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DigiGods Special: John Bruno and Sherman Augustus
52 Plays8 years ago
In this DigiGods special, Wade and Tim talk with the director and star of cult classic "Virus," special effects legend John Bruno and Sherman Augustus of AMC's "Into the Badlands."
DigiGods Podcast, 06/17/17 (MP3) — 30.8 MB
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Transcript
Introduction and Connection to Virus
00:00:41
Speaker
Tim and I are here talking with John Bruno, director of Virus, which is now out on Blu-ray. A cult classic now, which is incredible. It feels like it just got released yesterday or a few years ago.
00:00:56
Speaker
Very good friend of ours. Yes. Sherman Augustus is in virus. Yup. Directed by John. John say hello to the folks. Hello everyone. Out of the Digigod world. And Sherman is in virus. John directed virus. And Sherman did me a solid by hooking us up with John. Yes he did. To be able to talk about the release of Blue Right. So anyway, what year anniversary of this is?
Collaboration with James Cameron and Genre Film Work
00:01:19
Speaker
1999, right? If I'm not mistaken. Virus?
00:01:21
Speaker
So that's... I keep thinking it was 1998, but... Because you guys were shooting in 1998. Well, we were shooting... Well, it's 18, 19 years. So that's... It's at least 19. And John, you go deep as far as genre films. I mean, you go back to Poltergeist and Ghostbusters and you come up all the way... You've been with James Cameron as a special effects person for 28 years. And so, you know, you go deep in this genre,
00:01:49
Speaker
You know, Comic-Con people, they know your name. Yeah, it seemed like forever, every film I was working on was films that were released in the summer. So, you know, they're always big, they're always, you know, the films that end with explosions. Films that begin with explosions. And end with explosions. And end with explosions.
Transition from Animation to Visual Effects
00:02:11
Speaker
Walk us back a little bit, because practical effects, you were a practical effects guy.
00:02:18
Speaker
Explain what that is, as opposed to some of the CGI stuff. A lot of effects now with CGI stuff. Explain the difference between what you were doing back then and now, and what goes on a lot now. Well, I mean, my background initially was animation, so one day I got in line to see this film Star Wars. I had ten years in animation.
00:02:41
Speaker
I saw this movie, and I walked out of the theater, turned around and walked, got in line again to see it again, because I wasn't sure what I saw. I didn't know how any of that was done. And I thought, I want to do that. Whatever, I don't care what, I want to do that. And right after that, I got hired to do the movie Heavy Metal with Ivan Reitman as a producer. And I moved to Montreal.
00:03:09
Speaker
did that film, and while I was there, Richard Edlund, who was the visual effects supervisor of Star Wars, Return of the Jedi, and what was the other one? Empire Strikes Back. Empire Strikes Back. Yeah. Was showing Empire Strikes Back at the Canadian Film Board, and I walked in and I said to Richard, hi, my name's John, I'm an animation guy, I wanna do what you do. And he says, here's my card, give me a call. So I ended up in,
00:03:37
Speaker
Los Angeles doing post on heavy metal. And I called him and he says, well, come on down to come over to MGM. We're posting, we're posting Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Photorealism and Practical Effects at ILM
00:03:52
Speaker
Oh wow. So I go down there and I meet, I'm sitting in Steven Spielberg's office. Spielberg walks by, George Lucas walks by and there's a poster that says,
00:04:06
Speaker
from the producers of Jaws and Star Wars. Or makers of Star Wars and Star Wars. Right as the Lost Ark. And I thought, I don't belong here. And I said, but I swear to God, I had a reel under my arm. I got up, I was going to leave, and Richard came in and said, you want to show that reel? And I said, yes. So I went in, showed them the reel, and they hired me to set up the animation department at ILM, which was
00:04:36
Speaker
Poltergeist. Star Trek II, Jedi, and E.T. So I ran that department. And Richard left to come to L.A. and we started Boss Films. That was with Ghostbusters. That's my short story. Well, of course, the technology we were talking about from back then is completely different than the technology of today.
00:05:02
Speaker
So what I learned at ILM from Richard and all the guys there, which is a terrific team, I looked at it as I got to go to school and was being paid to go to school. But the goal from everybody and everybody's mind was photorealism. How do we do photorealism?
00:05:24
Speaker
You couldn't do it for real in camera. The scenes were very short. I mean, the shots in Poltergeist are 11 frames, 18 frames. The longest one is 31 frames. Today they're two minutes. And they did, the imploding house was a big model turned on its back and pulled through cables down through a hole in the ground. And we animated glass and flickers and the like.
00:05:54
Speaker
So I came up through that. And then the first job that we had, and then the closet was a little miniature door. I think it was like two and a half feet in poltergeist with the lights coming. So in order to get light bright enough, in order to get debris thrown in at the right scale, but it was in camera. That was always the point.
00:06:18
Speaker
When Richard went to Open Boss Film in Los Angeles, it was 65 millimeter, meaning that's four or five times larger than regular 35 film. You had better opportunity to do a lesser and almost invisible matte line. We called it the chemical process of blue screen chemicals.
00:06:45
Speaker
So if we thought we couldn't get a good composite, we'd just shoot a model or a miniature. Ghostbusters shows up, and they said, the goal from Ghostbusters, we have 10 months. In 10 months, this movie will release. How do we get it done? That was, OK, then it's models and miniature. We're going to have a guy in a suit. That's going to say, I think of the whole scene when the state popped up. There was no digital. I've got to think of that. Yeah. A guy in a suit.
00:07:14
Speaker
uh... against the blue screen we're going to have the terror dog we're going to have the the goat that the any ghost was just shot against black and and and we call it that and dx or cross dissolved into a background transparent no mat line problem that movie and then with the animation we did uh... the explosion of the building with it was a fifteen foot
00:07:39
Speaker
section of the building. That exploded for real at high speed. So I learned all of that. And I guess if anybody wants to learn anything about this, animation is what animation, rhythm, timing, and understanding, how much you see in eight frames is very important. So that movie, of course, Jim Cameron then cast Sigourney Weaver, an alien, aliens.
