The Filmumentaries Podcast

John Maclean is the writer and director of Slow West and Tornado. Two films that I saw on release and enjoyed both. I've seen John talk on stage a few times about his films. I also ended up having a chat with him at the BFI before an event and then again afterwards in the green room. So when the opportunity to interview him came along, it said "yes!". John was born just four years before me so we share a love for a lot of the movie we grew up watching.John grew up in a small Scottish village with two artists for parents, in a working-class factory town where his family were the odd ones out. He wasn’t academic. He scraped through every exam that wasn’t art, and by sixth year he and the one other like-minded kid in the school had quietly dropped everything else and were just building portfolios.His film education came from the local video shop, which stocked Terminator, Robocop, Predator and Die Hard, and from working Edinburgh cinemas while he was at art school. The turning point was Tarantino coming to the Cameo with Reservoir Dogs and standing there talking about B movies and John Carpenter. His line is that these were the films he’d been ashamed to love. After that it was Scorsese, then whoever Scorsese liked, then whoever Kurosawa liked, and on it went.Then came the band (The Beta Band), more or less by accident. A sampler, a four track and a record collection in a Shepherd’s Bush flat turned into a demo and then a deal. He walked into the first record company meeting and said he wanted to do the sleeves and the videos. Rather than one video for forty grand, he’d make ten for four grand each. The band wouldn’t act and wouldn’t take direction, so he had to storyboard everything, and that discipline never left him.We get into storyboards as the final stage of writing rather than the first stage of shooting. Shooting a short on a phone with Michael Fassbender because he knew nobody and didn’t want a crew. Getting rejected by every festival going before London took it. Slow West nearly coming apart in the edit before it won Sundance. Populating the American West with Germans, Scandinavians, Irish and Scots. Casting faces rather than bodies. Two perf 35mm on Tornado, twenty-five days, forty to fifty setups a day. And why he thinks television has ruined our tolerance for not knowing everything about a character.Timestamps00:00 Two artists for parents, in a factory town
02:18 Not academic, and the one creative kid in the school
05:01 Dropping every subject except art
06:35 The video shop: Terminator, Robocop, Predator, Die Hard
07:57 Art school, the Film House and the Cameo
08:58 Tarantino at the Cameo, and the films he was ashamed to love
09:27 Scorsese to Kurosawa to Mizoguchi
12:04 Moviedrome, Assault on Precinct 13, and the BFI with Alex Cox
13:03 Watching films again as a director, then as a writer
14:41 Why Hollywood films didn’t seem makeable
15:35 An MA in painting, the Gate Cinema, and a sampler
16:31 Walking into the record company asking to make the videos
17:03 Ten videos for four grand each
17:32 Realising he preferred the videos to the music
19:12 Storyboarding because the band wouldn’t act
20:48 Storyboards as the last stage of the script
21:46 Pitch Black Heist, Slow West and shooting the boards
23:10 Tornado: redrawing the boards as the budget shrank
24:49 A direct line from concept to screen
25:28 Robbie Ryan, and the rules: deep focus, don’t move the camera
26:17 How little gets said on set
27:29 Studying the short form, and not rushing to a feature
29:02 Knowing nobody, and a coffee with Fassbender’s agent
30:56 Man on a Motorcycle, shot on a phone
31:26 Rejected everywhere, then London
32:30 Film4, Pitch Black Heist, and Fassbender’s offer
33:30 Slow West: New Zealand, and years of prep
34:50 A decent budget, and a much tougher time on Tornado
35:52 The edit going wrong, and nearly losing the film
39:03 John Gregory, rhythm, and being thrown out of the room
41:01 Why a Western, and why nobody was making them
42:33 The real West: Germans, Scandinavians, Irish and Scots
43:19 Reading Hawthorne, Twain and Bierce instead of the mythology
43:57 Avoiding pastiche, and knowing a genre to subvert it
46:59 Casting: no gym bodies, and Leone’s faces
48:17 The actor who played Weasel with a blank stare
49:37 Tornado: no juicy role for an A-lister
50:34 Refusing to inflate the Tim Roth part
51:39 Casting Kōki off a single Zoom
54:12 Takehiro Hira, and research as the reason he said yes
55:35 Stripping out backstory and exposition
56:41 Thin characters, Boba Fett and The Penguin
58:05 James Bond, and knowing too much
58:44 Slow West on digital, Tornado on two perf 35mm
60:25 Shooting as if it’s film, even when it isn’t
61:18 Film as value for money in the edit
64:41 Jed Kurzel, and giving a composer rules
66:10 Editing without music, and a test screening that went wrong
67:30 Writing the next one, and not chasing quantity
69:06 Second features in Britain
70:21 Every film takes someone years

