that first go-motion shot, it's...

you're sold.

That's Vermithrax, that's the real dragon.

I thought the movement of the dragon

in Dragonslayer was just amazing,

I mean, you could see right away that this is like...

you know, much better than work that been done before.

So we were just winding up Dragonslayer

and Phil came in one day and said,

"George Lucas has a new picture called Revenge of the Jedi."

I was like, "Work on a Star Wars movie?"

This is like-- That was the ultimate

you could possibly do on the planet

as an effects person.

I asked him, "So what are we designing?"

And he just said, "Just design whatever you want,

"design a whole bunch of aliens,

and George will sort it out."

For Return of the Jedi, George asked me

to head up the creature shop.

There wasn't even a script yet.

He said there was a scene

that's gonna be kinda like the Cantina,

only bigger. I put all my effort

into doing three-dimensional stuff,

which I found, particularly for George, worked really well.

He really responded to three-dimensional stuff

viscerally, you know, right there.

Because when you do a drawing and it's cool,

and it's whatever, you still have

to interpret that,

and it changes again from the interpretation.

And this is like, oh, this thing has that feeling,

I can see it, it has light, you know, I can see an angle,

I can really imagine what that thing could be.

For Jabba the Hutt, the direction that we got was,

"It should be like a big slug."

And so, we all did different versions

of what that could be.

The first one I did was like a four-armed creature

that George thought it looked too much

like Ming the Merciless.

The second one I did,

he thought was too gross.

So I asked, "If you could cast an actor

to play the part, who would that be?"

And he thought for a second and said, "Sidney Greenstreet."

And that was

the direction that I needed

to all of a sudden, I... I...

I didn't see what it should be,

but I understood the character.

And so I sculpted up this thing

that ended up becoming the design

that Stuart Freeborn and his team executed

as a huge puppet with like five operators.

What I realized with Phil is like,

he's really good at blocking out

very primitive shapes,

and then he adds the detail,

whereas a lot of other designers today,

they kind of start hitting it with the detail

long before they found the form.

One of the reasons why I think a lot of the designs,

especially with Star Wars,

stayed relevant for so long

is that, at their core,

they're very powerful, instinctive forms and shapes--

like the Rancor monster--

you know instinctively what it is.

The Rancor was a puppet that

I put my hand up into

and operated the mouth,

and Tom St. Amand had rods

that Dennis had to light out

to make the mechanical hands work.

If you shot it at normal speed

and just moved it,

right away, you'd say there's something wrong,

I recognize that.

And after a little while,

"Oh, I know what they're doing,

it's a little puppet," you know.

So, to get away from that

and to make it look bigger and heavier,

we did a lot of tricks.

The Rancor pit sequence

was shot as a high-speed puppet.

We had to shoot really fast, and so we were like...

We had to move that quickly and be coordinated,

so we did tons and tons and tons of takes.

While we were shooting the Rancor,

one of the biggest lights

was up there by the ceiling,

but the knob hadn't been tightened down,

so this big hundred-pound light came down

and squished this part of my hand, like right there.

It was very painful, but then we had to shoot,

so I put my hand up the thing,

we were performing.

My hand just swole up inside this thing.

My hand swole up, I couldn't-- I couldn't pull it out.

So I had to eat my lunch with my hand up Rancor's ass.

There was a character that I designed,

it was a small thing

and it fit down to your waist,

and it was gonna be playing a piano,

kind of a keyboard instrument.

We were rehearsing

and George had chosen

a temp track to rehearse to,

which was "Superfreak."

There wasn't anybody else around,

so I got into this outfit

and was just rehearsing

to make sure that it was

all gonna work properly.

And I have no sense of rhythm

and I can't dance.

But I got in this thing, I was like,

"Okay, we'll turn on music and then we'll film it,"

and my wife walked in.

And I saw this kind of blue character

dancing to "Superfreak."

And he was dancing away,

and seemed to have the beat and everything,

and I'm like, "That's cool!"

She goes, "Who's that?

And who's in the suit? Where's Phil?"

And you know, "Phil's in the suit."

"No, that's not Phil.

Phil can't dance."

And then he took the thing off

and it was Phil! I'm like...

The point is, is that

once one puts on a mask

or change your physicality,

you can become something else that you're not.

You can inhabit what that character is.

You know, if you look at these Star Wars films,

they're sort of like school.

