Modern Mages: Phil Tippett

Posted by Steve in Interviews, Latest News, The Magic Lantern - Steve Weintz on November 27th, 2009

Famous Monsters is immensely pleased to launch The Magic Lantern’s “Modern Mages” interview series with a conversation with Phil Tippett.

We met at Tippett Studios’ Main Building in a active, funky mixed-use neighborhood in Berkeley, where PR rep Lori Petrini gave me a quick but thorough tour of the various departments. What struck me while studying the many sculptures, puppets, models and sketches adorning the lobby, and later when screening the house demo reel, was the quiet ubiquity of Tippett Studio’s work.

Most of us will remember Phil’s tour-de-force from days gone by, the tauntauns and the Hoth ice battle from 1980’s “The Empire Strikes Back”.  A strong heritage of character animation has led the firm to deliver monsters, talking animals and zoomorphic machines in quantity to the major studios, and yet I was surprised at how rarely I connected the studio to its memorably impressive work.  This is no slight but rather a testament to the old-school competence and delivery of the company, much like the “Invisible Art” practiced by the great effects people of yore.

Killer drones before they were cool (or even existed) on “RoboCop?” Check. Talking pets in “Cats & Dogs?” Check. Squid robots in “The Matrix?”  Check.  Bugs in “Starship Troopers?”  Check.  Biggest. Movie. Monster. Ever. “Cloverfield.”  Check.  And then there’s the werewolves of “Twilight: New Moon” and the horror of “Drag Me To Hell”, just to note some current work.   When we sat down to talk in a screening room, Phil Tippett seemed satisfied with his work and his team, and happy to talk shop.

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FM: Please talk about your connections to Forrest J Ackerman and “Famous Monsters of Filmland.”

PT: Well, Uncle Forry was the man, such a sweet, generous guy.

I grew up down in San Diego, where the only other guy I knew who was into sci-fi and stuff was a friend of mine named Greg Bear, who’s now a successful science-fiction author.  After I graduated from art school I went to work at a little studio called Cascade Pictures, where I worked with Jim Danforth, Dennis Muren, Dave Allen and Harry Walton and others.

We all loved Ray Harryhausen’s movies, and somehow we wound up getting invited up to the Ackermansion to meet Ray H. when he was in town, and to hang out and gawk at Forry’s amazing houseful of cool stuff.   There were film fests there, and I remember meeting Richard Corben at one in the late 60’s.  He showed us a tracing-paper animatic of what would become his “Den” comic.

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FM: What were and are the greatest artistic influences upon you?

PT: Stop-motion? Ray Harryhausen.

It all began with Ray and his work, and he was the most accessible of the “old masters,” well, I mean, Obie was no longer with us by then.

I’m an omnivorous consumer of culture. William R. Stromberg, an independent filmmaker, was my mentor (I helped Bill on his 16mm production of Ray Bradbury’s Sound of Thunder) and through him I met Jon Morgan, who now works with Bill’s son reconstructing motion picture scores for some of the classic Steiner & Korngold pictures. It was through John that I became interested in classical music as introduced through motion picture scores.

Reading?  H. G. Wells, Jack London, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. P. Lovecraft…standard boilerplate stuff. (grins)

I collect lots and lots of periodicals — “Forensic Pathology,” “New Scientist,”"National Geographic,” “Newsweek,” “Art Forum” and so forth. At the end of the year I plow through this pile and make clippings – mostly pictures, some articles.  It fills my “unconscious sandbox.” It’s a way of staying in touch.  I have tons of files, and I can go back to the old ones and look across all the media.  If I have time I start organizing them into collages and finding images in them; sometimes they go into scrapbooks.  I also go to movies, and to art shows, but I don’t track pop trends all that much.  The major studios do that.

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FM: What interests you today in SFX and sci-fi/fantasy/horror filmmaking?

PT: Well, what’s NOT being done, really.  Most of the stuff being done today is pedantic and uninteresting.  Like late-19th Century symphonic music; a Bruckner symphony never ends…

The potential is really terrific.  The problem is, it’s no longer one guy in a dark little room.  It’s huge barns full of people and millions of dollars.  To justify the costs the product must have the broadest appeal, hence the most homogenized results.  We’re in franchise mode for a while, I’m afraid.

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FM: I wanted to ask about a shot in Sam Raimi’s “Drag Me To Hell.” A young woman is dragged down into a hellish hole between some railroad tracks.  I understand that was a miniature shot rather than CGI.

PT: Yeah, I suggested that they might just as easily do the shot with a miniature as with CGI, and the old-school effects worked great.  But what I thought was interesting is that they shot each element separately, rather than all at once in one take like we had to do back in the day.  That seemed weird, except that now you have to shoot that way, in order for the shot to remain malleable.  Nothing is locked down now; the studios, producers and directors want to be able to change everything later.  And that requires lots of separate elements, barns full of people and lots of money.

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FM: If you could resurrect a lost, abandoned, never-made film project, what would it be?

PT: I’ve got drawers full of stuff that I want to make! I don’t need to go looking for any.

I love irony and black humor, but when it comes to putting up money no one knows how to sell those qualities.  These days there isn’t demand for ‘just some’ effects — it’s either pedal-to-the-metal or none at all.  It’s great to get an occasional “Cloverfield” job, where we can apply ourselves without blowing out the screen.  In “New Moon“ we’re doing some 60 special-effects shots,  mostly only the werewolves.  In “Jurassic Park” 60 shots was the sum total of ALL the dinosaur effects shots, and it left the audience wanting more.

Once I’m finally forced into retirement I have some things I want to try.  When I left ILM in the 1980’s I made a little film called “Prehistoric Beast” in my garage, for the educational and fan markets.  The staff here are scanning and printing the old film now.  In the late 80’s – early 90’s I shot some material I called “Mad God.”  I’d been reading a lot of surrealist literature and this was an attempt to animate some primal myths in the odd, almost infantile mode of expression I found in those books.  I abandoned the project when CGI came along, but again we’re now restoring and rescanning the original.

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FM: Thanks, Phil, for your time and enthusiasm.

PT: Thank you guys for bringing “Famous Monsters” back!  Keep up the good work!

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