This podcast is completely independent and made possible by listener support. If you’d like to help me keep making these episodes, you can join my Patreon community here: https://patreon.com/jamiebenning

Watch more on YouTube:
Check out the Filmumentaries YouTube channel for behind-the-scenes clips and extra content: https://youtube.com/filmumentaries

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John Knoll is Chief Creative Officer at ILM and visual effects supervisor on The Mandalorian and Grogu, the first time Mando and Grogu have been on a cinema screen. He describes two forces pulling against each other. It had to feel like it came from the same group of people who made the series, which meant keeping the handcrafted approach — puppets, creatures in rubber masks, motion control miniatures, stop motion.

But roughly forty-five per cent of the film is IMAX, and you compose and cut differently for a hundred-foot screen. Fewer quick cuts, more headroom, room around the frame for peripheral vision. IMAX had sent ILM a document about all this years ago. John decided simulating the room beat following the notes, so they built an Apple Vision Pro app that puts you in an IMAX auditorium, seats and all, looking at the live feed off the video taps.

They used it on set to check composition, and later to check animation and action scenes before they were finished. The stop motion went to Tippett, who spent the better part of a year animating a two-minute fight between Mando and two droids. The Razor Crest is a forty-eight inch miniature, double the size of the one built for the series, and John finally got to shoot it in an LED volume — built in part from panels salvaged off a decommissioned StageCraft stage.

He’d been chasing that since season one, when he tried building a foam core enclosure and projecting onto it. It sort of worked, right up until Favreau wanted the flight path changed. We also cover Rotta the Hutt, who turned out to be the hardest thing in the film. A Hutt who moves fast reads as funny on the page and is difficult to put on screen. Does he move like a snake, an inchworm, a snail? They landed on elephant seals, and then on a barrel roll.

Plus the cameras — a Sony ILX-LR1 for daylight exteriors at the Ranch, and a Canon 5D Mark IV out of ILM’s equipment cupboard for the interiors. Gaussian splats for the Razor Crest interior, shot in twenty minutes and used from any angle he wanted. Keeping a coherent look across five vendors with Doug Chiang riding the designs through post. And two shots containing an original 1976 Y-wing, on loan from the Lucas Museum for a single day, with two museum staff watching the whole time.

This podcast is completely independent and made possible by listener support. If you’d like to help me keep making these episodes, you can join my Patreon community here: https://patreon.com/jamiebenning

Watch more on YouTube:
Check out the Filmumentaries YouTube channel for behind-the-scenes clips and extra content: https://youtube.com/filmumentaries

All my links

This one's a bit different. It's shorter, and it's about a film that doesn't exist yet. Christopher Jacobsen is an actor and filmmaker, and full disclosure, the brother of one of my good friends. He's trying to get a documentary made about Daragh O'Malley, who played Sergeant Patrick Harper in Sharpe.

Daragh and Sean Bean were the only two actors in every episode, from 1993 to 2008. Chris grew up a huge Sharpe fan. In 2021 he and his filmmaking partner Marco sent Daragh a short film script. Daragh said yes, and a friendship followed, along with a lot of two-hour phone calls.

The spine of the documentary is Daragh's friendship with Marlon Brando. In 1995 the two were cast in Divine Rapture, alongside Johnny Depp, Debra Winger and John Hurt. Two weeks into the shoot the money fell apart and production shut down for good. Daragh and Brando stayed friends. Daragh took him for his first pint of Guinness in a rural Irish pub, kept his voicemails, and still has thirty or forty minutes of largely unseen Divine Rapture footage. There's plenty more.