You know, you got your three classes,

each one's lasting three years,

of working on this thing,

and when you're done,

then you kind of go on to something else

and that's what Phil wanted to do.

And he got an Oscar for Jedi too, so that was like,

"Yes, go on, young man," to the world, you know.

After having worked on three Star Wars movies,

pretty consecutively, that were interrupted

by Raiders and Dragonslayer,

it was time to move on,

and there wasn't anything to move on to, really.

He just kind of like got,

was absolutely, completely depleted,

and I think at that point, he was kind of done

with working at ILM.

And so it was an opportunity for me

to do what I kinda needed to do,

was to get what drove me

into all of this as a kid out of my system

by making my own short dinosaur movie.

That's when he decided to do Prehistoric Beast

in the garage.

I was so obsessed

with all of that stuff in King Kong when I was a kid,

I had to do something to make it go away. Heh.

And so that's what Prehistoric Beast was,

it was actually putting a nail in that coffin

and saying--

The title is a line from King Kong.

So I made this 16mm short called Prehistoric Beast

that I thought I could sell to educational channels,

because it would be-- That's the kind of thing

I'd have liked to see when I was a kid.

When Phil told me he was doing Prehistoric Beast,

I thought, "Oh, that's interesting, but why?"

It seemed like a step backwards or something,

I was still working at ILM

where we're just like pushing the envelope,

technically, all the time.

That's not where Phil's interests were.

He was going for an aesthetic.

When it was over, I just felt

that it was absolutely the right choice to do that

because nobody has any idea what you have in your mind.

It was paleontologically accurate,

and it was a narrative,

but any of the exhibitors I took it to said,

"It's too scary for kids.

"You know, if you got one kid that started crying,

then, that's over."

He was messing around with zooms

and moving cameras, and rack focuses,

just things you didn't see being done

in stop-motion films at that time.

He was bringing them up a level

and incorporating them

into a more naturalistic filmmaking style.

And from there,

a production company in New York

called Philips Mark

wanted to do a documentary

on dinosaurs, which we ultimately did.

So that's when I started my studio.

We rented a space and we hired some people

and it was old-fashioned stop-motion:

so, sculpting, casting...

We got to put all that stuff together and cut it together,

and Jules edited it

and did all the sound effects work.

That was fun doing that.

We actually bought a warehouse to work in,

basically from the money

that Phil was allowed to participate

from the profits of Jedi, which was amazing.

Thank you, George Lucas, for letting us have

a little tiny, tiny, tiny percentage

of a percentage of a percentage,

but it was actually very significant and meaningful,

and allowed us to, to actually start our business.

I was never a business man.

I mean, if business

was left up to me, I would have been

out of business 30 years ago.

He has to always be making something

or drawing something,

and he didn't really want

to be involved with running the company

on the level that I had to run it.

I gradually learned and I took some courses

and I joined a group that trained CEOs

and I learned how to run a business

with creative people,

because it's not always that easy.

Probably the smartest thing Phil Tippett ever did

was to marry Jules.

Jules was always in charge

of the production aspect of the effects--

from Piranha on, she just ran the show.

You know, Phil would have been out of business

a hundred times if it wasn't for Jules.

I mean, she has managed to keep all these shops

and all these people running for decades.

I got a call from my friend Jon Davison,

who produced Piranha.

That he had acquired a screenplay

by Ed Neumeier and Michael Miner

called Robocop.

There was a big monster robot in it, ED-209.

When I first read the screenplay for Robocop,

one of the things I was first attracted to was

ED-209 was the perfect opportunity

to work with Phil again.

Jon hired Paul Verhoeven

after having been rejected by quite a few directors.

And Paul had never done any visual effects before.

So, I think he was kind of nervous about that.

Phil, of course, had to explain to me,

basically, what we were going to do.

I had never done anything like that.

And so, he had to teach me

what he would do with stop-motion

and how that would be integrated in the movie.

He couldn't have had a better mentor than Phil Tippett,

who was there all the time,

and walked him through

how to best spend our very limited resources.

The budget wasn't that great,

so there was not a lot of money,

so everything had to be very carefully managed.

I'm not that great at mechanical design,

so I hired Craig Hayes to come up

with the designs for ED-209.

I met Phil back in the '80s.

I guess it was '85, '84, somewhere around there.

Phil was working on the big monster in Howard the Duck.

