Everyone Is...with Jennifer Coronado
The intent of this show is to engage with all types of people and build an understanding that anyone who has any kind of success has achieved that success because they are creative thinkers. So whether you are an artist, a cook, a bottle washer, or an award-winning journalist, everyone has something to contribute to the human conversation.
Everyone Is...with Jennifer Coronado
Dennis Muren: It's the Spectacle!
What fuels the imagination of a visual effects legend? Join us as Dennis Muren opens up about his remarkable journey from an LA kid in love with the spectacle of "War of the Worlds" to a nine-time Academy Award winner. From the highs of working on Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind to the technical challenges of creating groundbreaking sequences, Dennis's stories provide a rare glimpse into the heart and soul of cinematic magic.
Ever wondered how the iconic asteroid sequence in Empire Strikes Back was created or what it took to bring dinosaurs to life in Jurassic Park? Dennis delves into the creative processes behind these memorable moments, revealing the trial-and-error approaches, the collaborative spirit, and the sheer perseverance required. He also touches on how different directors like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg influenced his work and the fascinating transition from practical effects to digital graphics that revolutionized the industry.
Join us in an insightful conversation with Dennis where imagination meets innovation and every pixel tells a story.
www.slightlyprod.com
So I saw an alien invasion and a giant dinosaur tearing apart New York City in the same year. I remember hiding behind the seat and my mom saying, okay, you can look down, you can look down. But when I walked out I said wait, where is it? Where's that stuff? I like seeing that stuff.
Jennifer Coronado:Hello and welcome to Everyone Is I am your host, jennifer Coronado. The intent of this show is to engage with all types of people and build an understanding that anyone who has any kind of success has achieved that success because they are a creative thinker. So, whether you are an artist or a cook, or an award-winning journalist, everyone has something to contribute to the human conversation. And now, as they say, on with the show, on with the show. When I think about Dennis Mirren, the first phrase that comes into my mind is cinematic visual innovation. From his earliest days helping to pioneer visual effects work on the original Star Wars trilogy, to his work on ET, to Terminator 2, to his later films like Steven Spielberg's AI and War of the Worlds, this nine-time Academy Award winner represents the best of what movies can provide. So, dennis Muren, welcome.
Dennis Muren:Sure Nice to be here.
Jennifer Coronado:I want to start very basically. Where did you grow up, Dennis?
Dennis Muren:I grew up in LA, la Cunada, which is near Pasadena and Glendale and outside of Hollywood. But you know there'd always be film shoots going on. You'd see a truck park somewhere. If there were two trucks, it means there was a shooting of a movie or a TV show. So I would always, if I was driving, pull over and run out and have a look.
Jennifer Coronado:So as a little kid you were kind of aware that you were living in a company town and the company town made movies. Yeah, it was like that.
Dennis Muren:But and the company Town Made Movies. Yeah, it was like that. But I was never going to do it because I wanted to do special effects stuff. I didn't want to do regular movies and there was no effects being done really in those days there were some commercials being done in two or three places and I did commercials. But the big effects films there was maybe one or two a year, like Earthquake or Towering Inferno. They were studio movies. You had to be in the union to do them and so I just I went around. I tried to get work at Disney, at Fox, when I was really young and everybody just said, sorry, we can't do anything for you because you're not in the union and they weren't hiring because they weren't making very many movies. It was a dead end. I was not looking forward or expecting to get a career out of this at all, but it was something I loved to do.
Jennifer Coronado:I know the War of the Worlds is a film that you love the original one, right. So you look at that movie and you think, oh, I want to do the things that they're doing. Was that how you were thinking about it?
Dennis Muren:No, I think I was about seven when I saw that and I also saw the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms the same year. So I saw an alien invasion and a giant dinosaur carrying apart New York City in the same year. I remember hiding behind the seat and my mom saying, okay, you can look now, you can look now. When I walked out I said wait, where is it? Where's that stuff? I liked seeing that stuff Really.
Dennis Muren:I remember going up to Yosemite when they were doing the firefall, the real firefall up there, dropping fire, you know, down 1500 feet at nighttime, glowing in the dark. I mean it was unbelievable. And my first trip when I was like about nine, to new york city and just seeing, you know, the concrete corridors was unbelievable, the scale of everything. So I've always been attracted to some sort of spectacle, you know whether it's in a movie or real life or something. But I love the, of course, telling stories, at least effect stories. So not necessarily the whole movies, but I but you know, movies are something I've always really liked a lot. And, uh, I found some friends in la there are probably a half dozen of us and all of la that were like my, and this is in the late 50s and early 60s that cared about these films and we all kind of found each other. We were our own group and grew up together and made our little movies together and showed them to each other and all.
Jennifer Coronado:How do you find each other? How do you go about finding a community like that?
Dennis Muren:There was a magazine, famous, monsters of Filmland, that you could find at a few stores. I found a copy of it on a trip to San Diego. There weren't many places you could find it and I wasn't interested as much in the monsters as the special effects and that's where you'd see pictures of King Kong or War of the Worlds or something, because there was no way to see the picture again unless you see the movie again, and then you had to stay and see it a second time to try to see it. You couldn't stop it. I tried shooting still photos in the movie theater and sometimes it worked. I shot still photos and eventually 8mm movies off the TV.