Six months in a cabin with Hugh Grant and Bill Nighy on Grant's first job. Swapping Brando stories with Ron Perlman, who'd survived The Island of Dr. Moreau. Pete Postlethwaite brushing his teeth with lager on the Sharpe shoot. A family connection to Richard Harris. And the angry Irishman in the pub in Withnail and I. Chris is raising £7,000 for the first shoot.

That's a week in Ireland with Daragh, visiting places tied to Divine Rapture and his early life, and a week in London interviewing the people who knew him. The kit is already covered. The money pays for flights, fuel, a car and an extra crew member.

I've been on the other side of this. The Joe Alves documentary got to Martha's Vineyard and LA because people listening to this podcast chipped in. If you can spare the price of a coffee or a pint, send it Chris's way. Support the documentary Daragh and Brando on

GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/f/how-to-make-the-documentary-daragh-and-brando If you've got a question you'd like Chris to put to Daragh, about Sharpe, Brando, Withnail or anything else, get in touch and I'll pass it on.

Timestamps

00:34 How Chris and I know each other, and what the project is
01:00 A short film script, and how Daragh O'Malley came on board
01:58 Daragh's friendship with Marlon Brando
02:29 Divine Rapture: the cast, the collapse, the two weeks of footage
04:10 The Guinness, the voicemails and the unseen footage
05:02 Neil Sedaka, Shoreham Towers and a parrot called Vincent
06:17 Getting the stories on tape
07:15 How relationships form in this industry
08:15 Sharpe: fifteen years, and every episode
08:43 Jason Salkey, Brian Cox, Daniel Craig, and Pete Postlethwaite's lager
10:04 Richard Harris
11:05 Six months in a cabin with Hugh Grant and Bill Nighy
11:32 Ron Perlman, The Magnificent Seven, and swapping Brando stories
12:48 Theatre, sets and the bonds that last
13:37 The wish list: Barry Navidi, Debra Winger, Johnny Depp, Brian Cox
14:25 The Sharpe fan community and an archive producer from Facebook
17:26 The GoFundMe: £7,000, a week in Ireland, a week in London
19:48 Why these projects need backing
21:07 Withnail and I, and sending in your questions

This podcast is completely independent and made possible by listener support. If you’d like to help me keep making these episodes, you can join my Patreon community here: https://patreon.com/jamiebenning

Watch more on YouTube:
Check out the Filmumentaries YouTube channel for behind-the-scenes clips and extra content: https://youtube.com/filmumentaries

All my links

Sean England has been at Skywalker Sound since 1993. He didn't arrive as a foley artist. He came in on the technical side, in the machine room and the transfer department, back when everything went to analog tape and film was spliced on a Kem. He calls those years his film school. He watched sound get made from one end of a picture to the other, then became a foley recordist, then a mixer, then went through the glass and became the artist.

The show where he cut his teeth was The Clone Wars. There was one foley stage at the Ranch in those days, so he and Ronni Brown took the night shift and cranked the episodes out, learning to work fast and picking up the Star Wars tricks handed down from Dennie Thorpe and Jana Vance.He's very good on what the job actually is. An egg crack might be an ice cream cone. The sizzle in the pan might be a candle held under tinfoil. He's got a recording of a cattle gate on his phone that he still hasn't cracked, and then somebody gave him a metal contraption built for hanging blueprints and it turned out to be exactly the sound.

He picks up leather purses in thrift shops and holds them to his ear to check for creak. He puts shoes on and looks for a hard surface to walk on.He's a drummer too, and he came up in the eighties being told drum machines would replace him, so he has a settled view on whether sound libraries and new tech are coming for his job.We cover the anatomy of a foley stage, why the mixer isn't watching his hands, the weight difference between Marvel and Star Wars and Pixar, Lincoln split between a day crew and a night crew who had to match each other, grasshopper footsteps for documentaries, mic placement as performance, and the off-mic tricks he doesn't always mention to the mixer.

Thanks so much for your continued support!