And so, I got to go over there and see the stage

where he was working, and see

the go-motion set-up and stuff.

And it was pretty cool.

He was just a kid,

and he brought in some model parts he made.

And I was like, "Oh, that's really brilliant!"

These are some of the pieces of the foam maquettes

that were used to talk through the design with Paul Verhoeven.

And you can see here-- it's pretty kind of simple.

And, let's see...

So, you can see here, some piece of the arm,

and it really wasn't much more developed than this

to be able to just kind of talk through

what this design would be.

A lot of the ideas were from military equipment-- tanks, etc.

But a lot of that stuff is very dry.

So, another thing that I really draw inspiration from,

as most people do, is nature.

So, I really wanted to kind of figure out

what was the organic component to this thing.

ED-209 is a great amalgam

of like Japanese aesthetics

mixed with corporate thinking,

with Detroit sensibility.

Especially in 1987,

it was everything that Detroit was--

big, clunky, overdesigned,

made for one thing,

but completely inappropriate for its task.

It's not perfectly symmetrical.

For instance, these big pods

that are in the front, here,

are exactly the same, side to side.

But all the weaponry that's attached to them

is slightly different.

Same thing with the lower legs.

When they originally designed this guy,

his mouth was actually turned the other direction.

So, it actually looked like he had a smile.

Everybody was trying to figure out what was wrong with him.

And Phil kind of came in and said,

"Yeah, because he looks like he's smiling.

Why don't you just take that thing and turn it upside down?"

And like almost immediately, it became this grimace,

this angry looking face.

Because the budget was so tight on this thing,

I was going to do everything

very Ray Harryhausen Dynamation style,

which really kind of limits how you can go about

designing the shots.

You move it like this.

The next frame, next frame, next frame,

next frame, next frame, next frame...

And in the movie, you will see this.

I grew up with Harryhausen,

of course, and Phil too, in fact.

If you look at The Argonauts,

it's not so different

from ED-209, isn't it?

I mean, it's also stop-motion.

And there is a beauty to that.

I think what you can do with it,

with the stop-motion is that

it adds a dimension to the movie of beauty.

There was a problem

that in the boardroom scene,

there were really long dialogue scenes.

The way those shots needed to be set-up,

the way that Paul would have to been done

on a blue screen stage,

but there wasn't any money for that.

So, I proposed that we build

a full-scale prop of 209,

this thing that's behind me.

This part right here, the carapace,

and over and these parts here, are built

in many ways like a ship,

like you would build a ship.

So, I would build cross sections

out of wood, and then,

in between those cross sections,

lathed very thin strips of wood

to form the basis of the curve.

The killer whale was a huge influence in the sort of,

you know, the face or the head of this kind of thing.

And then, we had to do a missile launcher.

We had to have something that really told people,

"Uh-oh, something's gonna happen now."

These pieces here, these braided,

stainless, kind of very fancy looking things

come from the plumbing department in the store.

The guns themselves, you can see on the front here,

these sort of elaborate looking machine pieces

are actually like sprinkler, automatic sprinkler valves.

This piece right here was fun-- this is also kind of cool

because this whole piece pops off and gives us access

to the interior of the robot.

So, when we're putting it together, the arms and the base and stuff,

we're able to access it through there.

It couldn't move, so you had to put it there,

and then the moment that it started to move,

you had to go to stop-motion, with the miniature.

There is one scene

where he has to go down a staircase.

He doesn't get it because he's not programmed for that.

And so, he falls down.

And then he's on his back, like an insect.

And then he gets irritated,

and he does like this, agh-agh, like this!

That's all Phil.

I was trying to push Phil

into making the... ED's

fall down the stairs, comedic.

And I also wanted a joke at his death.

I was in a middle of shooting the shot,

I got a call from Jon, who said,

"Can you do something funny?"

"We need a laugh right here."

He completely surprised me with that shot.

I thought it was so well done, and so funny!

I did the voice of ED, by the way.

"Put down your weapon.

You have 14 seconds to comply."

Which is sort of a bad Roger Corman imitation!

"Put down your weapon!"

When they made the first Robocop,

they built ED-209,

and of course, everybody loves ED-209.

And they were actually incredibly surprised

that within a very short period of time,

there were model kits out of this guy.

And Craig Hayes, apparently, kind of took offense to that.