00:08:08
Speaker
And I started, we started talking about, because he did practical play. Aliens is really, you know, full-size queen, a puppet queen, four feet tall, three feet tall. I redid that in Alien vs. Predator, but at four feet, four-foot puppet, in camera, and a nine-foot tall puppet, about 16 foot.
00:08:31
Speaker
tall puppet of the queen in
Evolution of Digital Effects with ILM
00:08:35
Speaker
Alien vs. Predator. And then everything we couldn't do with that was animated, digitally. So the queen and Cameron's alien was a four foot tall, the full size puppet. Full size. Okay. And when it had to move, it was a rod puppet. That Frank Oz type thing. Yeah. Guys beneath the floor. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's great.
00:08:57
Speaker
So, there was no, again, there was no digital. But it was better without digital. Really, you know, you don't, you're not sort of... But it's photography. The difference is, even today, I still recommend, I'm going to film things within a budget. The abyss was five, we had
00:09:20
Speaker
The only thing digital in the abyss was the water tentacle. But the submarines were at different scales of full-size practical. A 40-foot submarine shot in water. A 14-foot submarine shot on a smoke stage. The subchase with flatbed and deep core flatbed was about five feet.
00:09:46
Speaker
radio control in a swimming pool that we milked up to make it look hazy. Nothing digital, except for the first release.
00:10:01
Speaker
To me, it's a surprising and satisfactory case of something looking photoreal with the water tentacle. There's only 16 cuts in that. I got an Oscar for that. Yeah, you won a few Oscars. That was the first time that water tentacle thing had been used. That became a thing, that effect. It obviously became a very important effect in Terminator 2, which you also worked on.
00:10:28
Speaker
Talk about that transition there when those digital effects, I remember the morphing effect when that first happened. Michael Jackson had a video. What was it? It'd be a black and white. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Talk about when the digital effects started coming in. Morphing was the big, if you could do that, then you solved it. You had to add one shape into another shape smoothly and have a computer try to figure it out.
00:10:59
Speaker
On the abyss, you know, one day I was sitting with Mike Pangrazio. Pangrazio was the matte painter at ILM. We were going to go to lunch and we were sitting on the couch. I was waiting for someone else. We were going to go across the street.
00:11:15
Speaker
Kerner Optical Company in San Rafael. Still there, but it's ILM. And George stands in the doorway and says, go next door to Sprocket Systems and have Alvi, somebody, have them show you how computers work. But it's that simple. And so Mike and I go over there. What year is this? This is 80?
00:11:47
Speaker
somewhere early 80s. And computers were just more of a, to me, accountant's tool. You could organize things. But trying to draw something, it wasn't quite there, I didn't think. So the first effect that was being worked on in
00:12:11
Speaker
It was Star Trek II, the Wrath of Khan, was the Genesis effect, the Genesis effect, where the planet catches on fire, this moon, and creates an atmosphere. It was a one minute shot. So I went next door, and we sat there, and Mike Pangrazio said, George said, you're supposed to show us how computers work. The guy looked at me and just took a deep breath.
00:12:39
Speaker
And we had a monitor, and he showed. He goes, OK, here's a grid. And it's on black, a white grid squared, like a checkerboard. He goes, each one of these cross intersections is a point in space. So if you put a water surface on this, and you pin it to each of these things, you can then rotate it to match your scene or roll it up in a tube. I never forgot that. That's the water tentacle.
00:13:09
Speaker
Really? That was the foundational moment in your head. In my subconscious. So I believed, because when we actually went out and tried to, you know, I brought the storyboards, I pre-storyboarded the movie and we went to different, there were three big effects houses at the time in Los Angeles. One being ILM, Apogee, and with the other one. And Apogee was John Dykes' company, yeah. And nobody else said, oh, we can do water.
00:13:39
Speaker
And they showed us things that were, anybody that was in computer graphics had sort of, I called it, it was liquid mercury things or chrome people or chrome, not quite good animation. It was kind of really annoying to me actually. Or something looked like wiggling mercury. And they said, well, we can take this and just take the reflection off until it looks like plastic. I don't know.
00:14:09
Speaker
So but ILM, Dennis Murin and John Knoll, I think it was at the time, showed us some moving liquid mercury stuff and said, we can do it. We just need development money. And Jim and I sat in a room and said, well, look, I trust ILM. They're kind of ahead in certain places. I don't know if they can do it. But if anybody's going to do it,
00:14:38
Speaker
It's them, because we had other things to deal with at the time. And the very first test was this thing moving like that. I went, oh, geez, look at that. The next thing that had to be invented, though, for the whole effect to work was morphing, which ILM invented. That was the first time it became somebody's face, and you could manipulate it.
00:15:07
Speaker
I'm speaking too much on this. Not at all. This is fascinating. This is a great trip down memory lane. And the development of this technology. Right. So what did that lead to?
00:15:18
Speaker
The water pseudopod, again, trying to be photo real. Everything with visual effects, they have to look photo real to me, or my compadres, or it doesn't work. It takes you out of the movie. That looked real. Still looks real today. That concept of the next time it was used was Jurassic Park.
00:15:48
Speaker
You had a wire frame dinosaur wrapped in a skin that you can then have to animate. But you could turn it around and you could have source light and go, oh. But you painted the skin texture and you made it look whatever. Nobody's going to tell you that that's incorrect because we don't have one running around. I know it. But that was the next, that got us to Jurassic Park.
00:16:16
Speaker
Oh, Terminator 2, I left out. So the second iteration was, and people are gonna laugh, because there's effects shows now, they have 2,000, 2,500 effect shots. Terminator 2, the character of the T-1000 cop,
00:16:45
Speaker
41 shots. That's it. Really? Yeah. So again, keeping in my trying to do things practical, I looked at this and went to Stan Winston. I said, Ken, we should have a, the guy should have a, somebody should make a chrome or a silver cop jacket, put a chrome face on the guy in a chrome helmet and chrome glasses. And he can be fighting with Arnold. And then when he can't do certain things, those are digital shots.