Dennis Muren:I wanted to hold those images in my head and we all have the same stories. I mean, we're just comparing notes. Recently we all said, yeah, we always thought everybody could hold an image in their head, but we learned because we wanted to see it so much and we've had to do that, just years and years of having to do it. Right now you know you can just grab a freeze frame of something, look at it and study it and see 20 versions of it and everything. It's much easier. I think you can probably learn much faster now than you ever could, than we ever could, because there's so much available.
Jennifer Coronado:I had someone say to me once and I can't even remember who it was that they thought that you, as an individual, see the world in a different way than other people do. And when I hear you talk about things like going to New York and those big corridors right and the fire fall, do you? And obviously you know how you see the world, but you don't know if you see it differently than other people because you live in your own experience. What do you think someone would say you see the world differently.
Dennis Muren:I guess they see me from the outside and are comparing me to other people or something I don't know. And you know, I thought that a little bit that everybody could pre-visualize stuff and they can't just, realizing that within a couple of years, realized that not everybody could do that and I'm sure everybody in some skill probably goes through the same sort of thing. Because you only know, you only know what you are, who you are.
Jennifer Coronado:You know, I don't know thank you for answering that esoteric question. I appreciate it. I know like in the 60s and 70s the studios were struggling, right, so they had initially had their own visual effects units that were attached to the studios. You talked right, so they had initially had their own visual effects units that were attached to the studios you talked about getting into the business was tough. I think you were looking at being some sort of doctor at one point, weren't you?
Dennis Muren:I think that sounds great. Being a doctor sounds great. Unfortunately, I had no skill and no experience being a doctor and I was looking through the LA Times for a job and saw inhalation therapy and I said what is that? And I looked at it and said you know, it's how to treat people you know who've had lung problems like pneumonia or something to breathe again. And it said it's very easy to learn and you can make. I think it was $1,200 a month or something like that and I thought, okay, I guess this is what I'm going to want to do. I don't want to work in a factory or something like that. I just would get bored with. This would be a little more interesting.
Dennis Muren:So I was about ready to do that and we had a sort of a lucky thing happen at Cascade, which is a company doing commercials Pillsbury, dolboy and all. They were struggling for like 10 years and finally closed up but managed to restart the effects department under a friend of mine, jim danforth, and I got hired there to be the head cameraman of the place, of being effects cameraman really what it was. So I got from the union doing that. I decided I wanted to get in the union instead of being an outsider. That's the rebel. I'm never going to join the union, but if you really want to work, I wanted to, so so I got in that way and then that group we all folded in one year.
Dennis Muren:Cascade was amazing. It was like the MGM of television commercials. They had like three or four sound stages. You know big stages in Hollywood for in commercials all the time Things you've heard of and you could go through and learn everything about how to light hair you've heard of and you could go through and learn everything about how to light hair. Phil Kelson, my boss, he knew how to take a silver dollar and make it look like it was worth a million dollars only in the lighting, how to light something in such a way to make it much bigger than it ever was, and I saw examples with people doing that, with models, people doing it with cans of soups and stuff like that faces, you know. So you kind of learn the tricks of lighting and photography and all that, which is what I was really interested in.
Dennis Muren:And somewhere around this time I also got onto a or I pulled my car off at a school in Hollywood I can't remember quite where, it was Los Fios where they were shooting a lot of movies. They're always shooting there. So I got out there and ran up just to see what was going on and I'd been doing that a few times and I noticed that the film crews, that there seemed to be a place that was very important and that was where I could see, oh, we have cameras there, okay, okay, no-transcript, other guys are. So I always thought, if I ever can do it I don't want to be one of the guys cleaning up or doing this or building that. If I could do it, I don't know if I could, but in that group and I also had noticed the few times that guys were nice enough to invite me to a shoot, a big miniature shoot.
Dennis Muren:I went out to 20th Century Fox tank in Malibu a couple of times and watched Bill Abbott LB Abbott shooting stuff with a crew of 40 people and wave machines and a big spectacle, and it was a whole deal. They were nice people in the world and I'd realized I mean, the most important job in doing effects is the cameraman, because he has the button and Bill would not shoot anything until it was right in his mind and so I always was thinking you know that's the job I'm going to want. If I ever do effects. It's a union. You know, if you're in a union, that's where it's got to be. So I decided, okay, I'm going to be a cameraman. I kind of knew I'd like, but also, if it ever happens to me, he's the guy with the final button and I've got ideas in my head about how things should look. So I had no problem imagining looking at a storyboard or an idea Instantly. I have imagining looking at a storyboard or an idea instantly. I have a visual view of it in my head all right away. Whenever anybody's talking about it, I do that. So that's the job I wanted.
Dennis Muren:So after so that's what I got in the union I had a chance to get into the union that said I'll do it, be a cameraman. That that closed up, cascade closed up. And three months I heard about Star Wars that was being done in the San Fernando Valley. I knew some friends that went to actually talk to George about doing the effects and they didn't. They said nothing's going to come with this film. He wants to do it, throwing models by the camera and everything, and it needs to be controlled. And stop motion was the way we were all doing stuff in those days. I was in the very archaic film school, still using techniques from the 20s and 30s because that's all my little group ever knew, and at that time George was not talking to John Dykstra or anything. He was not talking about anything. So I heard the film look like it was actually going to happen and I approached them to work on it and managed to get hired on it.
Jennifer Coronado:How do you get the chutzpah to do that, like you just approached? Hi, I'm Dennis. I want to work on your movie. What is it? What motivates you to get to that point? How do you get there?