And so, for Robocop 2,

he decided that he would make

something so complicated

that nobody could ever duplicate it again.

I mean, certainly, that's not the only reason

you do something.

You know, design has got to be for,

to serve its purpose,

but, yeah, there was a certain amount

of, you know, I would say, glee taken in the fact

that, whoever's gonna try and make this one's

got their work cut out for 'em.

They wouldn't possibly be able to replicate it.

And they did.

Somehow, some way,

a model kit came out, not long afterwards.

They did it solely from photos

and they get pretty close.

They did several toys, yeah.

And some of them were pretty good.

So, mission not accomplished,

but they did come up with a pretty cool robot,

and it has a lot of interesting features on it.

We had so many moving parts on this puppet.

I think Phil even got a little mad.

At one point he said, "What are we building

such a complicated puppet for?"

I think the original design was more like an ape.

He was kind of like a gorilla, sort of.

And even, I think, in some cases,

walked on his knuckles too.

This is the design drawing

that Craig came up with, the final design drawing.

There were quite a few different ones.

And this was the wooden model that Craig put together,

just to make sure that all of the designed parts

could move and perform.

I took Craig's prototype

and spent about two or three months engineering it

to work as an animation puppet,

which has to be practical.

All these things have to work.

He has to be able to walk.

It had to do a lot

of different things.

And so, there was like a grasping arm,

there is a machine gun.

And it's got like a big ram on it.

Boom! So, it can punch people.

It's got retractable toes, so it can dig in and hold.

And then its head, for the third act,

opens up, and there's a projection

of Cain's face on the inside.

At the end of the day, we had

eight Cain stop-motion puppets,

in addition to like a one-third scale

larger one for close-ups.

Robocop 2 was going to be

one of the biggest stop-motion projects

that anybody had done, so they were looking

to get people with experience from all over.

So, I was lucky enough to be contacted and came up here.

And I was one of the cameramen,

doing primarily lightning and camera set-up

on the miniature effects on the show.

We had so many people working on it

and trying to get the shots out

that we had multiple set-ups going.

At some point in time,

we had 18 stop-motion set-ups.

One would be being prepped

and the other one being shot,

and we'd go back and forth like that.

I animated one shot right at the very beginning,

but there just wasn't enough time,

because there was just too many things going on.

For a lot of the work,

the interactive work with Robocop

or the static stuff, with people talking and such,

we built a full-scale version

of the model from right here up.

We didn't need to build the legs, you know,

so we basically took it from here and built it up.

The picture was directed by Irv Kershner.

But we had to start principal photography

with the ending of the picture,

the big effects sequence battle,

because there was a release date coming right up.

But Kersh just couldn't figure out,

you know, how to shoot it, or what to shoot.

Irvin Kershner had known Phil Tippett

from Empire Strikes Back,

because he, of course, did the great Walkers.

And I think Kersh leaned on Phil very heavily.

So we had Giacomo Ghiazza

who storyboarded the whole sequence with Phil,

and really, Phil went out and just directed it.

So, the first unit was shooting all day,

and Phil had to be there

because it was filled with visual effects.

And at night, Phil was directing

the second unit on many days.

So, he was like practically working around the clock.

We have 36 shots to do

in the next 12 working days.

Everybody was so focused on the same thing.

I mean, everybody in the studio was working on the same movie.

Everybody was together.

You know, there was a lot of passion,

you know, just absolute passion.

Robocop 2, really, was kind of the peak

of stop-motion animation for a feature film.

So, through all this process,

we were really looking forward to the future

and to see where is it gonna go from here.

What's next?

Well, none of us really had any idea

what that would end up being.

Everything went to computer generated images

practically overnight.

Computers were finally just sort of taking over.

There was absolutely no choice

when the digital revolution hit

and kind of dissolved the photochemical process.

I was more intimidated

by the digital technology

than I was fascinated by it.

You know, I was compelled to use it,

because there was no other choice.

I got a call from Kathy Kennedy

right after I'd finished Robocop 2.

She said, "We have this Michael Crichton property

called Jurassic Park.

What Steven Spielberg wants to do

is to use full-scale animatronics."

And I went like, "I don't think so, Kathy.

I don't think it's ready."

She said, "Why not?"

And I said, "It's just not practical."

Dennis Muren, Stan Winston,

Michael Lantieri and me, we went down to talk to them.