00:17:13
Speaker
That's fascinating, because I don't think I ever knew that. If you look at the movie... I don't think I ever knew that. There's a guy in a... Again, it's quick cuts. I mean, punching a throw. Which, frankly, in Jurassic Park as well. I mean, the really close-up stuff is animatronic. It's animatronic. It's still quite useful to gather... What is the lighting source, the color, what's it supposed to look like past this, right? For the rest of the film.
00:17:40
Speaker
There were 41 shots and I remember I storyboarded all this stuff out and I was sitting with Jim looking at me and he goes, I said, you remember the first thing we saw from the abyss, the first thing out of the computer in the water pseudopod was a chrome wing, you know, this wiggly chrome thing. So that means we can definitely do a chrome guy because it's the first thing that the computer does before you start dealing with the reflection
00:18:09
Speaker
So the shot of when the guy captures that, he 1000 captures the helicopter and pours himself in, that's a pseudopod. And he sits up and says, get out. That was the second transition to, I said, yeah, but can we do 41 shots?
00:18:32
Speaker
That is a big deal. Which is probably pretty costly at the time, too. There's a million dollars. Really. Wow.
Comparing Practical and Digital Effects
00:18:40
Speaker
You know, in your dropping names, to me, it's like the pantheon of special effects greats, because the modern era of special effects really begins, we could say theoretically, it begins with 2001. Correct. And then, you know, it takes a big giant leap with the close encounters in Star Wars. But I mean, you're dropping names here.
00:18:59
Speaker
Let me, let me, let me, Doug, Doug Trumbull. Uh, what, so you know what, uh, when, when, uh, Richard Benton left ILM, uh, Boss Film Corporation was EEG. Doug Trumbull. Right. So he was partners with Doug Trumbull and Richard Urasich. Uh-huh. I was, I was just going to say the, the Urasich brothers, Ken Ralston, Dennis Mirren.
00:19:22
Speaker
You know all these guys. That's unbelievable to me. I mean, these are like, I used to, you know, I was like, you know, that magazine Cinefax Cinefax. I remember Cinefax. It was that glossy, that small kind of half size glossy came out. You have six covers. It came out every month. I used to go to Westwood, a little comic store in Westwood. You know, I'm in high school. We're geeking out. We're, you know, we shave a good friend of mine.
00:19:48
Speaker
Yeah, we would go over to this comic store called Graffiti, and we would just check that new episode, that new issue of Cineffects. It was like seven or eight bucks, and we're like, oh, that really hurts, but I'm going to get it. You know? That was amazing. And everything in there was, we paid special attention to make it true and not hold back. Yeah. Because by the time you did the movie, whatever secret you had, it's out.
00:20:18
Speaker
So, but, and I go back through sin effects sometimes and go through, I have all of them, right? So I go back and I look at,
00:20:25
Speaker
Oh shit, I forgot. Sorry. That's a simpler way to do it than what I'm thinking of. Why don't we do that? Now, that's what I think Tim wanted to get to as well, because do people overthink these things from an effects standpoint? I mean, obviously, Guardians of the Galaxy, that's mayhem. That's effect mayhem. I don't even know how you begin to conceptualize that.
00:20:50
Speaker
But have we gotten to a place where people are now lazy, where if there's a thing that would be cheaper and more cost effective and better storytelling to do. And look better. Look better. With practical effects. But they just don't want to have to think it through. So it's like, eh, just do it in CGI. There's some of that. I mean, part of it is they don't teach model building and miniature work or how to do it as much in camera as possible. Christopher Nolan, British.
00:21:18
Speaker
wants to do everything in camera. And they have, of course, an example, the flying Batmobile chasing a movie. One of the Dark Knight movies, one of the Dark Knight movies. But it's flying through streets, city streets. Well, that's practical. And it's on a big hydraulic rig.
00:21:41
Speaker
Full-size, full-size, under a sort of, I guess, say a framed up, I'll call it a race car, but a go-kart system, a car system all framed up with hydraulic rigs on it, and it's driving at speed, and it's banking, and it's being controlled. And you're just painting that out. Now on True Lies, True Lies was another situation where, that was the first digital movie I actually did.
00:22:10
Speaker
And it's like, well, how do we get this guy? How do we get the Arnold character to fly around in a Harrier? Jim insisted on Harrier taking off from flying around landing. And the digital guys that were a digital domain, because that company was built to do that movie, to start with that movie. Digital domain. I had 30 people, 30 digital artists.
00:22:33
Speaker
And then Ravalgado came in, and following that, they were overlapping in Apollo 13. And everybody hired there were digital people, and they said, well, we can do this digitally. And I went, show me. Show me somewhere. Because you can buy online a Harrier jet. Not only does that not look real, it's not even the current model of a Harrier jet.
00:23:00
Speaker
So after we storyboarded the movie, we did two Harrier models seven feet long and a full-size Harrier.
00:23:09
Speaker
to shoot on stage at first. And then in the discussion with Jim and other people, it's like, well, how many of the, we're going through the boards and we got to get the budget right. And it's like, well, this guy's hanging on the wing here later in the story. He's on the wing. Well, maybe we hang a wing off of like a parking structure or something and then to find something. And then it turned into, why don't we just put the whole jet up there? Yeah.
00:23:35
Speaker
And then Jim said, why don't you go ask the crane guy how much weight that crane will support? And then I went to Tommy Fisher, who's our special effects guy, floor effects guy. Can you support this carrier with actors on it? We'll find a balance point. Can you hold this?