Dennis Muren:You know, I was out of work, three months out of work. I'd always I'd ever seen before, and not knowing quite how it was ever done, that's where it was happening. And I said, okay, I'm just going to have to do it. And I heard John Deister, who I didn't know. I got their number somehow out there or probably from my friends that had visited George and Gary, and said, oh, that's not going to be anything. They probably had a phone number, I don't know, or maybe I called Gary or something, not knowing him either. But I tracked down where it was and just called up and they said, okay, come on in. And that's the way I remember it. Now Phil Tippett says he remembers hearing somebody who was working out there about him and said Dennis, recall this guy and try to get work out there. But I don't remember that part of the story at all, so I don't know which it was. Probably both happened actually.
Dennis Muren:So anyway, I ended up getting onto the show and the good thing about it was, if I'd gone into a big Hollywood film it would have been lost, because all the old techniques, you have to learn them. All the gear, you have to learn them. Nobody knew anything about how this was going to be done, except John had an idea for the technology but none of us knew about. Literally, how do you move these motors with a knob, you know, and you may have 12 motors doing a complicated shot with all the camera moves and the model itself on a movie in front of a blue screen. You know 30 or 40 seconds to record one motor and then you got to do it for each axis and you put it all together and you want a really nice motion. That's got.
Dennis Muren:I always put in spaceships. I put a skid into them Whenever they're going, like airplanes do they sort of skid I put into everything. I do something you can relate to. I'll find something in there that makes it human, but it makes the programming of those stuff harder. But I picked it up really fast and I think it was because John Dykstra knew that I'd done stop motion. He'd seen the stuff I'd done and thought this guy understands unusual film speeds or he can do stop motion one frame at a time, but imagine, at 24 frames a second he could probably do this. John was absolutely right. So I really took to it and it took us all a while but I managed to do it. So that was it, and then I had four days off after that and went right into Close Encounters.
Jennifer Coronado:Well, that's a totally different speed of a film, right, star Wars is very dynamic and very energy driven, and Close Encounters is very contemplative and it leads you down a slower path. So how do you approach those, being a novice, cause you had just done one movie?
Dennis Muren:First of all, nobody's I'm not figuring everything out. That kind of is coming from direct the director, whether it's George or Steven, and the supervisor, whether it's John or Doug Trumbull. They've got a strong opinion on how it's going to be. Half the work had already been done on Close Encounters, so right away it's a lyrical movie, it's almost spiritual. It's all more illumination of light, slow motions on things. I don't have any problem doing that over Star Wars. It's not like Star Wars is who I was. The motions that was was just. You just adapt to the show and you learn over a time. Because anyway it wasn't. That wasn't difficult if they had everything worked out.
Dennis Muren:All I was really on, mostly on closing counters, was like a big babysitter. I made sure the shots got set up right, followed all the lighting stuff that had already been laid out by richard yersich and dougumbull according to what Stephen wanted. So it was six months of that to shoot. I don't know how many shots. It ended up being the mothership in the movie.
Dennis Muren:I had no idea that's what I was going to be doing. I thought I was going to be in the corner somewhere, you know, and it wasn't until a few days I realized oh, this is the end of the movie. Okay, that's, I'm fine doing that anyway. That was great. And meeting I never worked with doug before, of course, and but meeting steven was fantastic, so after jaws, you know. So I so in that short span I met both george and steven, two amazing filmmakers that were like about my age, they were all contemporary and they were all wonderful to work with. They all had strong visual opinions about things and they could just make decisions instantly. And I had a visual connection Because I think we all are the same age or we all grew up watching the same stuff.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah.
Dennis Muren:And even though they're writers also, they're also visual. That's why they want to get in there and make these visual movies. It was neat, it was neat.
Jennifer Coronado:It's really interesting because, going back to what you said earlier about taking pictures in the movie theater, trying to capture that feeling, A moment, just capture an image, something you could look at and you could study it.
Dennis Muren:You could look and see the composition, anything.
Jennifer Coronado:And, like you've said, it's not like you can do now and go on YouTube and freeze frame something and find like an old Godard movie, and go through step by step, like you had to capture it Right. All of you, as filmmakers at that time were doing, was like I'm capturing something, I'm capturing a visual, I'm capturing an emotion, I'm capturing so much so. Yeah, so you did Close Encounters, and then where did you go?
Dennis Muren:then we kept thinking. I was thinking george has got to do another star wars, but he was the same. I didn't ever see him after the show was over. I don't think I might have seen him somewhere, I don't know, but not on the sequel of star wars or anything. But we started hearing that he might do another one.
Dennis Muren:But I went back to work with john dykstra, who had not gotten along with george, and he was doing balisar galactica, which was all based on Star Wars sort of thing, and I'm thinking, my God, what the hell is this? And it's an amazing example of what Hollywood can do. You look at Star Wars. You've got a template for how to tell these stories. And you look at Galactica, which has some good things but also has some old things in it, and they actually have a template to look at when they did Galactica, but they missed a lot of it, of what was going on in Star Wars to keep that really going. So it was not a very satisfying six months that I was on that show, tried some really neat shots, though I was getting more and more visual and more aggressive about compositions. I did some very interesting things in it that I learned a lot about motion control. With that six months on Close Encounters, I had a chance to think about what we'd done on Star Wars and what worked and what didn't work. And I tried it on Galactica and really had it all figured out how to program the stuff and what you can be thinking visually, spatially, more than like sort of flat planes moving, like in 2001, sideways. It's more complicated stuff.