And Kathy took me into an office and said,

"Here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna cut you four guys

into participation of the film."

And then we got into the storyboards.

Who is doing what? What's practical? What's full-size?

How are we gonna put it together?

So, everybody's area

of expertise were kind of framed.

And we would just go through that

over and over and over again.

And at that time,

most of the work was gonna be done

as go-motion, stop-motion,

high-speed miniatures...

the visual effects side.

I worked on the animatics

for Jurassic Park with Phil,

Randy Dutra and Kim Blanchette,

who is a very fine puppet animator.

These were done as a guide for the live action filming.

I remember seeing a number of the tests

they were doing, and the dinosaurs

were looking just fantastic.

Seeing this raptor attack

was just great, it was incredible.

And I was really excited about seeing that.

So, what was ILM gonna do on Jurassic Park?

We didn't know.

Animation was gonna be done

by Phil as traditional.

Maybe we could add blurs to Phil's work.

At that point, there wasn't any talk

about computer graphics.

At the same time,

Steve Williams and Mark Dippé

had confidence that they could build

computer graphic dinosaurs.

So, Steve made a tyrannosaurus skeleton,

and they had it like running and showed it to Steven.

And he went like, "Great!"

And they funded ILM to go to the next phase,

where they made a whole-skinned creature

based off of Stan Winston's maquettes

and took it down to Steven.

And Steven, you know, said,

"This is how we're gonna make the movie."

So, we all thought that we would be out of a job.

We thought, "Well, now what are we gonna do?"

Everybody over there

was so shocked, you know,

because, of course,

everybody loved stop-motion.

I thought it was pretty much over for me

at that point in time.

You know, I remember Steven asked me how I felt,

and I said, "You know, I feel like George Méliés."

And that's when he very kindly said,

"Oh, he made great movies!"

And I said, "I feel extinct."

And he goes like, "I'm puttin' that in the movie."

It was incredibly emotional for Phil.

He just was, again, was just like depleted.

Like, "That's it, life's over, we're done."

And I'm like, "We're bloody well not done!

"I got these two little kids,

"we've got a warehouse,

"we've got employees.

We've gotta keep it going."

I do remember, actually, driving over

to ILM with Craig Hayes

and having a meeting with Dennis Muren

and a couple of other people.

And, you know, Dennis...

it had been on his balcony

that I proposed to Phil in the first place.

Phil also kind of felt betrayed by Dennis.

Like, "You're doing this stuff in CG!"

It was a bit complicated.

Ultimately, of course,

Dennis really valued Phil as an artist.

He maybe felt betrayed, but he wasn't

and it was the future.

And you know, the thing is, it was gonna happen anyway.

But it was really hard on him,

hard on me, at the time...

But you just had to go through it,

because it was an opportunity.

And so, Craig and Jules and Dennis

cooked up this idea for the "Dinosaur Input Device"

or "Direct Input Device"

that would allow stop-motion animators

of my studio, Randy Dutra and Tom St. Amand,

to go in and physically manipulate these things.

Essentially, it's a motion capture device

with little encoders at all the various places,

where there are rotations.

And that feeds through an umbilicus

into the computer,

and there's a wireframe

of the dinosaur in the computer.

So, when you move the head,

the head moves in the computer.

We could still be puppet animators.

We could still do what our training taught us to do,

which is to take the model

and move it a frame at the time,

same as we did in the old days.

We didn't have to worry about cameras,

it was like a virtual camera.

In that sense, it was kind of liberating.

So, the stop-motion animators

could still be a part of this process.

They bring all of their talent to the show

and not be sort of ostracized

because they weren't computer animators.

Those guys knew how animals move

and how they should perform.

We had CG artists

that were good at computer graphics,

but they didn't know about animals, really.

And Phil, you know, knew all about animals.

And Tom St. Amand, and Randy Dutra--

these guys knew all about the behavior.

It would not have been the same movie at all

if ILM on its own had done the film.

I thought it was a fantastic idea

to try to keep Phil involved

because it's not just a technical process.

No matter if it's a practical dinosaur,

or a digital dinosaur, or a stop-motion dinosaur,

you need an aesthetic brain like Phil Tippett's

in the animation and the movement,

because that's where the character is.

And that's what Phil has established over the years

is his grasp on frame by frame

expression of character.

And of course, Jurassic won Oscars.

It was Phil's second award.

