You obviously have had tremendous
success in the area of special effects. Have you always
wanted to direct, and if so, why did it take so long to
find this project?
I've been making movies all my life one way or another.
I really enjoy the process, and the vantage point you get
in being a visual effects supervisor is that you get to
work through the entire production process from the beginning
to the end. You're working really closely with writers
and directors and producers to figure out how you're
going to do this thing and you're in every single
department. And you're there through the end
with the answer print and the release print. It gives you
a really strong background in what the theatrical feature
film entails. I had been around actors and directors for
a long time and looked at how they work and it looked like
a lot of fun - you just have to be prepared.
As for why we weren't able to get anything going
earlier? I've been working with Jon Davison trying
to get some projects going. The short version of the story
is they were all too weird in Hollywood. We did a pretty
good job pulling together some really interesting talent
- we had gotten some scripts together with Martin
Amis and Alex Cox and Jon and I wanted to do Mars Attacks
long before Tim Burton, but it was too weird. Martin did
a terrific script, but Hollywood didn't think it was
funny. It was actually hilarious. But when you're
pitching against corporate culture and a market economy,
they didn't think it was very funny.
We tried pitching some things with Pulitzer Prize-winning
author Michael Chabon, but everybody thought it was too
weird. So this was the only hook that anybody bit on when
Jon went to Sony and proposed that we do this direct-to-video
Starship Troopers and they thought it was a good idea.
Was there anything in particular that appealed
to you about doing a sequel to Starship Troopers?
I liked the first movie. I understood the milieu. I knew
immediately what it was. I'm very good friends with
Jon Davison and we are on the same wavelength all the time.
We decided that the first thing we'd do was once the
studio was interested in our ideas was to figure out if
there were any. Ed and I sat down for a weekend to see if
we could come up with a story, and strangely enough, by
the end of a couple of days batting around a couple of ideas,
we came up with the story we have. We thought we could do
something with it.
Your budget was a little smaller on this one, yes?
Kind of (laughs). It depends on who you talk to. Some
people say that the original was between $90 and $100 million,
and ours was just under $6 million. It's a big difference.
The limited budget - as the film buffs we are, we
immediately realized that this had to be a horror film.
We always said that if Starship Troopers was Aliens, this
one was Alien. It wasn't going to be as good as a
Ridley Scott picture, but it was going to be 10 Little Indians
in a haunted house. That was just a given. We started from
that premise and realized that we weren't going to
have something that was spectacle upon spectacle upon spectacle.
We have to deliver that, as well, but we had to be conscious
of what we could do.
Did you ever talk to Verhoeven about the film?
He was my spiritual guide and mentor on the thing. I consulted
Paul quite a bit. I'd call him on the phone and give
him my ideas and ask him if they held water. He'd
give me advice and would tell me if I was going up shit
creek or not.
The first film had a lot of political subtext
to it. Was that something you wanted to focus on the second
time out?
Certainly not as much as Paul. His picture was much more
idea-oriented than mine. I don't think horror completely
serves that. I was more interested in some bigger Lovecraftian
themes rather than political stuff within the Federation,
but the central thesis was certainly borne out of the first
film: War turns us all into fascists.
My idea was a bit of a skew on that. I've been reading
some Barbara Enright (?) books - one called Blood
Right. It hypothesized that the Richard Dawkins (?) idea
that when you're culturally created, you can become
stronger than the culture itself and this could be a dangerous
thing that leads to war. We tried to pin these ideas -
these bugs that could get inside you was a metaphor for
that. We tried to create a kind of family that you liked
and then watch them get infected and have them become other
kinds of people.
That was an interesting aspect of it. And we wanted to
carry through with the idea from the first picture that
the Federation was saying one thing and doing another. We
attempted to illustrate that with Dax, the man who denied
the person he actually was, which was a hero. In the end,
the person he didn't want to be was used by the Federation
to advertise against the identity of the individual and
get people to go to war.
It's very timely. Was the studio ever squeamish
about any of this?
