John Dykstra interview pt. 5

Martin Anderson

You don't do this work because you expect praise for everything you do. You do it because you enjoy the solving of the problems...

Published on Nov 2, 2008

Continued from part 4

Is there a risk when you start out on a challenging project - such as creating the fur in Stuart Little - that getting one particular aspect right can end up dominating the project?
No, not really. If you don't have fur, you get a big 'fur team' [laughs], and they work on that uniquely. The fur team was over there working for a while, the animators were working on something else, and the clothing guys something else; the pipeline is parallel processing. Could that dominate the process? Yes. But it wouldn't be an intelligent way to do it. So fortunately for those folks at Sony, they had me working on it [laughs] and we worked together with the folks at SPI, who were terrific at handling exactly that kind of logistics and we were able to expand or contract our teams dependent upon the resources necessary to make the shot happen. In each of those cases we did a preliminary shot, which I think is really an important thing to do, where we picked out a representative piece of action from the movie and we completed it before we were even into principal photography. When I say that we 'completed' it, I mean that we ran something through what we considered to be our pipeline. Obviously not all the aspects of the pipeline were completed at the point at which we finished that first shot, and although I had to promise them that we could use the shot in the movie, I knew that the shot would never make it into the movie, because we had to make too many compromises.

What you find out is where the conflicts exist: how does the cloth interact with the fur? Where does the flesh of the body interpenetrate the cloth and cause problems? How does the musculature cause the mesh of the flesh to distort? What kind of elasticity do we have to use? When we did Doc Ock's visage for Spiderman 2, where we took Alfred Molina and photographed him in a variety of lighting environments and a variety of expressions and brought that all together to create a surrogate for his face…that was a huge effort. It took months for us to have that come together with the rest of the elements necessary for us to make the shot at the completion of the project.

Do you feel that the age of the special effects auteur has passed? You were always leading teams, but now the numbers seem to have increased enormously…
Film-making in and of itself is not a singular art; it always requires incredible collaboration, and the final product will reflect the quality of that collaboration, whether it's a happy or unhappy one. I think visual effects is the microcosm of the entire making of a film in that you have a huge number of artists with disparate talents that have to be brought together and have to communicate in an efficient way in order to make the whole greater than the sum of the pieces. I think that that is still the purview of the visual effects supervisor - I like to call myself a designer, but it's interchangeable - and our responsibility is to make sure that the talents of all the artists who are working on the creation of those images are well utilised, and that the images that they produce pay respect to what it is that the producer wants, and the needs of the telling of the story.

Do you feel a little cheated when your particular contribution to a movie like Batman And Robin gets lumped in with other criticism unrelated to your work on the film?
I think that if you're in this business that you kind of have to get over that. You don't do this work because you expect praise for everything you do. You do it because you enjoy the solving of the problems, the interaction with other creative people, and you enjoy the challenges. For whatever reason that your work is recognised or not recognised - and it goes both ways, by the way, as a lot of times work that is not as good as it could be is lifted by the tide of the picture itself...you just don't think about that. And it's kind of a waste of time to think about it afterwards.

So it's not totally essential that you believe in the entire film at the outset?
I have to believe in the entire film, but if the final product is flawed, then aggravating over it doesn't do you any good. You need to learn from your mistakes, but to go 'Oh, we got a bum rap on that…' because the picture didn't do well…it's like saying 'Well, here's an excuse for why I'm not going to try as hard on the next one', or whatever. Your work has to stand on its own merit. And there's the joy of doing it. It pays well when you get to work on the big movies, but the joy of doing it has to be in the doing of it. To do it just because you want a Paycheck doesn't work.

After the success of the Firefox game, I understand that you were involved in game development for a fair period of the eighties. Was this proof-of-concept work that you were involved with…?
Yes, we did some proof--of-concept for a variety of games, and the I'd be hard-pressed to give you the names of all of them. I actually developed a game for Coleco - this is really weird, talk about software and hardware overtaking the market, but Coleco at one point came up with a system that used videotape, and it used the four tracks on the videotape head to put images together and then it interlaced the images to create four possible tracks. I did a videogame for that system called Sewer Shark. You had to fly the Sewer Shark and shoot characters and bad guys and stuff [laughs]. We got the whole thing done, and then Coleco had also gotten into the computer market; they just decided they were going to make a PC, and they overstepped their bounds and basically went belly-up. So my big game, the game that I conceived and created ended up…I don't know, I think they sold it to Activision or somebody.