This podcast is completely independent and made possible by listener support. If you’d like to help me keep making these episodes, you can join my Patreon community here: https://patreon.com/jamiebenning

Watch more on YouTube:
Check out the Filmumentaries YouTube channel for behind-the-scenes clips and extra content: https://youtube.com/filmumentaries

All my links

Ep 154 — Wolf Kahler — Colonel Dietrich in Raiders of the Lost Ark

For Episode 154 of The Filmumentaries Podcast, I’m going back to one of my earliest and most memorable interviews: a conversation with German actor Wolf Kahler, best known to film fans as Colonel Dietrich in Raiders of the Lost Ark.Kahler’s wonderfully imposing performance as the Nazi officer who helps Belloq search for the Ark is one of the many unforgettable supporting performances in Spielberg’s 1981 adventure. But there’s much more to his career than one film.In this episode, Wolf talks about his acting career, how he came to be cast in Raiders of the Lost Ark, working with Steven Spielberg and the cast, and his memories of making one of the most beloved adventure films ever made.It’s also a chance to revisit the making of Raiders from the perspective of someone who was actually there — and to hear stories from behind the scenes that you won’t find in the finished film.Wolf Kahler has appeared in numerous films and television productions, often playing German military characters, including The Dirty Dozen: The Next Mission, The Bourne Identity, The Remains of the Day, Charlotte Gray, Wonder Woman and The Great Escaper.So, grab your hat, whip and favourite archaeological artefact, and join me for a conversation with Colonel Dietrich himself.

This podcast is completely independent and made possible by listener support. If you’d like to help me keep making these episodes, you can join my Patreon community here: https://patreon.com/jamiebenning

Watch more on YouTube:
Check out the Filmumentaries YouTube channel for behind-the-scenes clips and extra content: https://youtube.com/filmumentaries

All my links

Brad Fiedel wrote one of the most recognisable pieces of music in film history, and he did it on a drum machine, a sequencer and a keyboard chained together with a computer ribbon cable, before MIDI was really a thing. The famous lurch in the rhythm is him hitting a button by hand and deciding the wobble was better than the fix. Years later Henry Mancini rang up wanting to record it with a big band, and the man writing the lead sheet couldn't work out the time signature.

There is a lot more to Brad than Terminator, and that's really what this conversation is about. He grew up inside his parents' school of the arts on Long Island, his dad a jazz musician, his mum a modern dancer who studied with Martha Graham. He spent years improvising live for dance classes, which turned out to be exactly the muscle a film composer needs, though nobody told him that at the time. He nearly signed to Columbia. He played keys for Hall and Oates in 1974 and jammed with the band that became the E Street Band. He was working with Arthur Miller and Vanessa Redgrave before James Cameron ever called.We get into temp tracks and why he never did his best work against one, when a scene is better off with no music at all, the direction Cameron gave him on the canal chase in T2, and the moment after the True Lies sessions when a small voice told him he was finished. These days his regular gig is writing musicals with first graders in Santa Barbara, and he's very clear that he gets as much out of it as they do.

This podcast is completely independent and made possible by listener support. If you’d like to help me keep making these episodes, you can join my Patreon community here: https://patreon.com/jamiebenning

Watch more on YouTube:
Check out the Filmumentaries YouTube channel for behind-the-scenes clips and extra content: https://youtube.com/filmumentaries

All my links

Episode 152: John Goodson (Part 1)

John Goodson is a model maker and digital artist who spent more than three decades at ILM. His credits span The Rocketeer, Star Trek: First Contact, the Star Wars prequel trilogy, Rogue One, and most recently The Mandalorian and Grogu. In this first of two episodes, I talk to John about his lifelong obsession with spacecraft and model-making, how he got to ILM, what the model shop was like at its peak, and the craft philosophy that has defined his career. In this episode:

• Growing up obsessed with Lost in Space, Star Log, and the making-of books that shaped his ambitions
• Writing letters to ILM at age 14 — and getting politely told to stop
• How a childhood friendship and a homemade recreation of the Battle of Hoth eventually led to his first visit to ILM
• The advice that sent him back to finish school — and why it was the right call
• Getting hired for one week on Body Wars and spending the first three days hiding in the model shop hoping nobody would notice
• What the ILM model shop culture was like at its peak, and what he absorbed from Bill George, Lorne Peterson, Larry Tan, and the rest of that team
• The 18-foot Titanic model for Ghostbusters II and learning to just start building
• The 33-foot Hindenburg for The Rocketeer — eight months of construction, a night shoot at a decommissioned Air Force base, kerosene running out of the holes, and a cherry picker at 25 feet
• The pasta trick, pancake syrup, and other unexpected materials that found their way into ILM shots
• Watching the digital wave arrive and feeling like parts of the machine were being taken away
• The transition to digital model-making and eventually finding his footing with Mari
• What it felt like to return to physical model-making for The Mandalorian — and what was hardest about working without the model shop around him
• The mechanical language of spacecraft: why weathering works, what Star Crash got wrong, and the disposable camera exercise that taught a kit-bash class to see the real world differently
• How the Razor Crest started as a 3D-printed assembly that couldn't survive construction — and what he did about it

Part two is coming soon...

This podcast is completely independent and made possible by listener support. If you’d like to help me keep making these episodes, you can join my Patreon community here: https://patreon.com/jamiebenning

Watch more on YouTube:
Check out the Filmumentaries YouTube channel for behind-the-scenes clips and extra content: https://youtube.com/filmumentaries

All my links

Ian Hunter has spent four decades building miniatures, supervising visual effects and thinking like a filmmaker on some of the most demanding productions in Hollywood. In this episode, he traces a career that began in a garden shed with a punched-up piece of German black velvet and ended up — via James Cameron, Tim Burton, the Coen Brothers, and Christopher Nolan — on some of the most iconic screens in the world.

Ian grew up surrounded by art. His father painted oils and acrylics, played music and did pastel portraits, and encouraged his three sons to make things — even when those things destroyed the materials he'd given them. The moment that really clicked, Ian recalls, was being handed a model kit as a kid and taking to it immediately. That creative instinct only grew stronger. In high school, he and his brothers were making Super 8 films, scratching laser effects onto the film with a pin and blowing up overloaded resistors for explosions. One of those films required them to fake-rob a local bank — and the encounter that followed, with the surprisingly enthusiastic vice president of the Monrovia Wells Fargo, led to a meeting with the mother of Rick Baker, whose work Ian had recently encountered in a traveling special effects exhibition and been completely floored by.

After drifting away from an aerospace course at Cal Poly Pomona and working in an acid bath plastics factory, Ian answered a classified ad looking for model makers — and on the strength of a modest portfolio, was hired the same day. His first feature was The Abyss. He and fellow model maker Jim McGee built the flooded engine room of the Montana submarine with almost no direction beyond James Cameron's bare-bones description, and shipped it to South Carolina having never seen a frame of the live action. The production was not without its disasters — Ian found himself entangled in the notorious wax crane fiasco, and talks about the valuable early lesson of knowing when to call something out before it goes wrong.

From there, a friend pointed him toward Boss Film, Richard Edlund's company in Marina del Rey, where a chance encounter with departing model supervisor Mark Stetson changed everything. What was supposed to be a one-week favour on a music video turned into six years. Working with Stetson took Ian from being a junior model maker building things in isolation to visiting sets, talking directly with directors, and understanding that miniature work only succeeds when it becomes invisible — just more shots in a movie, telling the story rather than showing off the technique.

Among the projects from that period, Ian talks at length about Total Recall — including the behind-the-scenes chaos of a scale miscommunication on the final day of shooting, a scene involving a little person that nobody had accounted for, and the moment he glued a Coke can to a model building because they were running out of time. That Coke can, dressed up and shot from the front, made it into the finished film. So did one in Waterworld. And Inception. And Interstellar. And, after the story apparently got around, director Fede Álvarez greeted Ian on Alien: Romulus by asking exactly where he was planning to hide it.