Dennis Muren:Along came an opportunity to go up north and I moved from LA then up to San Francisco and said goodbye to my friends and family.
Dennis Muren:I brought four or five of my friends up with me Tom Sanamon and Phil Tippett and John Berg and Ken Ralston and a couple others.
Dennis Muren:We all came up and worked on it together and that was the hardest show I've ever worked on and maybe the most. It might be the most satisfying I think so, but it was so hard and just rewarding because it went everywhere that Star Wars didn't go there were so many different planets with different types of effects on them didn't go. There were so many different planets with different types of effects on them and I was credited as the effects cameraman, but I was really an effect supervisor on the show along with Richard. So I decided let's do the stop motion, let's do the asteroid sequence. This way, I laid out my sequences, whichever whatever they were, and started at the beginning, really for the first time, being able to say starting with how I imagined the end result, backing up and looking at the technology and how then we could do it as efficiently as possible without breaking the bank and making shots that were like you had never seen before.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah, you talk about complexity. So, like Empire, jedi, complex shows, right, but you've worked on shows that had simpler things to solve, right, like where it doesn't have 15 different planets or it doesn't have a really complex effects sequence that you have to figure out. How do you shift your brain to solve the smaller problems and the bigger problems, and which one's more exciting for you? Do you find peace in solving the small problems?
Dennis Muren:I don't know. Everything has to look real and everything has to be compelling and on top of it, everything has to be emotional. So how do you make a shot emotional? Because the big advantage we got over photography is that we have time going by, so the emotion can change during the shot. So I tried to build all that into it, the simplicity. I had that all in Empire. I had the Walker sequence, which I consider a simple sequence. It was all stuff that you instantly figure out, with big backings and sets and stop motion, and that was pretty straightforward. You get the asteroid sequence. You can't tell what the hell you're looking at.
Dennis Muren:In the first few dailies it was so complicated visually it's like this is never going to work. I can't tell the story and then that's where you have to figure out how you move objects and light objects and fine framing to be able to tell that story clearly. So I go either way. You know it's something that could be really simple. I suppose it'd be like et. You think that would be a simpler show. Maybe it was, but we got into shots like that or that. I made sure, like the bikes are flying off into the setting sun, that the light in that looked like your memory of the moment, not like what it really looked like, but everything's heightened a little bit. The colors are a little bit more colorful, because that's what I think kind of movies are. Anyway, they're like your memory as opposed to a documentary and all the people working on them. They're all adding stuff too, so I'm going to add something that I think is going to help the show so I can shift back and forth between hard and easy easily.
Jennifer Coronado:It's interesting because I think about Stanley Kubrick's films, for example. He just does such intricate color mapping for mood in the work that he does and you know you have that shot in ET where it's the heightened reality and what a kid would feel like if they really were riding a bike up in the sky right.
Dennis Muren:Yeah, and what your memory is of it like just after it happened. What's your memory?
Jennifer Coronado:Do those ideas come to you kind of immediately, or do you marinate on them, or do you get those light bulb moments, or is it a combination of it?
Dennis Muren:It can be any of them. It's not like a dawning, like I have a checklist, okay, I got to figure the lighting out here. I mean, you know, you get into it and you say, oh, I see where this is going and it seems appropriate. Other times it's you just think this is the way you're going to put it into the film. But the thing is we've usually never seen the film in advance, so we don't know if we're right or not and I'll be on the set a bit and I'll be able to talk to steven a bit. But it's not. Like.
Dennis Muren:You know, there is the kubrick color design for everything like that. I don't think I'd even be good at that, so I see it more as a shot by shot thing and that seems to work. You know I I was to a certain extent copying Alan Daviau's lighting that he was doing in ET for the live action. So it all did seem to fit, but just doing this other bit to it that he probably would have done too if he was lighting something like that really big. So I'm aware of those things that are going on. But again, if you think about the fact that you've never even seen the movie, it's amazing that they all come together, but it's because we all think a lot about it. We all talk a lot about it too.
Jennifer Coronado:And the story drives it right.
Dennis Muren:It should always be, oh yeah the story, yeah, but the story certainly drives the emotion. That's where you want to get the idea. Okay, this does have to be an uplifting moment, has to be a satisfying but still dangerous moment, or this I'm seeing has to be a moment that looks like we're never going to get out of this. Oh, we are. Oh wait, no, we're not, and that's all going to happen in two and a half seconds. So and I'll try to fill in those things, because that stuff often the director won't even know what he wants in the shot he's done some storyboards. They're usually not in the board. The board will have an example kind of the camera view with some kind of you see the threats or whatever it is going on, the emotion in it. But how you fill up those two to five seconds is pretty much up to me and that's where I think all my liking movies and loving them and seeing them and feeling them and enjoying the reality of life and how it changes in relationships. I make sure that stuff's in there because it's opportunities.
Dennis Muren:It's like an actor's, the whole thing is opportunities. You've got five seconds to do something. You've got a two-minute shot. What are you going to do with it? What's an actor going to do with it. You're not just standing there saying your words, you're adding something to it. And most departments do it. Camera guys do it, I do it, actors do it, writers certainly do it, everybody.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah, I see it sometimes in acting performances where there's just a singular gesture that someone makes and it could be very simple and very small, but it's just the perfect moment and the perfect gesture for what you're trying to indicate in that scene. Everybody does that in their different roles.
