Reacting is so important to the craft of acting.

When I was a kid, one of my hobbies was as model-maker.

In animation, you can often defer decisions or make changes later.

It's harder to get your second picture than it is to get your first one.

Ideally, you will never know that you're seeing a computer-generated car.

You can hardly turn around and not see something that was done in Photoshop.

Almost everything I've been paid to do was something that was largely self-taught.

Any tool can be used for good or bad. It's really the ethics of the artist using it.

ILM was the first company that I had worked at that had a computer-graphics division.

Eighty percent of my job is to ask the question, 'If this were real, what would it look like?'

I've always lived by the principle of find what you really enjoy doing and make it your career.

As soon as you take your hobby and make it into your profession, it sort of kills it as a hobby.

I don't have any particular loyalties to one technique or another. I'm just trying to use the best for the job.

I've been lucky enough in my career to have opportunities to revisit things that meant a lot to me in childhood.

Often if a picture is in trouble one way or another, there are ways to salvage it, through reshoots or whatever.

Visual-effects shots should flow into the rest of the live action, and you shouldn't be able to see a difference.

A lot of us got into the industry because of 'Star Wars,' and we all have this love of the original source material.

A lot of filmmakers understand that the work is done digitally, and it's technically possible to change it late in the game.

I certainly have opinions about things, but we're a service organization. Our job is to try and realize the director's vision.

You have to do what the story demands, but inside of those constraints, I try to inject as much realistic physics as I'm allowed to.

I just have this very simple idea about the rebel spies in the opening crawl of A 'New Hope' who steal the plans for the Death Star.

On every show, there's some amount of work that is brought to some state of completion - or even finished - and then cut out of the movie.

Having been a cameraman, I think about, 'Well, if this was real, how would this be shot?' I try to inject as much realism as much as possible.

I started off as a model maker, so the first part of my career was a model maker and then a motion control camera operator, so I shot a lot of miniatures.

When you are shooting traditional motion capture, it's a big footprint on set. There are, like, 16 cameras that are needed and constraints over the lighting.

Life's too short to be spending all your waking hours doing something you're not excited about. And when people are that excited, you can see it in the work.

'Baby's Day Out' is maybe not a great movie, but... No, I've enjoyed and learned things from every project I've worked on. That was an important step in my career at ILM.

'Pacific Rim,' for me, was a chance to touch on those old Toho monster movies. 'Godzilla' and 'Rodan'... and then 'Ultraman' and 'Robotech' and all those kinds of things.

Part of the process is always, 'Is there a better way?' We try to think through if there's something we can do better creatively or technically, or just is more efficient.

We were in an atmosphere in the household that you could accomplish anything you set your mind to. If you were willing to put in the hard work, nothing was beyond your grasp.

I've gone through a whole series of careers where something started as a hobby of some kind. Almost everything I've been paid to do was something that was largely self-taught.

A spacecraft cockpit interior is a set where there are a lot of little techy bits, control panels and graphics displays, and other things that are kind of a job to manufacture well.

I've been on lots of movies where we've done a lot of planning of sets - how much you build, and is this big enough, and will this get us what we need? - just with foam-core models.

When I was a kid, I built miniatures, and that was actually the first thing I did professionally in the film industry. It was a demonstrable skill that I had, so I worked as a model maker.

It's part of the culture at ILM and at Lucasfilm that the work is better when you collaborate, you know. There's this culture of open exchange, a wonderful ego-free sharing of ideas and talent.

There's things that you just couldn't do with an optical printer. Now, with digital compositing, most of the energy that goes into a shot goes into the aesthetic issues of, 'Is it a good shot or not?'

I came in during the era of models, motion control, and optical printers. ILM had just started its own computer graphics division, after the Lucasfilm computer division had been sold off and became Pixar.

'Phantom Menace' was a huge project. It was the biggest visual effects production ever done at that point, and it was a little scary how big it was and how many unknown technologies had to be developed to do that work.

As Lucasfilm is developing IP and we're working on our projects, we should be using those films to advance the ball further down the field and to make things better for the rest of the company and the rest of the industry.

I read a magazine called 'Cinefantastique' that had just come out with a making of 'Star Wars' issue. They had some very long and detailed interviews with a whole bunch of people at ILM. I think I memorized that whole magazine.

There's no reason to think Disney is going to stop wanting to make 'Star Wars' movies if there's quality and there's interest. It has unlimited potential. It has a huge number of characters, worlds... It's a massive playground.

I loved movies. In particular, I loved movies depicting places and events that obviously you couldn't have gone out and shot. It was obvious you were looking at something that had been manufactured in some way. I was fascinated by that.

Something we often struggle with on pictures is the right way to shoot live-action elements that are for an environment that's very complicated from a lighting standpoint. An example is a starship flying through an environment that's constantly changing.

There was a 3-foot-long model that was built for 'New Hope,' and then there was an 8-foot model that was built for 'Empire Strikes Back.' The 8-foot model and the 3-foot model are kind of different. A lot of the details are different between the two of them.

If you were a new guy at ILM, they put you on the night crew - my shift was from 7 P.M. to about 5 A.M. In my free time, I was working on an idea with my older brother, a software engineer getting his doctorate at the University of Michigan. Ultimately, it developed into Photoshop.

There are things that I am nostalgic about from the 'good old days.' I loved motion control cameras, actually. I love the way they sound. I used to do a lot of miniature work, and it's still warranted, but it's done less often, largely for budgetary, schedule, and flexibility reasons.

I have three daughters who grew up while I was working on the special editions and the prequels. They got to be big 'Star Wars' fans. And, you know, I would see them identifying with a lot of the male characters, and I just thought, 'Star Wars' could use more good strong female leads.'

There's a shot that I designed to try and illustrate the scale of the Death Star that's sort of framed in close on the equatorial trench as Krennic's ship is leaving. The camera's pulling back, and you start with it framed so you can kind of see those docking bays that are in that trench.

Every film tries to advance the state of the art, at least a little bit. Brand new techniques? A lot of them are just evolutionary: we're just building on something that's like something we've done before and just trying to do it a little bit better or make it a little bit more realistic.

Imagine a 'Mission: Impossible'-style spy or infiltration mission into the core, the very heart of the Empire's military-industrial complex, the most secure facility in the Empire. You have a small band of experts with complementary skills who, together, are able to do these amazing things.

Share This Page