00:24:01
Speaker
He goes, yeah, I'll just put a two inch cable and we'll clamp it here. But yeah, there's no way that thing will break. And then I went to the stunt guy, Joel. Joel, Joel, Joel. I'll come back. Joel the stunt guy. Joel the stunt guy. I'm sorry. He's going to kill me if he hears this. Kramer, sorry. Joel Kramer. He goes, OK, I'll be in the jet if you want to swing it out over the street. I went, swing it out over the street.
00:24:26
Speaker
I mean, all these ideas are actually, so this is actually progressing. I mean, so you went from your little jet, model jet, a little bit bigger model jet. I was gonna hang a wing over the building and film that. And now we got an actual jet hanging from a cable off a crane with a dude in it. So the jet is 7,000 pounds, the mock-up. I went to the crane operator and he goes, I can support 10. He goes, so you're within a safety zone.
00:24:56
Speaker
Well, and then we puppeted it then we swing it over the street and we had cables on the wingtips and we would move the jet left and right and the crane would swing it. That's how it was flying. And then we put.
00:25:12
Speaker
We digitally composited the engine fans and this, what we call the heat signature, which is this jet exhaust blasting this jet exhaust down over an actual practical in-camera element. And when we landed it on the street, the same thing happened. We landed it, it hit a cop car.
00:25:31
Speaker
So David Fincher was great. Fincher one day, with Arnold in it and Elijah Dushku, the young girl. Oh, that's great. 50 feet. You know, the crane driver just, and we said, don't go above the palm trees. And he goes, he swung it up 50 feet, pulled it up 50 feet. It landed, hit a cop car. Showed this to David Fincher. And David says, OK, I know how you did this. How do I do it? And he goes, it's a, it's a,
00:26:02
Speaker
It's a miniature cop car, and it's a miniature at the start, and there's a blend in there where you have all that stuff blowing, and then that miniature hits a miniature cop car. No, it's all on camera. People were pulling their hair out like, how did you do that? How did you Jamie Lee hang it? Jamie Lee hung off that helicopter. She insisted to Jim, I want to do this. I want to do it for real.
00:26:28
Speaker
I remember that that was a whole thing that was in that little in that little that little black dress Sherman Augustus just walked in Sherman Go ahead and grab your mic. You go ahead and grab your mic there. So you can grab it right out of there Sherman And then get that one to take it to the other mechanic in the past and now I'm hearing the presence on him and and Sherman is is blowing up big right now on into the Badlands as the character moon
00:26:58
Speaker
who is a pretty great character, I gotta say. Chopping and slashing and hacking his way. I'd say a really good character. Now, the first time you hired Sherman, Sherman has worked for you more than just in virus. Sherman worked for you on, was it Voyager? Would Star Trek did? Voyager? Well, he was the catalyst for me getting that job because
00:27:21
Speaker
He recommended me. I did tinker tenor doctor spy, which I was told I'm told is the classic. Yeah, you told correctly And you came by to visit yeah, and I reckon you know like yeah
00:27:36
Speaker
all Klingons are black guys. I understand why they're mad all the time. That appliance is heavy. It was probably the hottest summer of that year. You cannot get out of that stuff. You have to use the bathroom. You have to actually disrobe your whole wardrobe.
00:28:01
Speaker
that wig was heavy, so yeah. In 18-hour days. You got to play a Klingon doodoo. Yeah, and I understand why Klingons are pissed off. Of course, that leads to, I guess, eventually him working for you in Virus, which is the movie. That was after Virus. That was after Virus before, yeah. I don't know who hears all of it, what we're talking about, but the casting process is a hideous process. Yeah.
00:28:31
Speaker
And from my side to the actor's side, I don't know if I should cross the line and say what people say. Actually walks in and after walks out and it's like, I think it's been a long time. I think it's okay. Go ahead and say it. I always complain. So I had written this film with Dennis Feldman and it was a dark horse comic. So everybody insisted that we stick to the
00:28:59
Speaker
to the comic book, because it was a big seller. And in there was a guy with long hair, Richie, white guy, smoked dope. And so in my mind, that's the guy. So Sherman comes in.
00:29:17
Speaker
And he just starts talking, and you made up on the spot, I think. I just started talking mad. He just started talking and said, hello there, Mr. Cable? Yeah. And when you said that, I went, this is the guy. He completely talked to yourself.
00:29:32
Speaker
that you were him, to me. Well actually, Tim helped me develop that guy with the, I wanted the roach clip on my neck, so we talked about that. We did all that, yeah. It was ridiculous, because he and I had been dittling around with this kind of stuff for years and years and years, and years it was actually called All Quite Twang. And then of course, pressing forward, Avatar,
00:29:58
Speaker
By the time you get to Avatar, you know, Harriet Jets on cranes and all that kind of stuff is gone. And, you know, you got these blue people and you got this, so talk about that transition into the world of your work as
Working on Avatar and Modern Filmmaking
00:30:11
Speaker
it exists today. But even though Avatar was all digital, the theory is the same. It's just how you complete it. And when I was on that, you know, I did heavy metal. I did the Tarnas, the girl on the bird. Oh, yeah.
00:30:25
Speaker
And doing all these shots, and the guys at Weta are sending me these clips from Tarna. And I'm like, oh man, come on, don't bring that up. But it's like, no, I mean, that hit a chord, so I thought, well, this is gonna work with the public, I think. I think this whole idea of flying is gonna really work with this girl on this creature.
00:30:51
Speaker
the Banshees. But I went into that. That technology, which was first discussed with Rob Legato, brought that to Jim saying, look, we can have this space on a stage that's the 3D volume.
00:31:14
Speaker
going back to the water tentacle, that's the 3D volume, but we're taking it from here to a stage. So everybody puts on these little suits and you walk on different, you know, you're looking, it looks kind of silly when you're watching it.
00:31:31
Speaker
But what you're seeing, because what the cameras are getting and feeding through computers back to you on a handheld monitor, is the actual image. Because you have the background, low resolution, but the background that you're in, you're looking at it like a computer screen, but you're holding it like an iPad. And wherever you go in the volume, you see what's in the world you're supposed to be in.