Dennis Muren:And what you may not be aware of, and I'm not really aware of very much, is how that character is creating that whole role so that when they decide to do the gesture, it stands out. Are they big, are they small? Are they distant? For the entire role, for all the regular scenes, they're talking and listening. That's all a decision. It's so complicated what they're doing and then to think some of it can be figured out. They could have a script that's full of notes and everything, but ultimately it comes down to instinct, which it probably does to me and most people too.
Dennis Muren:Do you feel it as you're doing it and whatever? That's important, to have an emotional connection to yourself, and it's a goal. Maybe it's not a clear goal, or maybe the goal is not to be clear, but just for more of you are acting. Yeah, I don't go into much. I know some folks do, but it affects people do, but I don't go into it not knowing what's going to happen. I, some folks do, but it affects people do, but I don't go into it not knowing what's going to happen. I pretty much at the beginning, want to know what's going to happen and I may want to try this. We're not sure how it's going to play out, but I pretty much know the feeling. I want to get from it no matter, and I don't care how we get to it, and if it's a, their surprise is great, but not like a serendipity sort of thing at all.
Jennifer Coronado:Here's a question for you. Sometimes, when you're doing something creative particularly you're in a creative industry and you do it as your job right it can sometimes feel like a job and you lose a little bit of spark around the initial joy that you had around it. And have you ever hit that wall? And have you ever? And how do you overcome that? Because everything has its ups and downs, right.
Dennis Muren:Yeah, I think all the time. After doing Empire Strikes Back, I said that's everything I ever wanted to do in movies. That was it. But I didn't want to leave because I was enjoying it. And I got to Dragon Slayer after that and I'd never done anything. I love dinosaurs and stuff like that. I thought I'd love, love them by. Really it's neat to see them on the screen. But he got a chance to do something. So, yeah, that goes all the time.
Dennis Muren:You have to keep yourself motivated and the nice thing that we've got at ILM is I could pretty much do a show a year and the directors were often different, so you've got different challenges all the time and different people to work with and crews and goals and everything. So there is new stuff that you need to come up with and you want to, but all the time, yeah, I'd say I'm. I couldn't say how many times I went up and, oh, I've had enough, get out of here and I didn't like the way the industry was changing. But then you think about it. No, that's the way it is.
Dennis Muren:It always goes through changes and it's an amazing business to be in. Where are you going to be working with dozens and dozens of creative people that care what they're doing and want to get to long and they want to all add something to it and there's layers, so it's so complicated and it somehow fits and you get it all at the end and you think it's the end, but no, it's just the end of the day. And then you get all those pieces together and it's the end of that. And then you get all those pieces together and your movie's done and then it ends up in the theater and it's another end. You know it's great. It's a really amazing business to be in.
Jennifer Coronado:Well, and something's interesting too is like sometimes you work on something and you're so in it and then you finally see it as a whole and maybe you have some distance from it and you're like, oh, I hadn't even realized that about this movie, I created something that I hadn't even expected, based on what I was contributing to it, which is an exciting part of it as well. What do you do when a director and you don't agree on a pass?
Dennis Muren:You just do it. First of all you want to hear maybe he's got an idea that's really good and this is not your way of doing it. But if there's something you're missing, then I always bring it up and they'll always listen to me and they'll always say well, I want to try it like this and we'll go ahead and do it that way Always. I'm not going to go against anybody like that. Who am I? He's the director. He may see things where there may be an accident with it, you know. So I haven't had that.
Dennis Muren:I can think of any big argument about anything. You know it's because the directors, their job is much more complicated than what I'm doing. I'm just trying to get the daily done. I'm trying to get these great seven or six seconds or three seconds. They're doing that with 2,000, 3,000 shots of five versions of each of it, with all the actors and everything. They know all that. They know what they can save and what they can throw out and how my work can be cut or trimmed and put a certain way with a certain type of music and it'll work. And I recognize that skill that a good director and editor and score and everything is going to make my stuff look great, so I'm not hung up on just my contribution to it at all, it's the whole thing.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah, because it is a collaboration, right, it's an orchestra piece that everyone's playing their different parts in, so you can't but in some way.
Dennis Muren:We don't know what the other parts are going to do with it, and I'm fine with that. Maybe it's a jazz piece, yeah, oh, hey, look, he cut the end of that. Oh, he cut it in half. Oh, he cut the end of that. Oh, he cut it in half. Oh, my god, now it's telling a different story. It's better, you know.
Jennifer Coronado:So it's all sorts of things one of the fun things too, I think, you see, that is the discovery of accidents, right? Uh, when you make a mistake on something, you're like, oh, that's actually better. I'm glad I made that mistake, because now it's contributing. I wasn't expecting.
Dennis Muren:Could be. Yeah, I don't remember any of those, but I probably did have those. I don't have memories of those.
Jennifer Coronado:Are you telling me you've never made a mistake, Dennis?
Dennis Muren:I'm sure I have, but then I've got to turn it into an asset because we've got to get it done.
Jennifer Coronado:You've had a long career and you saw the transition from the more practical optical side of visual effects into computer graphics like Jurassic, terminator 2. And you talked about. Sometimes the changes in the industry can be challenging, but did you ever find like the technical evolution challenging, or was it something you're like all right, man, let's do this, let's go for it.
