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Super 8 ILM VFX Master Dennis Muren Talks Spielberg, Going Back to 70s

by Anne Thompson
June 20, 2011 8:40 AM
2 Comments
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Thompson on Hollywood
Dennis Muren is the godfather of visual effects artists. Hired by George Lucas in 1976 to work on Star Wars and help launch Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), he went on to make the key breakthroughs that led to where VFX are today. Muren has won nine Oscars, including Visual Effects awards for Jurassic Park, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, The Abyss, Innerspace, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Return of the Jedi, E.T., and The Empire Strikes Back. He masterminded everything from the miniature dogfighters in Star Wars to the first fully CG larger-than-life Hulk.

Muren delivered the first photorealistic CG character (the stained-glass knight in Young Sherlock Holmes) and first morph (the old woman turning into a tiger in Willow), before pushing it even further, after taking off a year in 1989 to learn to use a Macintosh and Photoshop. That's when Muren helped take ILM's photo compositing -- combining separate visual components into one shot -- into the digital age, making possible the morphing waterpod in James Cameron's The Abyss and T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

His relationship with Steven Spielberg is especially close; he delivered E.T.'s flying bicycles, not to mention the then-seemingly impossible dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and the destructive effects in The War of the Worlds. "When I decided to make the movie," Spielberg told me for a VFX feature in Wired, "Muren was one of the first people I called."

So it was no surprise that producer Spielberg and writer-director J.J. Abrams turned to Muren to help them out on Super 8. In my Skype video interview with Muren, he digs into the details of how they delivered the train sequence (clip below) and designed the monster, as well as problems facing the VFX industry.

Here's a six-minute MSN clip from the beginning of Super 8.

Part One:

Part Two:

Super 8 train wreck:

[Photo of Dennis Muren and E.T. by Art Streiber, courtesy of Wired.]

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More: Awards, Directors, Genres, Studios, Video, Interviews, Oscars, Steven Spielberg, J.J. Abrams, Sci-fi, Paramount/Vantage/Insurge/CBS, Trailers

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2 Comments

  • chintan | June 23, 2011 11:54 AMReply

    Awesome .



    http://nextworldstudio.blogspot.com/

  • Jeffry Martini | June 21, 2011 10:43 AMReply

    Dennis Muren IS NOT the "Godfather of (modern) visual effects artists"....it's Doug Trumball who did 2001, A Space Odyssey" and assisted John Dykstra (who headed up SPFX) on "Star Wars" and assisted Dennis Muren on the 1st "Star Trek" (1) feature. Dennis IS a Great Artist and deserves adulation as do all the above mentioned genuine SPFX Stars including Richard Edlund!

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