- There was no difference between me and "Mad God."
And the deeper I got into it, it was more...
I was more it, than it was me. (laughs)
The early germination of "Mad God"
influences and inspiration started when I was very young,
Ray Harryhausen's, "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad."
(monster growling)
Well, as an eight year old, I had no idea what it was.
But it just grabbed me, you know, immediately.
I mean, it was the spectacle of it.
From the first second, you know,
the cyclops running after the magician
and exiting from the the great kind of cyclopian cave,
I was hooked.
I annoyed my parents to take me to see it.
But they ran black and white trailers on TV,
and I remember telling my parents
I really liked that the characters kind of moved like this.
And so I was already, before I'd seen the movie,
really attracted to that feeling of,
it was like a distant otherness that was inexplicable.
And I guess it just appealed to my aesthetic.
You know, I'd never seen anything like it,
and that's what I wanted to do the rest of my life.
I always wanted to make things that I had never seen before.
(creature growling)
At some point, I discovered Forrest J. Ackerman,
was the editor of a magazine called,
"Famous Monsters of Filmland."
And Forry, he was a friend with Ray Bradbury
and Ray Harryhausen, so he would run articles on this stuff.
My dad's, you know,
He said, "Well, I wonder what this,
"what is this stuff?"
And he said, "Well, it's like I think they take a model
"and it's kinda like a cartoon."
And that was the only reference that I had
until I read some of the articles
in Forrest's magazine on Ray.
And then it was like, "Oh, okay, great."
And so now I had a compass.
It was, it was a real vertical climb.
But then I got, you know, really lucky.
I always sought out, sought out mentors.
I started visiting the people
up at Cascade Pictures of California.
Jim Danforth and Dave Allen. It's where I met Dennis Muren,
and a bunch of people, Ken Ralston.
And because there were so few people doing this stuff
you can count 'em on, you know, one hand.
And that was really our, you know, graduate school.
It was run by a wonderful couple of guys,
Phil Kellison and Joe Rayner,
who were our mentors and really into stop motion
and visual effects and all of that stuff,
and would let us work after hours on projects and whatnot.
So it was a really wonderful time.
And then of course, you know,
from there it was like Dennis & Ken got jobs on "Star Wars"
and then one thing led to the next.
He didn't have the money he needed to do that show.
This is purely anecdotal,
but from what I could tell, it looked like, you know,
Stuart didn't have enough money
to make a lot of space aliens,
so there was a bunch of stuff in there
that kind looked like Beatrix Potter type stuff
that you might find, you know,
hanging on his shelf in the wardrobe department someplace.
And so George, you know, wanted more space aliens,
and somehow was able to talk Fox out of the money
and hired Rick Baker, who was already on another project.
And he put together a bunch of his friends,
stop motion animators.
So we made, you know, we used a lot of Rick's masks.
And then Ron Cobb had done a bunch
of designs for costumes that we made.
And, well, George would come by weekly
and check on our progress
and saw a stop motion I made when I was younger,
and that gave him the idea to do the chess set.
And then, you know, it was like,
hey, okay, it was the end of the movie.
He was gonna do it with people, humans with masks
and can you make, you know,
a dozen space aliens in two weeks?
And we did and shot it,
and was like, oh, hey, there's these guys out there
that can make a dozen space aliens in two weeks (laughs)
that aren't bad, you know?
So on Jedi, well, a bunch of things.
You know, he would meet up one week.
He'd just, "Make me a bunch of creatures."
And so I'd pull together half a dozen sculptors
and we'd do different things,
and he'd come in and go like, "What's this guy?"
And go like, "Oh, that's a calamari man."
And he's like, "Oh, okay, that's Admiral Akbar."
- It's a trap!
- And then, yeah, it went on on like that.
(birds chirping)
"Prehistoric Beast" led
to a CBS documentary show called "Dinosaur!"
Christopher Reeve narrated it.
- They were indomitable.
They were the lords of their universe.
And every year,
almost a million people come into the building,
the American Museum of Natural History,
to look up and to wonder at this
and other magnificent animals.
- It led to "Jurassic Park,"
And so when Steven was building that thing up,
you know, he was talking to George,
and George said, "Well, you should talk to Phil
"because he knows a lot about dinosaurs and knows movies."
So, you know, that got me a good job.
(dinosaur crunching) (thunder rumbling)
You know, I never was very academic.
I wasn't ever academically inclined, you know?
You know, I would study
and jerry-rig little ways
that I could single frame 8mm versions
of "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad"
and study how Ray did his stuff.
And, you know, got to the point where I realized,
"Oh, okay, so that's what he's doing."
And then after years of, you know,
I never really tried to duplicate his approach.
I wanted to do something different.
I didn't know what that was
until I started getting into it a little bit more.
So it was a very different kind of more naturalistic style.
Ray's style was very much kind of based on cell animation
that would pose, to pose, to pose.
But I tried to break that a lot and not do that.
I just wanted a different kind
of more naturalistic organic flow to stuff.
(being chittering) (beast roaring)
You know, "Mad God" was the classic Campbell
hero's journey that, you know,
was it results in the death and rebirth of the hero.
It's the throughline for the movie.
You know, the assassin exists in many, many different forms
all throughout the movie.
I mean, he is torn apart in surgery, and gives birth,
and the baby is reduced to its constituent elements
that create a new universe and blah, blah, blah.
It literally was a religious experience
in terms of how it manifested itself, you know?
Because it was back in the early to mid '80s,
I was orbiting this idea, or it wasn't even an idea yet.
You know, it was like the gravitational field
was out in the Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum. (laughs)
It just didn't act like any, then gradually,
things like, well, this kind of looks like that,
and this relates to that.
Things, particles start kind of coming into orbit.
And I made it and it made me, you know?
And there was no
there was no difference between me and "Mad God,"
and the deeper I got into it,
it was more,
I was more it than it was me. (laughs)
You know? I mean, I was just, you know,
I was just doing what I was told, like,
you hear so many times with particularly,
you know, the ancients like Bach and Mozart,
where do the, Beethoven,
where do all this stuff come from?
And they just go out, you know, it comes from God.
I was just transcribing it, you know?
I really feel like I had nothing to do with it.
And that's the way I do feel conceptually,
but, you know physically I felt it quite a bit.
So it's a different journey than doing work for hire,
which is all, you know, it has guard rails on it.
You know what you're doing
and it's budget and time and all that stuff,
but left to your own devices,
you know, it can really destroy you.
(dramatic music)
(smooth instrumental music)