Dennis Muren:I have never been interested in the technology from the olden days, from having the cameras and loading the cameras and building this and getting the pyro right. I never cared about that. It's always been the image, the end result. That's why I had no problem adapting the motion control, because I was trying to fly little spaceships when I was a kid and they never moved right, you know, didn't look like they fit in the star field. The stars never looked right. So you know, when it came to to doing complicated and stuff that we were doing at ilm with 50 people or 100 people, the models you're getting you're better than anything I could do and everything is better than I could do. That's why the idea of being a supervisor or whatever they were calling, which is really we're directing, but the academy said we couldn't be called directors in the 1940s, so we're just supervisors. It's great to have that amazing craftsmanship and skill and all the art that everybody's putting into it and being able to manipulate it in a certain way, following the director's advice most of the time, but putting my own into it you'd be able to get whatever it is. It's just terrific.
Dennis Muren:But the tool didn't matter. It was frustrating, like digital. I think digital could have happened five years earlier, but it was slow. There was no film person, as far as I'm concerned, in there. There was championing the getting digital, like comping and digital rendering, to look real. That had a background enough to say this works and that doesn't work, and this works and that doesn't work.
Dennis Muren:So after the Abyss I took a year off, but it wasn't to do that, I was just worn out. I got to take a break. But of course you can't do that and I started reading a computer graphic book that was like 1,600 pages, made for doctorate degree kids going into computer. I didn't understand the word of it, but I understood it was not magic and it was. If you could specify anything, you could pretty much write a tool for it and do it. The fact you could have something 20 stops too dark or 500 stops too bright or whatever, you could do it digitally. It all depended on how bright the light was or how dark, and you were telling it how bright or dark to make it. Was it a laser light? It didn't matter, you could do anything with it. So I just said my God, that's amazing. I think I can. I'm not afraid of it. I think I can adapt to it as long as there's people that know how to do that. I think I'm gonna adapt to it as long as there's people that know how to do that.
Dennis Muren:I had people long ago say you don't want to learn this stuff, you want to be the boss of this. You know it takes too long to learn it. Whatever it is, this was photographer camera work. You don't want to be a camera guy, he said, you want to be the boss. I heard a camera guy told me that. So that's what I did.
Dennis Muren:Then I got in and I worked on trying to solve the input-output because we didn't have any way to After the Abyss. The work was so great we still had to do optical composites, which were not quite there. They're very hard. You almost can't do them. So I put all my effort in for a while to solve the digital problem, which we'd have something from Kodak that had the wrong specification. We'd been using it for three years to try to film it out.
Dennis Muren:Kodak was making this tool to scan in home photos that you shot from your negative camera and they had a resolution of 4,000 pixels, and that's why everything was going nowhere, because there was no hardware to store data that big. And that's one of the first things I questioned. I said why do we need that? Well, kodak says here's the document. So I said yeah, but that's a still photo, you know well, they will imagine on a big screen. And I said yeah, but imagine on a big screen going through a projector and it's shaking 24 times a second. It's blurring everything. So we did a test at 2000 and it worked and that whole problem went away. So then, which was major, that could have been five more years to solve that, but then. So then we went in and I just worked on getting the colors right and narrowing the color thing down and then we had no output device and I ran around and managed to track down.
Dennis Muren:I think it was a $20,000 unit made by management software for making business slides, and what it was is a really beautiful quality CRT, like your TV set, but much better than your TV set, and they had an Acme animation camera shooting on it, photographing that, and it was all in a box, three feet tall and a foot on each side and a plug-in, and you could buy it in a work and they were making it for business slides On a computer, somebody would make the pie chart and show how much your sales are going to be and you could give that to put it in this machine and it would, on the screen, make that image. And then the camera, which was normally actually meant to shoot movies, being an Acme, they were doing one frame at a time, saying I'll get you 500 frames or 5,000, and cut it up and you have 5,000 slides for the 5,000 salesmen that are going out, that need all those slides. And the quality was great. And I was thinking, my God, could this possibly the quality, the color, the granularity that you saw on a TV screen? Maybe it doesn't show on this because it's such a it's a military quality tube.
Dennis Muren:And we did a test of it. We managed to get a frame from something we scanned in the back of the feature and the thing worked and that was it. We had the input, we had the output, and ILM already had the middle part, the image processing, along with Photoshop, which we didn't really use for that, but we used a little bit, but that was it. I could put that into T2. And suddenly you've got stuff that there's nothing you can see. That's a flaw about it. There's no matte edge. You could look at it, composite it on the screen and change this and add that and make it better and embellish it and surprise it and add all this stuff, and then that, of course, led to everything else. Death Becomes, her was after that which was got into the skin, and then we got into Jurassic and all the other stuff afterwards.
Jennifer Coronado:But here's the thing you didn't have Google. It wasn't like I'm going to Google these things and figure out where I could find something, so how did you find that?
Dennis Muren:Well, I found them with what's called a telephone. A telephone it was not wireless, it was not wireless in those days, but it was asking around and I was real cautious. I thought if we're ever going to solve this, ilm should be the one that solves this. We were so much into the motion picture business I was kind of sneaky and I ended up talking to Ray Feeney, a really nice guy. Didn't know him. He worked at, was doing some of it, rhythm and Hues, but he he had the management graphic stuff because they were filming out of rhythm and hughes.
Dennis Muren:Commercials doing of tony the tiger and all that were all done with, you know, a cg, but it wasn't of human people and walking and it was was all like and you go to a movie theater and you'd see between the shows you used to have some crazy cg thing of the of candy walking along and a coca-cola. It used to be cartoons. But then for in the 80s it went into computer graphics and I kept looking at this saying how come we're not used to something like this? Does it work? And everybody was saying it'll never work, it'll never work. So anyway, ray didn't think it was going to work.
