San Fransisco: City Search MOVERS & SHAKERS The musicians and filmmakers who define our local landscape Phil Tippett considers himself a craftsman and speaks about his work with the low-key reserve of a man who takes pride in what he does, but knows it's just a job. Which sounds like a healthy attitude, but in Tippett's case it's surprising nonetheless. Since joining his friend George Lucas to create visual effects for the first "Star Wars" film, Tippett has lead a revolutionary change in the film industry. One look at his credits says it all: Tippett's work with Lucas and Steven Spielberg on the "Star Wars" trilogy and "Jurassic Park" was largely responsible for some of the biggest blockbusters of all time. Tippett also helped lead the charge from creating effects with models (he once built the miniatures for a forgotten film called "The Creature Lake Monster") to the current era of digital-effects spectacles such as "Starship Troopers." Despite all this Tippett prefers to remain behind the screen, perfecting his craft and inventing new creatures and worlds in peace. Still, with the universe from long ago and far away that he helped create finally making its way back to theaters, we couldn't resist asking him to take a moment to look back over his career. by Ken A. Miller CitySearch: Have you seen the new "Star Wars" yet? Tippett: No. I'm just a regular audience member. CitySearch: Are you looking forward to it? Tippett: Oh yeah. I can enjoy it for the first time because I'm not working on it. CitySearch: I'm sure you've been getting asked about it a lot, but is it weird having a new round coming out and not being involved with it? Tippett: No, not at all. It's very normal. I worked on them 20 years ago. That's over and done with--it's up to new people to do their work. But it's not for me. After three "Star Wars" films it was starting to get kind of old. After a certain point these things turn into something different--they turn into a franchise. Merchandising issues become more important than filmmaking issues. The expectations are so high that it's very difficult to invent new stuff. CitySearch: That could be taken as a thinly veiled anti-Ewok statement. Tippett: I wasn't too wild about the teddy bears myself, but that's neither here nor there. CitySearch: How much do you get attached to an individual project? Is your attachment to your work [creating the effects] separate from the film itself? Tippett: Usually the commitment is 200 percent, so you're just completely wrapped up in the details of the production. You've become a part of the production team so you're really wishing the whole project well--giving everything you can to it and hoping that, when you see the first cut of the picture, there's a movie in it. CitySearch: Do you have personal favorites in terms of the stuff you've done? Tippett: Oh yeah. Certainly the first couple of "Star Wars" pictures. Coming up here with Lucas when he was starting his whole organization was certainly a big life change for me--and a very good one. We moved out of Los Angeles to the Bay Area, which was my home to begin with since I grew up in Berkeley. We had a boss who was a 30-year-old millionaire who sort of let us run the garage. We were not supervised by adults and it was great. Having more money to do stuff for "Empire Strikes Back" was great. Then I broke away to form my own studio, with the "Robocop" [series]. Usually the first one is my favorite. I was able to help my friend Joe Johnston on "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids." CitySearch: Paul Verhoeven is such a different director from Lucas, Johnston, or Spielberg. Was he different to work with? Tippett: His worldview is certainly different than theirs. His relationship to the medium as a filmmaker is different. George and Steven are moguls, while Paul's more of a filmmaker. But they're similar in many ways. It's easy to communicate with them. Once you get to that level of talent, with directors, it's very easy to work with them. It's the younger, less experienced directors who give you trouble. CitySearch: Do you prefer that a director give you very specific instructions? Tippett: No. It's collaborative. I prefer when it's open because filmmaking is a collaborative medium. When it comes down to every single i to dot and t to cross, they usually don't know what they're doing. The better directors really engage you and make you a part of the process. CitySearch: Is it easier to create a fantasy world, such as "Star Wars" or "Starship Troopers," or to make something based on reality? Tippett: Everything's got its own trade-offs. [Even] if you're doing a completely fanciful space alien thing or a robot, you have to figure out the mechanics of what you've developed. Usually for an ambulatory thing that has a brain and arms and limbs, in reality these things have been developed over millions of years. When you have a pattern that's culled from a geologic record, as in "Jurassic Park" or the scorpion in "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids," then you have a clear pattern to work from, but you're stuck with the pattern. Then it's more a matter of deduction. In "Jurassic Park" it was more like scientific work--paleanthological reconstruction to figure out masses and volumes. We were looking at the behavior of modern animals to try and figure out the personality. But