So, you know, that was... had a happy ending, again.

That kind of pulled us

into the next era of Tippett Studio.

Without that, we would've been stuck doing clay and...

I don't know, he probably wouldn't have done anything,

but that actually paved the way for the next step.

Ultimately, it was Starship Troopers.

That was the step

into a completely digital studio.

The reason I made Starship Troopers

is I wanted to work with Phil Tippett.

I wanted to do a giant bug movie with Phil Tippett.

I thought, "I wonder if the book 'Starship Troopers'

is optioned or available."

I mean, nobody's done that.

I mean, that's kind of the classic,

giant bug in outer space movie.

So, we found out that the rights were available.

Very early on, Paul Verhoeven

went off to do Showgirls.

We had met and worked with Craig Hayes,

and had pretty much designed all of the bugs

two years before going in.

So, we knew what the bugs were gonna be.

And one of the conceptual things

going into it was, well, it's a war movie,

and so each of these bug characters

are gonna represent a different aspect

of the movie genre, war stuff, you know,

things like the German Stuttgart flying bugs;

there's the warrior bugs are the infantry;

there's a tanker bug was like a flame-throwing tank.

It was just a great experience

because we were able to be there

from the very beginning, right.

It's always the best when you're

part of the filmmaking process from the start.

One of the things that was great about Paul Verhoeven

is that he is very visually orientated

and really understands this stuff.

So, it was a smooth process of iterations.

I did storyboards, Phil did storyboards,

we exchanged storyboards.

We were very deep into it.

I gave them to a really... storyboard artist

to make them really powerful and strong, you know,

make them more three-dimensional, in fact.

The designs were great,

and so what we did was, we executed

Phil's vision of what these bugs should look like

and how they should move.

And our job was to take them from basically illustrations

and execute 'em and bring 'em into reality.

And that meant that Phil

was really our art director on the show.

Go ahead and touch it.

- You want to retract it? - Yeah.

Get ready to retract, guys!

And... retract!

Yeah, Okay. All right, great.

Phil was all the insects in it.

And without Phil,

there would have not been a movie, you know.

Starship Troopers was kind of not manageable.

I must have hired like a hundred people,

whoever we could find who had

some sort of aptitude and enthusiasm.

Phil was gone, shooting in the Badlands

for, gosh, it seemed like four months,

just gone the entire time.

Phil was always there, of course-- he was all animals

that had to be integrated later in it.

Vic Armstrong, the second unit director,

did the ones that I would not have time to do.

And then we split, and he went one way

and I went the other way.

And then we started to shoot.

And Phil was jumping from one set

to the other set, you know.

I had the feeling there were

three directors in Starship Troopers.

There was me, there was Vic Armstrong,

and there was Phil Tippett.

These three directors have made that movie.

Not one!

Okay, and action!

We were shooting out in the desert

and they were really long days, and I think six-day weeks,

and it was very physically grueling

and we... all exhausted.

And then when Phil came back,

I remember he came back,

maybe he broke the door,

and I just thought, "Oh, my God!

What's happened?"

He just looked like a wild man,

like he'd been out in the desert for a long time.

And then there we were back in Berkeley,

trying to figure out how on earth

are we gonna do these shots!

I was like, we had no idea.

I arrived at Tippett Studio

when we started working on Starship Troopers.

Computers were newish

to the industry at that point,

and the Digital Input Device

was a fantastic way for me

and some of the other guys

to get into the digital world,

because we had never-- at least myself--

I had never even turned on a computer

at that point to use for anything.

We always prefer to take someone

from their practical film experience

and we could teach them how to operate a computer.

The hardest thing to do was to take someone

who could operate a computer and teach them how to be an artist.

Craig Hayes pretty much designed and supervised,

you know, putting all the stuff together.

At the end of the show, I offered to give

my visual effects supervisor credit to Craig.

He really was that visual effects supervisor.

But the studio wouldn't have it.

So, they wanted my name to be up there.

I had signed a contract,

so it was like, ehh...

You know, the results were just fantastic.

I think, to this day,

the movie holds up really, really well,

in terms of the blend of the CGI

and the practical effects.

I have the feeling that everybody

was so taken by the movie

and had so much the feeling that they were expressing

and doing something that they had never done, you know.

We were all working on something unique.

And then it was compounded with the Academy Awards

because it was nominated, of course,

because, I mean, the work was phenomenal.