Dennis Muren:I don't think a manager of graphics ever thought it would be able to make a tonal image from black to white of all the colors necessary and be stable and not like some sort of flicker, you know electronic thing. That we didn't know from the way it was built, but the thing worked and they ended up getting a good SciTech award for it. They should have Management of graphics for doing that. For building that. I should have managed my graphics for doing that. For building that. I have always been on a crusade for the supervisors to be choosing the future, not the departments that they were into the future, because that could have been happening two or three or four years earlier. The soup's got to go in there with something they say they know from the shows. Right, that is needed. And if it's not there, figure it out.
Jennifer Coronado:And it's kind of like when a director comes in and says I have this thing, I want Figure it out for me, right. It's that sort of leading, that desire leads the innovation, right.
Dennis Muren:Right, or else the supervisor is going to say, oh yeah, I know, I know something like this, we did it on this show and know something like this, we did it on the show and you know we did that on that show and if we put this together, we'll have the shot. Great, really. Is that really great? Or do you have in your mind an idea like wait, that's going to look very familiar, I'm going to come up with something different. So you've got to have a goal, you know, and my goal was to it was the stuff to look like perfect and be infinitely flexible and, like my mind is.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah.
Dennis Muren:Or was?
Jennifer Coronado:No is One of the things that I've always thought is really interesting about you is you always have a really good sense about what an audience will forgive and where the focus really is in an image. But in your time working in movies, how do you think the audience's perception has changed and how does that impact things now?
Dennis Muren:On one hand, I'm surprised that there's so much weak image out there that the audience doesn't care about. The audience is now, but they never did Before. Suddenly they'd break into song at a dance number somewhere in Oklahoma or who knows where it was. It was never believable, right. But because we're in effect so much and most of the clients have wanted us to make it look really real that it doesn't seem to matter if it doesn't.
Dennis Muren:In a lot of films You've got to get 3,000 shots done. There's not the money to make them all perfect, and it could be that even to make it perfect you've got to slow things down. So the gravity is correct, or the character has time to respond when it hits the ground and gets up, or you have time to see the bridge breaking the right way or something that might slow the movie down. So it could be the director's got a point when he just says no, I just want her faster, I don't want her faster, and maybe the audiences don't care because they're just in another space. I just want her faster, I don't want her faster, and maybe the audiences don't care because they're just in another space than I am in.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah.
Dennis Muren:You know we all were. It's like just a change in the culture. I don't like it because I couldn't. I wouldn't enjoy working on those shows at all, where reality doesn't matter and you're almost like letters and words. You're just getting this done and this done that amount of time and boom and it's done, and just you know, put it together, perfect for AI to do that stuff.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah, what do you think about AI? What's your thoughts on that?
Dennis Muren:I don't know, who knows what it's going to do. I think movies and television and music are fashion, and fashion is based on how we feel about something three weeks later. I love this, I bought this Wait a minute and it doesn't seem so good anymore. Anyway, oh, look at that over there. There's something over there. I like better Climate changes. So things go in and out of fashion, and I don't know how their AI or I care if they're going to be able to keep up with fashion. It's easy to turn out scripts, I think, and to do effects nowadays how you do memorable ones. I don't know if a computer can do it. They're not our mind. It's not our mind, and good filmmaking comes from, I think, a human thinking through the way humans are going to react to it, as the story's told.
Jennifer Coronado:A lot of the stuff I see feels very yeah, that's a cool image, but what it's compiled together from a bunch of other things that may not map together and I it feels very flat to me like emotionless, and what I love movies is the emotion that you get out of it right are there filmmakers that you are excited about now, you having worked with the greats like spielberg and george?
Dennis Muren:You know I can't. I'm sort of so out of the contemporary stuff. You know I'm into like completely different sort of things. The stuff that the Dune guys have been doing, the work looks great. I like some of the Chris Nolan stuff is fabulous in there. As far as you know, I wish they would go a little bit farther than they do, but that's my taste on it. But I understand why the hold back or whatever. But they're great filmmakers, you know. And of course, steven and George and all those guys and Cameron. You know I can't pull anything out, but I, you know, I'll look at something.
Dennis Muren:I don't know if you've seen Tangerine. It's been out for a long time now. You know. Great vision, great performances, great writing. You know, on an iPhone five, give me a break.
Dennis Muren:And a lot of people thought, yeah, you know. And Sean Baker was saying, yeah, we're out there, we're shooting this thing and nobody you know the he couldn't even tell we were shooting stuff because the sound equipment was bigger than the camera so they could shoot on streets and everything. It's better, I think you can see it in the performances, you can see the reality in it, but it's uncomfortable for producers to try something like that. So they've got to have their comfort zone. Everybody's got to be protected because films are so expensive and if they're not expensive you're doing something wrong and they're not happy making a $3 million or a $300,000 movie.
Dennis Muren:The studios have always wanted to have big successes, but more so now, probably, than ever. So it's just a different world. On the other hand, anybody can make a film. I did my little film, you know when it's 16 millimeter, and I sold it and it played in the theaters and everything when I, you know, my second year in college summer vacation Back then, if you could do it. It's so much easier now to do it. So I'm always surprised that there's not more of that going on, but it has. It's picking up. More and more people are making indie films, really on the cheap, and I'm glad to see it and also there's so many perspectives that you can get into.