Ian built the suburb for Edward Scissorhands — deliberately making it more bland and mundane than real life — and talks about one of his proudest in-camera shots: the final view through the bedroom window and out over the snow-dusted neighbourhood, achieved with a 1:24 scale model and real snow shakers on the night. On Batman Returns he built the Penguin's zoo, and describes receiving one of his all-time favourite compliments from Tim Burton — who, after watching a pyrotechnics test, asked simply: "Where did you shoot this?" Not realising he was looking at a miniature. The zoo also gave Ian one of his best examples of a happy accident: a polar bear sculpture that was supposed to explode but instead toppled slowly sideways with flames coming out of its feet. Tim Burton loved it. The entire subsequent engineering challenge was figuring out how to recreate the mistake.
On the X-Files movie, Ian and his partner Matthew Gratzner built a collapsing federal building on a tight budget, referencing Oklahoma City bombing photographs for the detail of damaged concrete and exposed floors. The late Roger Ebert reviewed the finished film and said the sequence should have been cut — because it was too reminiscent of real tragedy. Ian reflects on that as a marker: they'd gotten past the technique and into the emotion.

The conversation turns to Christopher Nolan, with whom Ian has worked across multiple films. Ian describes Nolan as collaborative but definitive, someone who discusses a shot in depth and then tells you exactly what he wants. He talks about the liberation Nolan offered on Interstellar when he told the crew to stop following the previs — pre-vis is just a guy at a computer on a Friday trying to get the shot out the door, Nolan told them; if you can see a better angle, do that instead. The result was that the miniature crew started shooting faster, and a number of shots that had been planned as digital moved across to the physical side. Ian also describes the meticulous sun-angle calculation that went into matching the Inception hospital sequence — setting up models in a parking lot at a precisely calculated skewed angle to hit the exact quality of light that had been captured in Calgary on a specific date.

On First Man with Damien Chazelle, Ian had drawn storyboards before the first meeting proposing a documentary approach — cameras attached to the spacecraft, nothing sweeping or cinematic, everything either very close or very wide as if shot from another ship. Chazelle walked in and described exactly the same idea. They spent twenty minutes together going through the sequence, working to an animatic cut to music, and Ian went off and shot it. That shorthand — that moment of being in sync before the conversation has really started — is something Ian describes as central to how he has survived in an industry where so many practical effects houses have not. He's a model maker, yes. But more than that, he's a filmmaker.

This podcast is completely independent and made possible by listener support. If you’d like to help me keep making these episodes, you can join my Patreon community here: https://patreon.com/jamiebenning

Watch more on YouTube:
Check out the Filmumentaries YouTube channel for behind-the-scenes clips and extra content: https://youtube.com/filmumentaries

All my links

In this episode I chat with visual effects supervisor, second unit director and digital pre-visualisation pioneer David Dozoretz about a career that traces the entire arc of how modern filmmaking shifted from analogue to digital — and how, somewhere in the middle of that shift, pre-vis went from a curious side experiment to a fundamental part of how films get planned and shot.

David talks about growing up in Phoenix, falling in love with cinema the day his sister snuck him into the projection booth at the Cine Capri during The Empire Strikes Back asteroid sequence, and how a chance encounter with a Lucasfilm coffee-table book in a university bookstore set him on the path to ILM. He arrived at ILM in 1991 as an intern, became known as "the computer nerd in the art department and the art nerd in the computer department," and ended up bridging the gap between the two as digital began to take over.

We get into his first feature — the original Jurassic Park — his year-long apprenticeship in the legendary ILM art department alongside Doug Chiang, Ty Ellingson, Harley Jessup, Mark Moore and Stefan Dechant, and the time he had to split a $1,400 piece of 3D software into two $700 purchase orders to get round ILM's general-manager sign-off threshold. It's a small story but it tells you everything about the era — digital tools were arriving faster than the institutions running things knew what to do with them.

A big part of the conversation focuses on the early years of digital pre-visualisation. David did the first major digital previs sequence in mainstream cinema — the train and helicopter sequence in Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible, the work John Knoll asked him to do that's now credited as one of the reasons the sequence got greenlit. From there he went on to spend four years working with George Lucas on The Phantom Menace, building the entire pod race in previs (a 25-minute version that almost no one has ever seen got whittled down to the 9-and-a-half-minute final), establishing his now-famous three rules of previs (no textures, no motion blur, no shadows) and then immediately having to break all three of them to convey the sense of speed and floating in the pod race itself.