you make an alien bug, like in "Starship Troopers"--none of those things were based in any way on terrestrial insects, but they had to make sense mechanically and physiologically. A tremendous amount of design time went into figuring out the lengths of the joints and figuring out the footfall rhythms. CitySearch: You're in an interesting position because, given the type of movies you work on, you're such a big part of the final product. And yet you're behind the scenes. In many ways it would seem that you're as responsible for the final film as the director, since you're directing so many of the sequences. Tippett: There's an advantage to being behind the scenes because you can do things quietly and you're not being watched. Again, it's part of a collaborative project. I'm so glad to be able to see a movie all the way through from the beginning. We're usually involved right from the point where the screenplay gets Xeroxed--breaking it down--right through postproduction. It gives you a good overview and you really feel like you've contributed, no matter how the movie turns out. CitySearch: You started in the precomputer era and I'm assuming you're now completely computer-based. Do you have a preference for one technique over the other? Tippett: It's a love-hate thing with any technology or tool. I grew up pushing clay around and drawing with pencils and erasers. That's pretty much my preferred medium. The basic lexicon of film language had pretty much [already] been established in the 75 years or so before I got involved. So I really grew up with that mechanical-industrial approach to filmmaking and certainly understood that and had more of a relationship to that. A great deal of how we worked was moving three-dimensional objects with our hands, working on sets and being very physical. I'm not that wild about working with computers. As a human endeavor, I think it's not very good to sit in front of a monitor all day long and press a keyboard. But at this point it does allow you to do things you otherwise wouldn't be able to do, pictorially and production-wise. But I think we've got a ways to go until we find the ideal medium. CitySearch: One of the initial selling points for doing effects with computers was that it would be cheaper and easier-- Tippett: Nah, nothing ever gets easier. It just ends up being more stuff. The information that it takes to organize all of it...you just find yourself in meeting after meeting instead of just getting to work and plying a trade. It's still very much in its infancy, so a great deal of time goes into trying to figure out how the systems are going to work. CitySearch: What was your background? Tippett: [I was] just some stupid kid who saves up his allowance from cutting lawns to go buy clay at the art store. I figured out how to sculpt--learned volume and mass, all those issues. From there I took up photography and learned how to photograph the objects I was making. I never became particularly skilled or prolific in any one thing, but I kind of did all of them. Certainly a lot of folks were a lot better than I [was] at any one of them. I ended up being a pretty good animator in part because nobody in their right mind would really want to do that. Three-dimensional animation is an incredibly difficult thing--just physically and mentally draining. CitySearch: Do you ever look back at those old claymations and groan? Tippett: No, I'm more nostalgic and forgiving. It's more cute and mystifying that I would even do something like that. I don't beat myself up about it. CitySearch: You went down to L.A. to work in animation? Tippett: A few years after I got out of college I started working in commercials with a lot of people I had met in my teens. That's where I met a lot of people I still work with today. There was a small band of us that got together and created a little community in L.A. Then some of us came here with George and just sort of stuck here. Once Industrial Light and Magic got started I came up here to work with them and then broke away to found my own studio in Berkeley. CitySearch: It seems like the Bay Area has become a center for computer animation. Tippett: Yeah it's a mecca. Certainly you can follow the tributaries back to the source, which is George. CitySearch: Is there a collaborative relationship between the different studios? Tippett: We all have a pretty healthy respect for each other. I know all the guys at ILM and I always run into John Lassiter from Pixar. Now it's beginning to open up and the workforce is beginning to move around a lot more. Prior to the last couple of years each of the studios was kind of its own bastion and was protective of how it operated. They'd each developed their own techniques and tools they didn't want anyone to know. Now those walls are beginning to come down. It's just beginning to be like it was 20 or 30 years ago, when there was this substantial crafts field out there. CitySearch: Do you think the animation tools will eventually become standardized? Tippett: Eventually they will. Some things will prove themselves to work better than others. The main thing is the workforce--right and left, career counselors are telling people to become animators. The problem ten years ago was that there were only a hundred people who knew how to do this digital stuff. Now there's a lot more of a workforce to choose from. 5.20.99 |