The great thing about Coleco's idea was video-resolution; of course at that time none of the video-games were video-resolution, so it was a realistic, high-quality image that you were playing the game in. When they took that continuous tone video image and tried to convert it into a six-colour, six values of grey image, it didn't work [laughs]. It didn't have enough detail or bit-depth, so the game turned out to be a waste of time. I haven't really been involved with videogames that much subsequent to that…

I was wondering if you took an interest in the future of videogaming….
I like playing 'em…? The thing about videogames for me is that it's not a field that I've spent a lot of time in, and -like so many other things - if you're not 'there', people don't come to you. You have to have a presence there, and my Sewer Shark game having failed [laughs] I went 'Okay, enough of this!'. So I got back into the movie stuff. And I really enjoy working on film. I enjoy working on commercials too. Commercials have gotten to be incredibly sophisticated and, as they were for the motion picture industry in the eighties, a lot of times you see images in commercials that start affecting things in motion pictures, so it's a cool kind of cauldron…

What about directing? The IMDB has you down as doing Tortoise And Hippo…?
Yes, I am. We're still working on that. The script is currently being written and we're waiting with great anticipation to see how this is going to exactly turn out.

Will it be a full CGI film?
Yes. Well, actually, that's not true - we'll probably shoot live-action plates and put CGI characters in. And the CGI characters will be photo-real, so you'll believe that a tortoise can talk.

What other projects would you like to get off the ground?
Oh boy…I've got a whole cadre of stuff that I'd really like to do. The trick is that it's very difficult to get a film off the ground. You have to have bankable actors and even bankable actors are becoming questionable in this day and era. The thing that I want to do more than anything is to work on visuals, and so anything I do is going to be something that uses that as my value-added to bring me the director's slot, if you know what I mean. They're not hiring me to be a director because of my incredible dramatic skills [laughs].

A project that I love that I don't know if it will ever be made is called The Star's My Destination. I'd love to see that made into a movie. I think that's a great story. So it's that kind of stuff that I'm interested in, and I'm talking to people but, you know, you have to have conversations going with lots and lots of people in this business, because so many of the opportunities fail.

What's the special effects film of this year, or recent years, that's really impressed you - apart from your own, of course..?
I have to pick a film? There's been so much good stuff out there…you know what I really liked from recent years? Pan's Labyrinth. I thought that was really great - incredibly evocative. And it's a lot of mechanical stuff, you know? If you can do it live, or if you can do it with make-up, then by all means. It's more instinctive. You're on the set, interacting with stuff, and that's what I thought was really interesting about that film, and I think Guillermo Del Toro's work always has that kind of quality to it.

I also thought Transformers was really good, I really enjoyed the action in it. Golden Compass was great and it was recognised for the work that went into it. It's really tough, because there are movies - and there are several of them - which are seamless, where the effects don't show, and they always get the short end of the stick, because when you get asked that question your mind immediately goes to the big blockbuster films.

What are the two or three shots you've done in your own career that really knocked your socks off, where you didn’t anticipate how well they'd turn out…?
The opening shot in Star Wars. That was one of the first things we did, and it was proof of the system, so if anything ever really gave me a great jolt of pride and relief at the same time, it was seeing that three-foot long Stardestroyer. We'd convinced them that we were going to build these little models and use tilting lens-boards and ultra-slow cameras and motion control to make these tiny little ships look big, and when we saw the dailies on that shot, I thought 'It's going to work!'. That was really cool. That was a great shot, and I remember that experience to this day.

I like a lot of the stuff in Stuart Little. I'm trying to think of a specific shot. Stuart Little, albeit not a blockbuster…the integration of that character into the movie, I think the team at Imageworks just did an exquisite job of seating that character into that world. I was really proud of that work as regards integration, lighting and all of that.

For Spiderman, I think probably the closing shot from the first film is one of my favourites.

John Dykstra, thank you very much!

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5

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