Strangely enough, not. The war started right as we were
starting to shoot. That kind of stuff is kind of buried,
though - it's very much subtext and it's
there, but it's mostly handled in the execution and
not so much on the page.
Was this always planned as a direct-to-DVD project?
And do you think that the format has become the home now
for the B-movie?
Another reason we were having such a hard time getting
other projects going was that the bandwidth in Hollywood
is very narrow and it's assumed that sci-fi and fantasy
movies have to be of a certain budget to have a certain
kind of a spectacle factor. That makes it very difficult
for people to be interested in doing lower-budget kinds
of things. The problem with advertising and marketing is
just that it costs them an inordinate amount of money -
$30 or $50 million. So if you make a $1 million movie that's
really good, it's going to cost you $51 million to get it
out.
So people are really worried about it - they want to do
these tent pole things and they end up costing $200 million,
and those aren't fun to do. George Lucas said it wasn't
like making a movie, it was like going to war. There's all
this stuff you have to carry along with you.
But the DVD market - television was difficult. I
looked into doing stuff for television, but the money wasn't
there and the production matrix was terrible, so this opportunity
came up and we thought we could make a B-movie, if we did
it right.
I was impressed with the visual effects here.
As an effects guy yourself, was it hard to stand back and
let your crew do their thing?
No. One of the things I learned and it's one of
my philosophies about making things in general, particularly
on something of this scale - where you put your effort
is in hiring people the best people you can on every level.
Once you've done that, your job is almost done. You
hire people and leave them alone. What comes out of that
is something that's much greater than any individual
part because you're getting something that you're
not expecting at all.
As long as everybody's on the right page, everyone
brings their own interpretations to it. I had no problem
at all. I worked very closely with Eric Leven - our
effects supervisor - we worked together on Starship
Troopers. We have a very good communication and I trusted
him and let him do the work.
What was the transition from practical effects
to CGI like for you as an effects artists trying to make
a living?
At that particular time, that was my craft that I grew
up loving. That was a horrific adjustment because all I
could see was the apocalypse and the end of the world. That
was one of the darker moments in my life. But things like
this come around a lot and what appeases you after a while
is that you have to reinvent yourself a lot in life -
not once, but three or four times. You have to account for
everything, pick up and move on.
In retrospect, it was the best thing that could happen
to me, because it forced me to think about something that
I really liked, which was hands-on work. I wanted to be
more involved with the conceptual and managerial sides of
things that left more focus on directing.
Do you think any of the old school practical visual
effects ethic will make a comeback?
One of the reasons is that sometimes schedules are really
tight and you have to move on very quickly. If you have
a complicated big practical effect that could be accomplished
a different way - or if the practical effect doesn't
work - then you're completely screwed. You have
to shut down. Whereas if you address it in post, it's
generally not as problematic. But there are things that
make no sense to do digitally. In Starship 2, we got lucky
and had Michael Lantieri do all the floor effects and you
can't live without that stuff. You can't make
a movie without it.
Overall, the use of digital stuff is shoveled on and it's
become kind of boring, but that's typical of most
technological revolutions, especially in cinema. You look
back and there were great effects in some silent movies,
but when sound came around they were all shitty. Then they
came up with color. There were a lot of great black-and-white
movies made before then and there were a lot of shitty color
movies.
We're in that boat now with visual effects. You look
back and say, "Remember the flying logo?" Yeah,
that was cool for about a year and then seven years later…
Now it's, "Hey - 10,000 guys charging
and killing each other!" It was cool the first time
you saw it, but now it's just another 10,000 guys
(laughs).
These movies that are made on blue screen stages certainly
lack something. You see it when you're on a set with actors
and the actors really do become inspired sets and all the
things around them, so if there's just a fake blue card
there, that's not a whole lot to be inspired by.
What's next for you?
Jon and Ed and I are working on a couple of ideas that
we should be able shop around by the end of the summer and
see if anybody wants to do them. There appears to be some
interest in doing Starship Troopers 3, actually. We'll see.
•••
Special thanks to Christian Reichert and all at Columbia
TriStar Home Entertainment. All images copyright Sony Pictures.
All rights reserved. |