But it was the same year as Titanic.

So it was like, there's no way!

The radioactive fallout

from an Oscar has meaning

in that it puts you on other people's radar.

And so, you get more publicity,

you get more notice, meetings, you get more work.

So, on that level, that's good.

But in terms of substantiating myself,

that is "no meaningful."

I don't think of myself as an artist.

I think of myself as a filmmaker, or a maker of things.

I think these things actually kind of make themselves.

You know, I just kind of stand back.

I found the older I get, the more I stand back

and really try

not to influence things by intention,

and to just kind of let things happen.

Effectively, I kind of got kicked upstairs.

For my day job,

I am a visual effects supervisor

or director at Tippett Studio.

I will be involved with the production,

go out on location and shoot everything,

make sure it's all is shot properly,

and then bring it back, and the guys will work on it.

So, I will show up to dailies

and see how things are going.

I've got a team of people

that I've worked with for many, many years,

that I have a great deal of confidence in.

We all share the same language,

we know what we're talking about.

Phil didn't really care about, you know, the glory.

I think Phil does it

for the love of what he's doing.

I wish that Phil had gone on to direct other pictures.

One of my favorite Phil Tippett films is Mad God.

I'd shot my Mad God project

maybe 30 years earlier and abandoned the project.

And some of the guys at the studio

were watching the archives and they got very interested

in rebooting the project, and offered to volunteer.

They did a couple of shots and came back,

and we've kind of got on a roll,

and then we accumulated more volunteers over time

and then it just kind of grew itself.

Mad God is a very old school,

hands-on approach to making stuff.

It's kind of my recapitulation

of all of the things that influenced me.

Mad God is a very unique

kind of experiment, I think.

It's a sort of a non-narrative narrative.

Heh. I mean, it is narrative,

but it has no structure.

I mean, it's not obvious where it's going.

It's just like nothing else I've seen.

Mad God was a reflection

of the absurdity of the world

that I live in

and the craziness of it.

I'm in this world, there's nothing

I can do about it, you know.

But I got to find some kind of expression

to make sense out of stuff

that doesn't make sense to me.

It's this weird organic sort of process,

but it's an obsessive thing.

I'll keep a journal.

In the journal, there'll be ideas

for Mad God as they come up.

But then, every night before I go to sleep,

I write a page or two

of the first thing that comes into my mind.

That's interesting to look at it the next day,

and see how the consciousness is eroding

and what the thought process is.

And I think that also helps feed

the dream world as well...

It seems like... I do that, I'll have more dreams.

This is a cottage in the back of my house

that I use to kind of do experiments

and to work on other projects that are advancing,

whatever it is I'm going to do next.

So, this is like a library of books

that I've collected over the years

that I've used as reference,

and a bunch of artifacts

that I just randomly place on shelves.

It's not so much inspiration,

it's more like having an ambience,

of like, I think things talk to you,

even when you're not listening.

That's kind of the world that I live in.

Phil...he is Mad God.

That's who he is.

What's great about Phil and Tippett Studios

is that Phil is giving

whoever is interested in stop-motion

a chance to experience it and to perform it.

I think it's very important

we have a shop

that actually still functions

and that we are still shooting stop-motion,

and that we're still working on puppets,

and using milling machines and lathes.

J.J. Abrams wanted to have a stop-motion sequence

in Star Wars Episode VII.

Our team had to go and find the actual puppets again,

which was not an easy task,

and then scan them,

recreate them in the physical world,

mold them, and then make some new puppets

for us to work with.

Phil and Dennis Muren and Jon Berg

all stopped by to remember

how everything was put together

and how it was executed.

Hey, how you doin'?

Hey.

So, here's the cuts.

- Wow! - In and out.

-There's just one cut you're doing? -Two.

It's very odd and very "déjà vu"

to see something like this after so many years.

Stand up...

Now you're playing chess.

It's so nice to be able to touch.

Not only the puppets, but it's the whole set-up.

Just move the camera, move the lights,

walk around, look at it, change this, change this...

I think there's a charm to the old way of doing it,

because you can relate to it, you feel it,

you can look at it and there's like an amazement

of something is moving by itself.

And that's still not been able

to be duplicated in CGI.

The animators were Chuck Duke

and Tom Gibbons.

Gibby animated the main characters

and Chuck did all the background characters.