Jennifer Coronado:That, I think, is so interesting.
Dennis Muren:Try telling that to ai. Let's say I'm in a different perspective and you'll get into that. I think is so interesting. Try telling that to AI. Let's say I want a different perspective and you'll get a different angle change and that's all. I can see my perspective. Okay, angle. No, that's not what we're talking about.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah, I want to see somebody's heartbreak in an image, like I want to see someone in love, or I want to see someone being powerful. You want that feeling from it, and so that kind of brings me to my last question Is there anything that you want from a movie that you have yet to see? What?
Dennis Muren:would be your dream thing to see from a movie. Oh, you have to ask me after I've had so hard to think about that. I don't think so, you know. And I would think why. Because it's so easy, at least with my experience and my age, to visualize anything. I'm not in wow as much as I used to be. I used to be in wow. I've got to be able to do that myself, and I used to be in wow. Oh look, I worked on something that went beyond that, and now I don't even have to work on it. But the ideas I have, spatially completed ones in my mind, are, uh, you know so um rich already that when I see a big film that works, I'm very satisfied and very glad that whole group got together and managed to turn something out really big and great and they did it, and that those little things were terrific or whatever. But it's not so much a big wow to me because I'm still looking at it on the screen and I'm in your mind, you're living it.
Jennifer Coronado:Dennis, what are you doing, Aaron? Thank you for asking that question, yeah.
Dennis Muren:It was very simple saying goodbye to work. I didn't think it was, but I had been thinking about it for like over five years, preparing for it in 10 years, and what I decided to do is I wanted to go back to you know, when I was born. Right, you're born and you're five and then you get up to like 15 and you kind of that's a really exciting period of exploration. And then you kind of settled in something when you were 20 or something like that, and movies is one of the things I did. So I thought that's okay, here's the beginning chapter. Then I got the Hollywood movie, san Francisco chapter. Now I got my final chapter, which is okay, everything comes to an end.
Dennis Muren:What did I miss in that first part that I loved? And it was music. And I can't play an instrument. I can play the piano and I can kind of play a guitar, but what I loved was some classical music, but mostly really good pop that everybody would just that's the most ridiculous thing in the world From in the late 50s, 60s, into the 70s, into the 80s, into 80s, the synthesizers and I got a set of wearing out and nothing beyond that, and I wanted to understand it. So what I've been doing is I'm just totally into that and I can understand it now, and I'm not right. I don't even know if I'm going to write it, but I want to understand it, and the technology is there now to do it, whereas before you'd hear something, you have to like, kind of pulling out that piano. Can I hear it? Oh, it's going. I can't quite tell how that piano like is that piano line? I think is what moved me during this part of the song, but then it comes and goes. Well, now you can find all the piano lines, find any song has been broken down into karaoke versions by expert musicians just experts and you can buy them like 10 tracks, 15 tracks of karaoke versions $3. And they're beautiful reproductions, if you ever wanted to be able to figure out how music is made, and you can do it with classical some classical music in there too, the same thing. So I just I love that, because I loved it so much as a kid. I don't know.
Dennis Muren:My goal was never, though, to be a performer, and it isn't now, but I'm hoping to be able to maybe actually start writing some simple things. I tried that a little bit when I was ILM, but I just got too bonked with a show and couldn't and you know I didn't know time, no time to think about it. But now I have nothing. I sort of have nothing but time, which is not true but you're so busy, but I have a lot more time than I did when I was working. So that's what I'm doing. So I've got like 200 karaoke versions of 200 of my favorite songs that I've already got and I and just saying wow, that's unbelievable. So I totally appreciate musical. The musicians arranging writing which is almost incidental to the purpose of those guys were doing in the first place. They kind of work, but I guess it's the technical stuff and the emotional response from it.
Jennifer Coronado:That's so interesting because that goes back to emotional response that you had to images when you were a kid and now you have that emotional response that it. That's so interesting because that goes back to emotional response that you had to images when you were a kid and now you have that emotional response that you're pursuing with music.
Dennis Muren:Yeah, at full time, like I'd like to be. I was doing for 35 years or 40 years at ILM, right. So now I'm, I can do it to something. I was also doing it when I was younger too, so, and I'm not that there's a goal or anything like that, but it's just, it's amazing. It's like a whole new chapter of something I didn't even think if it had been for technology and all allowing people and people wanting to do this stuff, you know. And then I still would be trying to hear how this song was made and being, and you know, and I've got them all on track, I've got all mixers, I got the sliders, I mix them, I try different versions and everything. I'm going to go in and change bass lines and see does that make an additional emotional response? Have I made it better or have I ruined it? Right, but there's no goal in any of this, nothing like that, just for fun. The goal is just to move me, me get me like, wow, look at that.
Jennifer Coronado:And so it's looking three in the morning, oh my god, you gave us an hour of your time, dennis, thank you so much.
Dennis Muren:Okay, sure, good luck with your stuff thank you for listening to everyone is.
Jennifer Coronado:Everyone is is produced and edited by Chris Hawkinson, executive producer is Aaron Dussault, music by Doug Infinite. Our logo and graphic design is by Harrison Parker and I am Jen Coronado. Everyone Is is a slightly disappointed Productions production dropping every other Thursday. Wherever podcasts are available, make sure to rate and review, and maybe even like and subscribe. Thank you for listening.