There are some lovely George Lucas stories too, including the time George walked into the editing room and reacted to David's droid-factory post-vis with "honestly, I was a little worried about that one — looks like it's gonna work," and the moment when George trailed off mid-sentence trying to describe a desert landscape and David — a 21-year-old kid — finished the thought with "John Ford?", which David thinks is the moment Lucas decided he could trust him. Later in the conversation we move into David's own company, Persistence of Vision, and his work on Titan A.E., Behind Enemy Lines, JJ Abrams' Mission: Impossible III, the 2009 Star Trek reboot (including the previs realisation that Vulcan being orange meant the costumes — originally designed to evoke 70s NASA — had to be completely redesigned) and Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D, where David served as second unit director on the first digital stereoscopic film and the production was effectively beta-testing the cameras Jim Cameron was building for Avatar.

We finish on Zafari, David's 52-episode children's animated series rendered almost entirely in Unreal Engine — one of the earliest large-scale uses of real-time rendering in mainstream animation, which saved 30% of the production budget — and on a wider conversation about AI, the future of filmmaking, the importance of human authenticity, and David's lovely closing thought: study the art and history of cinema, study the drawing, not just the pencil. The tools will keep changing. The language won't.

Topics covered

• Growing up in Phoenix and the Cine Capri projection-booth moment during Empire
• Discovering The Art of Special Effects book and the road to an ILM internship
• Joining the ILM art department in 1991 alongside Doug Chiang, Ty Ellingson, Harley Jessup and Mark Moore
• Bridging the art and computer departments as digital arrived at ILM
• The $1,400 / two-$700-purchase-orders workaround for buying 3D software
• Working on the original Jurassic Park as his first feature
• Doing previs for the Star Wars Special Editions (the dewback shots, Mos Eisley fly-bys)
• John Knoll asking him to previsualise the train-and-helicopter sequence on Mission: Impossible
• How that previs is credited as one of the reasons the sequence got greenlit
• Joining the new Skywalker Ranch art department under George Lucas
• Four years on The Phantom Menace and the 25-minute version of the pod race
• The three rules of previs (no textures, no motion blur, no shadows) — and breaking all of them to make the pod race work
• George Lucas reacting to the droid factory post-vis ("looks like it's gonna work")
• The Jake Lloyd head-turn morph that saved a reshoot
• Why pod racers go 500 mph in some shots and 2,000 mph in others
• The cinematographer who declared previs "shit" — and was overruled by the studio
• Founding Persistence of Vision and the move from Lucas to wider Hollywood
• Titan A.E. and the Don Bluth / Gary Goldman Phoenix animation studio
• Behind Enemy Lines and pre-vising aerial action
• Mission: Impossible III with JJ Abrams — the Shanghai building swing and the windmill helicopter sequence
• The Star Trek reboot orbital skydive — and how previs forced a costume redesign because Vulcan was orange
• Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D as second unit director, using Jim Cameron's pre-Avatar cameras
• Zafari, Unreal Engine, and saving 30% of an animated TV budget through real-time rendering
• The shift from analogue to digital to 3D to real-time to AI — and what stays constant
• Dennis Muren's wisdom on authenticity at the Jurassic Park wrap party
• Why a human premium will remain in an AI-augmented filmmaking world
• George Lucas, John Ford and the moment a 21-year-old earned a director's trust
• The advice David gives to young filmmakers: study the drawing, not just the pencil

Support the Podcast

This podcast is completely independent and made possible by listener support. If you'd like to help me keep making these episodes, you can join my Patreon community here: patreon.com/jamiebenning Watch on YouTube Check out the Filmumentaries YouTube channel for behind-the-scenes clips and extra content: youtube.com/filmumentaries

This podcast is completely independent and made possible by listener support. If you’d like to help me keep making these episodes, you can join my Patreon community here: https://patreon.com/jamiebenning

Watch more on YouTube:
Check out the Filmumentaries YouTube channel for behind-the-scenes clips and extra content: https://youtube.com/filmumentaries

All my links

In this episode, I chat with creature effects artist, puppeteer and digital pioneer Craig Caton-Largent about a career that arguably traces the entire arc of modern visual effects — from foam latex and animatronics to motion control, performance capture and full CG animation.