Chuck Duke, Jon Berg.

- Jon, hi! - How you doing?

So, these guys are gonna

do the deed.

- Oh! - They're gonna animate it.

That was an amazing circle

to have happened in my life

because that sequence

in the first Star Wars

was a huge thing for me as a kid.

Those were puppets that I've always wanted to see.

I never thought that would happen.

I look at animators as actors.

And so, I respect their skill and their judgment.

You know, it's like, "Well, you're gonna do

"the same thing that we did 40 years ago.

So, heh, good luck, I'll see you in the morning!"

There's just not a whole lot of time.

Maybe he gets up right away,

and this guy is coming in for him,

and he raises up his hammer and clocks him

and this guy goes down.

He's definitely the voice in the back of your mind

when you're animating.

Go!

We were asked again

for the Han Solo Star Wars

to bring back the chess set.

We tried to get Chuck back, but he was unavailable,

so one of the guys that was a volunteer on Mad God,

that we've subsequently hired, David Lauer,

has become a very, very good stop-motion animator.

Gibby animated the main characters

and David animated all the background guys.

We were actually redoing the New Hope animations,

but just with a more oiled machine.

And so, we were trying to get in

as many overlaps in animation,

little tendrils and claws, as we could.

It's technically far superior

to what Jon Berg and I did.

But they took a lot more time,

a put lot more effort into it.

We just did this thing like really quickly.

The stage has

all of these incredible armatures

and artifacts from all these past projects.

And some of those were Cain,

some of those were the Digital Input Devices

from Jurassic Park and Starship Troopers,

and I've just had this hankering,

this desire to animate those creatures.

I just kind of tapped him on the shoulder

and asked if it would be okay

if I could animate one of those things.

He said, "Oh, sure, anytime, no problem."

A lot of this stuff

that was done in the past

for theatrical feature films

has become like iconic

and historical and all that stuff, so it'll--

It's in the books.

You know, what's done is done

and it's got a life of its own,

and it's like your kids, you know...

It's like, "There they go."

I don't look back.

I never think about the past.

So, um, that's all done

and that was like a different person that did that stuff,

so I just look forward.

I have a number of projects after Mad God

that I want to do, that are bubbling away.

So, it's always one thing after the next.

Phil Tippett can do anything, you know?

When you want to really achieve an artistic,

subtle, nuanced idea

about movement of an animal, he's the master,

there's nobody better than him.

I've never seen better, you know?

You know, I've only heard Paul Verhoeven

call one person a genius

and that was Phil Tippett.

And I was somewhat taken back,

because, you know, I just think Phil Tippett, I mean,

he's an incredibly talented guy.

But a genius? Wow.

And you know something, Paul was right.

Phil Tippett is a genius.

He is an eccentric, unique visionary.

He's not a corporate kind of personality

who weaves smoothly and effortlessly

through the political structures of things,

he is the guy who says,

"This is how it ought to be,

and I'm not afraid to express it."

He's a brilliant guy

and is still working,

and still adapting.

He realized, along with a lot of others,

that stop-motion was gonna have its limits,

and when go-motion came in,

and, you know, the use of CGI on Jurassic Park,

all that kind of thing, I mean, he rolled with the punches

and he said, okay, this is the new technology,

I'm gonna embrace it and I'm going to try to make stuff

that's as personal to me

and expressive as it was

when it was just one man, one monster.

What's interesting about Phil

is there's no one else like him.

He doesn't design like other people design.

You always know when it's Phil's work.

He's a very recognizable artist,

he has a very recognizable style,

a very recognizable hand.

And he puts his fingerprints on everything he does--

you always know he's the artist.

It was good for the whole industry,

good for me and good for Lucasfilm and everybody,

that Phil's got such an imagination on it

that there's no way to keep it in.

He let his subconscious come up

and really could feel

the work and not analyze it.

It's the difference between a scientist and an artist.

You know, we're just lucky that he's been around.

I'm lucky.

He became well known because of being

on an incredibly successful commercial movie,

but the contradiction is,

really, really what he likes to do

are these very more underground kind of things.

I mean, I think this other persona

that's come out of Mad God,

that's also kind of this underground legacy.

I just don't think in terms of a legacy,

or what life is going be like

after I have no life.

You never know! But I won't be around,

you know, either way.

You're either forgotten

or, you know,

read about in history books.