00:32:02
Speaker
That was new to me, and I had to learn that at the time. Other guys were far, I consider, far advanced. But then basically Jim said, you know, I'm talking, I'm here doing this, and I have, you know, and they're starting to do shots at Weta, and I just want somebody that I really know. Can you do this?
00:32:27
Speaker
Yeah, again, I'll go to school. You pay me to go to school. It's OK. I didn't think I would have much impact. Well, once I got there, I talked to Joe the Terry, who I knew, who I consider one of the best visual effects supervisors ever. And it'll be hard to top this guy, the creative weather, or Lord of the Rings, et cetera.
00:32:52
Speaker
I talked to him and said, look, I'm not going to come down there if you think I'm going to interfere with your process. He goes, no, no, no, I could use help. We just need eyes, you know? This is like nobody knows how it's going to work. One shot at that time, once you started the shot, you wouldn't see it for nine months. By the end of the film, Avatar, it was three months.
00:33:15
Speaker
So it's going to be quicker this next few rounds. And they double the capacity of their computer hardware. And also, a lot of the modeling has been done now. We know what it's supposed to look like. We made our mistakes. We did all our stuff. Because I know Cameron was talking about that. He says the next films are going to be cheaper because all the pieces that had to be built from scratch, the digital pieces, they all exist now. And they'll be refined and tweakable. But yeah. And they know how to do it.
00:33:44
Speaker
So, but going down there, I still, I still, I just liked the, they call it the wet away. I just liked the way they approached work. Always had to look real. Does this look real? That's all I ever did. Everything is like, does this look real? Why doesn't this look real? You have a big monitor, big screen. We would project it full size.
00:34:08
Speaker
and go through the whole frame of a shot and say, that doesn't look right. This doesn't look right. How do we fix that? There was no real final on that film till the very end. And then we found out by the time we got to the end, there were three shots in the beginning.
00:34:30
Speaker
that Jake Avatar was lost and he has a spear and he's looking around and they tear he's up on a branch and she's gonna nail him, right, with an arrow. And it's like, and she, the little sprite lands on her, on the tip of her bow and it's like, don't do that. Well, he looked like a dark blue version of Spock.
00:34:55
Speaker
It was really weird. I mean, when we got back toward the end of the movie and went and checked the shots, go like, should we redo anything? There's three shots in the beginning. It didn't look anything like Jake. Because that was what you guys had learned and were applying literally in the process of working. By the time you got to the end of that, you said three months, right? Yeah. The work you had done at the front, you could make better.
00:35:19
Speaker
Yeah, but we had to look at the whole movie and realize that didn't look like Jake now. We should redo that.
00:35:29
Speaker
You know, Weta and Litteri and all those guys there. They're fantastic. I mean, they're fantastic. So what's so different? Where are we now? What would you say the status is today? You know, because most of the stuff that I'm looking at, Wade and I, you're with film critics, we see big, big, giant special effects. What was the big one? I just saw one last day. I just saw Pirates of the Caribbean. What's it? The subheading worst movie ever made?
00:35:51
Speaker
something like that. 2003, I think, was that first one, right? Yep, 2003. I mean, that's 15 years on. In terms of technology and everything, that movie looks worse than the first movie. Yeah, it does. Different people. It's how you perceive what, it's which director, which art director, which artist, which digital artist do you, you know, pending budget,
00:36:22
Speaker
all wants photo real. I mean, that's the goal. And some films I watch, I enjoy them, but I don't worry about if they look real or not, because some don't. I don't have to say what they are. But who's the...
00:36:43
Speaker
This is the first or second. The Octopus guy. Blanket. Well, that's the second. That's the Davey Jones. Davey Jones. Davey Jones. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Spectacular.
00:36:53
Speaker
Yeah, that was great. I won an Oscar for that. And I had done X-Men 3. And I voted for them. I was trying to get nominated, but I voted for that being the best picture. And John Knoll supervised that. And it's just photo-real. Maybe there's stuff around him, isn't it? But your focus is on something that makes you sit up in your seat. Like, wow, that's great. And if you don't, you've got to do that every time.
00:37:22
Speaker
That's the issue. Well, it's always been a power for me. I mean, for folks who have listened to me on the show whenever Wade and I have been on the Film Week show. And a big special effects movie was The Thing.
00:37:34
Speaker
Generally speaking, for me, make it practical. I have to believe that it is there in the room, in the scene, whatever it is. I gotta believe it's there. Even if it's not, you still have to make me believe it is. Maybe you can get away with it if it's not the thing I'm supposed to be looking at, right? So say I'm supposed to be looking at something else, and that background has been helped out a little bit. That's like in Zodiac. I mean, in Zodiac,
00:38:00
Speaker
Tons and tons of those backgrounds are completely CG. Exactly. But you're nothing in 1970s. If you're looking at the background, then that actor ain't working right. So that's beautiful me. But when it's supposed to be the thing I'm looking at, Dragonheart, that dragon in Dragonheart. I mean, it's called Dragonheart. The dragon has to look real. And if the dragon don't look real, we're done.
00:38:27
Speaker
And so that's the spot that I that I get to so often now they bail Well before they even get close to making the thing I'm supposed to be looking at in this movie. Yeah, look real I I still have not seen look it's been over a decade since rain of fire right rain of fire. Yeah, I mean But that's the best-looking dragon I think I've ever seen to this day an amazing dragon that dragon falls out of the sky and that big thing, you know
00:38:52
Speaker
and then you got the giant practical dragon down there. I believe that all the way from the sky to the ground to the actual practical effect. Tell me again where you guys shot virus. It was in one of the Carolinas, right? North Carolina and then we moved up to Newport News,
The Making of Virus and Titanic Dives
00:39:12
Speaker
Virginia. So talk a little bit about that. You had a big giant ship that you were actually on. Well, the Vandenberg. Yeah, the Vandenberg comic book.