Craig talks about growing up on a sheep and cattle ranch in Washington State, being captivated by the 1960s Batman TV show and then Planet of the Apes, and teaching himself prosthetics from Dick Smith's Monster Makeup Handbook. After tracking down Dick Smith's address in Who's Who in America, he wrote a letter that led to a year of mentorship over cassette tapes and ultimately introductions to Rick Baker, Stan Winston and Tom Burman.

We get into his first job on Charles Band's Metal Storm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn, working on the Olympic alien for the 1984 closing ceremonies, sculpting barnacles on Cocoon, building Spock's seamless silicone ears on Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, undulating menacingly under shaving cream on Larry Cohen's The Stuff, and puppeteering Slimer's mouth on the original Ghostbusters. A big part of the conversation focuses on Jurassic Park, including the design evolution of the T-Rex, the helicopter convention moment that led to the McFadden motion base, the logistics of moving the full-size animatronic across the San Fernando Valley at night, and Craig's work as the Raptor puppeteer, including the now-legendary "head tilt" at the kitchen window that earned an on-set "It's like Alien, I love it" from Spielberg.

We also talk about Craig's twenty-year stint as the caretaker, or "doctor", to the original ET puppet, including the time the LAPD turned up at his garage door thinking he was running a crack lab while he was actually repainting ET.

Plus the story of how Stan Winston handing him a couple of SGI machines led, almost overnight, to him becoming one of the eight co-founders of Digital Domain alongside James Cameron and Scott Ross. Later in the conversation we move into Craig's animation career as a final layout artist and character TD at DreamWorks and Disney, with credits on Tangled, Rise of the Guardians, How to Train Your Dragon 2 and Turbo, and stories from working with Guillermo del Toro at DreamWorks. We finish on Craig's current role as Creative Director of the 3D Animation and Visual Effects department at the New York Film Academy in Burbank.

Topics covered

• Growing up on a Washington State ranch and falling in love with Planet of the Apes
• Famous Monsters of Filmland and Dick Smith's Monster Makeup Handbook
• Cold-writing to Dick Smith and a year of cassette-tape mentorship
• Arriving in Hollywood at the start of the "golden age" of effects
• First feature work on Metal Storm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn
• The closing ceremonies of the 1984 LA Olympics and Ron Cobb's alien
• Sculpting barnacles and cocoons for Cocoon (1985)
• Seamless silicone Spock ears on Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
• The Stuff with Larry Cohen and "undulating menacingly"
• Puppeteering Slimer's mouth on Ghostbusters
• Designing the T-Rex around helicopter flight simulator technology
• Working with McFadden Simulation on the T-Rex motion base
• Moving the full-size T-Rex across the San Fernando Valley
• Building a 70lb Steadicam-rigged Raptor insert head for Jurassic Park
• Using parrots as reference for bird-like Raptor movement
• The kitchen porthole head tilt, and Spielberg's "It's like Alien" reaction
• Using Kermit the Frog's voice on set as the Raptor performer
• Twenty years as ET's "doctor", and the LAPD crack-lab incident
• ET's arm in a rifle case at JFK a week after 9/11
• Motion capture experiments and blood-spread effects on Interview with the Vampire
• A flying logo on an Amiga, and becoming a co-founder of Digital Domain
• Working with Stan Winston, James Cameron and Scott Ross
• Moving into animation: character rigging at Disney on Tangled
• Final layout and virtual camera work at DreamWorks on Rise of the Guardians, How to Train Your Dragon 2 and Turbo
• Lunches with Guillermo del Toro in the DreamWorks canteen
• Pre-vis on the Total Recall remake with Len Wiseman
• Teaching the next generation at the New York Film Academy, Burbank
• The unique "intergalactic award" Spielberg gave Craig for puppeteering ET

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