00:39:21
Speaker
has the Yuri Gagarin in it. It's a Russian satellite tracking ship, 700 feet long. That had been scrapped. We'd shot the opening scenes of Titanic, but the movie wasn't there yet. I made four dives on the ship, Titanic, in a mere submarine. And I lived on the Russian ship, the Kelsh.
00:39:50
Speaker
And so that my whole experience you made four dives on the Titanic. Yeah For Jim's it was the net that that documentary he made right. Yeah. Well, yeah, it was a 1995 Titanic expedition you say that like I went down to 7-eleven Jim there was this whole thing when we did the abyss the first submersible dive ever made was was the on the Kirk pride in
00:40:21
Speaker
in the Grand Cayman Islands, there's a Kirk project, 700 or 800 feet to this wreck, which was 250 feet long. And that determined the size of our things and what you could see underwater. So for
00:40:46
Speaker
Jim said after when the abyss was down he goes after true lives he said that he called me one day and said I was up for virus I think Jim called me and said I'm gonna dive the Titanic but you can't tell anybody can't tell a soul just left and I got some screaming phone calls from Gail Hurd I remember that but
00:41:15
Speaker
We were in St. John's, Newfoundland. And so the first, what it was, was Jim was gonna dive, document the ship, try to get a movie made, because we gotta see if it's possible. And we used film, we used two-perf technoscope, because that's all that would fit in the cameras. And Jim's brother, Mike Cameron, built these titanium,
00:41:43
Speaker
that could take full ocean, well, practical to full ocean depth, but we were gonna be at 12,500. And I said, well, we have one roll of, we have 400 feet, and so we're gonna shoot it 12 frames a second instead of 24 in order to get the images. And went down and we had a techno,
00:42:15
Speaker
A two per projector sent out to the ship and we put that and we'd watch dailies Okay in the in the in the In one of the rooms, right and That's Titanic and so I was in with I was without giddings in the in mere two with the lighting package and we would you know skirt along the the front the deck and up the
00:42:41
Speaker
up the front, you know, we call the crow's nest, where the crow's nest was, that poth. Yeah. So I'm in the movie, but I'm in the submarine. And I did have lunch in front of the bronze telemotor. Best lunch I ever had. Cold hot dog. It's a Russian lunch then. Cold hot dog, or Submariner's lunch, let me knock the Russians. But a cold piece of bread and a
00:43:10
Speaker
And I think it's broccoli. Best lunch ever. So this experience, I was out there, and I had the script to virus. So I started writing in the characters that are in the mirror spaced. Oh, and then every Wednesday, I would go, there's Valeria, I think the girl's Valeria is her name. She was the scientist.
00:43:39
Speaker
This is a science vessel, three team science labs on it. One guy had a blue laser, a green laser, excuse me, green laser.
00:43:50
Speaker
with a mirror that would stick out the side of the ship. And he'd hit that mirror to get a density reading of the ocean at wherever we were. He had a big book, and they would do it every day. And he'd turn it around at a 45 degree angle and pop it up, vertical, as the mere space station went over. And they would talk to the guys. That's where that stuff came from.
00:44:14
Speaker
where I have Joanna Pecula talking to the Mirs space station, playing chess. Vectors. There isn't vectors. And that was all to get air particles, the amount of particles, the brightness of that laser beam at that height or that depth. What does it read? So the one thing that Jim said, it says, well, I don't know if I'm going to do this movie.
00:44:40
Speaker
really vague in my first movie, and he said, just make it your own, man. And then, while we were at sea, we went through Hurricane Louis, which was a kick-ass storm. And that went, of course, that's how the movie opens. And it's what I remember visually. Yeah, there's no... So you took that experience and put it into your intro.
00:45:07
Speaker
What was the best part of making virus? I mean big movies, effects movies, sci-fi movies, everybody always says they come with, they're great, but they come with baggage. So you got fun, but you got fun mixed in with a lot of stress and a lot of headaches where you know, you got to... Well, nobody, I'm talking from the director point here, nobody can
00:45:30
Speaker
That's my first movie. The sea star accidentally sunk, right? What? Remember when the sea star sinks, but it was there that day, and it was just sitting there, and then it just went underwater a couple of days before it just... I mean, yeah, that's the problem. Spielberg couldn't get that shark back, right? So, I don't care what anybody tells you. They sit you down like, let's have a talk.
00:46:00
Speaker
This is what it's going to be like directing. No way that anybody can give you the speech. Because I would call Jim and say, Jim, I need the talk. He goes, what talk? What happens if it says, that's being a director, man. You've got to go with it. Wow.
Challenges in Directing Practical Effects Films
00:46:20
Speaker
He was doing Titanic.
00:46:23
Speaker
So his problems were far superior to my problems and we would talk on Sunday, every Sunday, me at three in the morning.
00:46:36
Speaker
when he was rapping the, you know, midnight in Mexico and he'd just ask me what's going on and I'd tell him and he'd come on with you and he goes, I think they're going to fire me. You know, he said, but, you know, it's just, it's going, it's going over. I said, well, I'm going over. And then he goes, you can't, don't let him get, you've got to just get in there, man. You just got to do it. And that's what kept me going.
00:47:05
Speaker
because it was a big technical film that relied on a big army of people.
00:47:15
Speaker
to get these shots that involved actors. It wasn't because it was all practical. Yeah. So actors were in the shots. Not that we could just go in. And I think that's what happens today with people. They think we don't want to deal with all that. We'll just put them in actors in front of a green screen. And we'll put that stuff in later when we're not going to because principal photography is the most important thing to a studio. We have to finish on this many days because it's $200,000 a day, maybe more today.
00:47:43
Speaker
And if we can get that done, then we can take our time going back. Or if you don't know what it looks like out the window, because we used to, you know, Cameron, everybody used to use RP. If you're driving in a car, something being projected in the window. There's actual, it's in camera. Well, they don't do that anymore. The screen screen, we'll figure out what goes in there later. That's there. You get done faster, but
00:48:10
Speaker
I think there's more panic in that than knowing what's in your shot. You know, we actually had things to look at that actually. You could react to the creature. Reacting to something that was real, you know, instead of having a director. Okay, you see it over here, okay, it moves over there. It's behind you now. No, I mean, they were throwing, when things were thrown at you, it was thrown at you. When things were breaking apart, it was, when you're breaking apart, when you had to shoot something, you had to shoot something, you know.
00:48:34
Speaker
I think there's a lesson in that too, that practical effects are not just great for an audience, not just great for storytelling, but they're great when you're acting. They're great for actors. Exactly. Exactly. You had to drop an anchor. There's a scene, you drop an anchor on the tugboat.
00:48:50
Speaker
That's real. Yep. Yep. I had to stop that anchor, too. Yeah. That was real. Well, as I run that movie in my head, I think about how many shots today, how many of those shots would be CGI. How much of that would just be CGI, just period? Whole, whole. You could do it CGI today, but not in camera, not quick, not for the same price. And that's always
00:49:20
Speaker
That's the trade-off. So settle this question for us. You would know the answer to the question. What is more expensive? CGI or practice. And I know that these things go together to a certain extent, but in a bottom line kind of way, the notion has always been that, oh, CGI will be way less expensive. It doesn't seem to be less expensive. How do these things break down price-wise?
00:49:43
Speaker
Well, when digital man was set up, even George Lucas used to say shots will be $16,000 a shot in the digital world. And then people would build their own companies because then they don't have to charge themselves any overhead. But digital shots, I wouldn't even know the price,
00:50:11
Speaker
Certain things, what used to be shots was wire removal. No longer a shot. It was like two grand, 700 bucks, somebody would paint that out. Used to be $25,000. But all that stuff's coming down, but what I look at in certain shots is you have 25 artists doing a creature. Well, each one of them's doing the creature the way they see the creature.
00:50:39
Speaker
There's not one. If you have something practical in the shot, the lighting's the same across 25 cuts, and the movement's the same. And there should be, like in traditional animation, a key creature supervisor that animation poses, things like that. Airplanes flying through shots. What's the Christopher Nolan film?
00:51:05
Speaker
about time travel. Oh, time travel. What was that one? I was thinking of the one where we- Interstellar. Oh, Interstellar, right, yeah. All right, so that's a big practical spaceship on a crane. They move it around, they camera on it, spinning it around, doing all that stuff in camera. He, above anybody today, does stuff as much in camera as possible.
00:51:30
Speaker
And 70 millimeter IMAX plates. If you're watching a movie, even Batman, the screen's here, and then suddenly it goes like that. That's IMAX, and it goes back. But just to get the detail and quality and richness of the look of film, now, these new red cameras, stuff like, they can get there. It's just... I think I still would...
00:52:01
Speaker
when I storyboard a scene or for a movie, I just look at it as what can we, it first says, can we do this for real? I don't think this can be done for real. So that's gonna be a, you know, I'll put a red sticker on that drawing. And when you go through it, it's like, okay, we have a jet. Well, we're gonna build one this big and we can use it in this shot, this shot, this, okay, we build one jet, not two. And it just, that's my approach to it. But yeah, because, and so in,
00:52:31
Speaker
In virus, they didn't want any digital shots. It was more expensive to do things digital than the practical. The studio didn't want any digital shots. Well, it was more expensive at that time. But at the end, we couldn't get the robots to do everything. So Phil Tippett came in. And whenever the robot moves really well,
00:52:54
Speaker
It's a digital shot and they match perfectly. One example of puppets. Donald Southern walks into the computer room where everybody's got their bodies are being repurposed.
00:53:14
Speaker
There's a creature, a big robot standing there with his hand on a door and then the door opens and the thing looks at him and it closes. Well, the arm was just tied to the door and they moved the door. It looked like the creature did it. And then the same thing inside. The scene where Richie and, well, Sherman and Marshall Bell come in
00:53:39
Speaker
But what did we call that room? I don't know, but it was so cool. That was my first day of shooting. There were 14 robots in there, making robots for real. Yeah. It was really happening. So we could move the camera. We could do stuff and reset everything and start again. Different angles do the same thing. You should talk about that. I'm taking up those. No, no, no, no. This is the John Bruno hour. I'm sorry.
00:54:00
Speaker
Well, it's all fascinating and certainly it's always been sort of interesting to me, particularly as we look back at these things from today. You watch television, we started out talking about Game of Thrones and how they are all over the world with these different units doing different things at different times of the year, but it really never stops. There's always something happening for Game of Thrones.
00:54:27
Speaker
I did do two seasons of Star Trek Voyager. As a television director, coming in, you're the guest. We can do this without you, but we know there's contracts. There's a director's guild. And you show up.
00:54:54
Speaker
The sets have been built, you're in the middle of some series. They all know where everything is. I had to learn like, wait a minute, where's the science station? And it's all on the bridge. And just shooting that, the actors know what they're supposed to do. Basically, at first I thought, I'm supposed to tell them.
00:55:19
Speaker
And then I would get this, why don't you watch what I do? They do this. I'm like, OK, yeah, let's do that. But I did storyboard my first one, Tinkertener, Dr. Spy, because I had all these things that I thought were funny. It was a comedy that I wanted to cut to an angle like this and cut to an angle like that. So I had it in my head.
00:55:43
Speaker
And that show was really, for me, that first Tinkertenner, of course, you know, Brandon Braga hired me. It was, to me, written by Joe Monosky, who was doing the current CBS Star Trek. Yeah. A lot of guys working on that. It was actually fun. And the DP was having fun because we were just doing the songs and weird. It was fun.
00:56:08
Speaker
The one thing that they told me in the beginning said, well, you realize you have to shoot eight pages a day and went eight pages a day. I've only shot a page and a half a day, maybe three in my best.
00:56:25
Speaker
And it's like, well, maybe 10 pages a day. Oh, how's this work? And anyway, they showed me how it worked. That's why you have those walking talks. Yeah. You get off, you know, two and a half pages, three pages and walk and talk now down a corridor. That's what in every every show, there's got to walk and talk. And one angle. And then you look for wonders. That was the big thing that I was I was I learned how we do a wonder which can get you through everything with maybe an insert.
00:56:54
Speaker
You can get through pages, and then I started applying that to live action. You know, the best one is Scorsese. He opens it for a five minute shot. Walking through that camera behind you.
00:57:16
Speaker
Anyway, did I answer your question? Yeah, you forgot the question. Oh, it's all fascinating. It's fascinating. Anyway, guys, look, I can't, I can't, I can't. Sean, thank you for hooking up. Before we wrap it up, the Argo story. Oh. We cannot kill this until we talk Argo. We talk about Argo. And when we talk about Argo, we're talking about Argo, the Argo that just popped into people's heads, that movie, with Ben Affleck.
00:57:41
Speaker
But also we're gonna talk about, John, walk the audience through your portion of the Argo story.
Involvement in the Real Argo Story
00:57:50
Speaker
All right, 1979, 1980. There was the Iraq hostage situation. Iran, yeah. Iran, I'm sorry, Iran hostage situation. And through my career,
00:58:08
Speaker
I wanted to be a makeup artist, and my cousin, John Inzorella, introduced me to John Chambers. John Chambers is played by John Goodman in the movie. People will remember. And I spent... I wasn't in the union, but I really planted the apes. I don't know how to do that. And he would have me... Actually, when I first met him, he showed me how to have me do stuff mixed
00:58:37
Speaker
some next materials that could be poured and to make moles and stuff. But I wasn't in the union, so I worked out of his garage in Burbank, right behind Disney Studios. That's as close as I'll get you. But he would, so when you're not doing anything, he's really a helpful guy. He became a mentor.
00:59:04
Speaker
And he goes, I know you want to do this. So, you know, I got some work. You can come over my garage and we'll just, you know, I'll pay a hundred bucks, 50 bucks. Happy to do it. So when they needed designs for characters like beneath the plan, I think you paid me a hundred dollars and I just drew some sketches.
00:59:25
Speaker
uh... at the time i was doing donald at comic books at disney studios which paid forty five bucks a week if they a page if you deliver the pages early they would mark them up and send them back i mean i never i maybe made forty five bucks a week and uh... he had me come in and uh... do these sketches and then he says you know i got this other thing
00:59:53
Speaker
that I may produce this film. You know Jason and the Argonauts? Yeah. He goes, oh, creatures and things. Well, the Argo is the ship from Jason and the Argonauts. Yeah. But you have to come in the office to work. So we're setting up an office. And we have some scouts. They're in the Middle East. And they're scouting to see if this can be done. So we need some sketches.
01:00:19
Speaker
I mean, I found out later they had other sketches from Jack Kirby. But I don't know if those are used or not, for real. I mean, let's not think of the movie for a second. So I would go in there, and I sat in there. There was a room, 15 by 20, four desks in it. There was a coffee machine in front of me that I would make coffee sometimes. And John was in there, in and out.
01:00:45
Speaker
And he would tell me what to draw. And I said, can I see the script? And he goes, no, script shit. You don't want to see it. And I would draw these sketches, and you'd take them away. And then I didn't even know if they were used. I mean, they were just characters. But I would pin things on the wall, the spaceship. This wasn't the spaceship. It was the sailing ship.
01:01:12
Speaker
And one day he goes out, and he comes back, and he's got all the pages from, he's got six Hollywood reporters. He goes, here, have this one. There's a big double spread of Argo, which is not how it looked in the movie. And then he goes, now, when me and Toneso leave the office, you have to answer the phone. If somebody answers the phone, you say, yes, this is Argo productions. OK.
01:01:41
Speaker
And one day, a guy comes in, and he's got a briefcase, and he opens it up next to me, and it's full of $100 bills. And he comes around, and he looks at me, and he goes, how many weeks? I went, three. He gives me $400, something like that, cash. And I look at John, and it's like, oh, what? And he goes, so he just waves him like, it's all right. And I never signed anything.
01:02:09
Speaker
It's like, well, it's cash on the table, don't worry about it. And then the guy, then he and John went out and went to lunch or something. And then seeing that in the movie, I kind of went, maybe there was $10,000 in everything. That's the number. That's the number. So then to end this quickly, he comes in and goes, hey, man, they're all back. Oh, so the scouts are back.
01:02:37
Speaker
I don't think there's going to be a movie. That's too expensive. Oh, OK. He goes, but what about this money? I got this money. He goes, hit the money. Don't worry about it. So that was that. 32 years later, I'm in a theater in Pasadena, and here comes this Argo with John Goodman as John Chambers. And it was much of a shock to me as anybody.
01:03:04
Speaker
I had no idea. And I wish they would have someone from the production at the time. Well, they didn't know I existed.
01:03:12
Speaker
would have asked me, because I just have information about that, who was in the rooms, who came in and out. Oh, and it was at Vine and Gower Studios, Sunset and Vine. Not one of them. Anyway, at least we know there was a time when the CIA did not move.
01:03:36
Speaker
32 years. 32 years. 32 years. It's a good secret to keep. But as far as I'm concerned, John Bruno, you rescued the Iran hospices. You brought it home safe, sir. Exactly. And I appreciate it. I appreciate that. Hey, guys. Thanks for coming by. Thanks so much. Thanks for talking about the business. Thanks for talking about all that special effects stuff. I'm sure the audience was really, really good. They're going to eat it up. Thank you, guys. Appreciate it. All right. Good luck, man.
01:04:19
Speaker
Yeah.
01:05:12
Speaker
you