Episode 1337 - Phil Tippett
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fuck nicks what's happening i'm mark maron this is my podcast wtf welcome to it are you new here are you here for phil have you come for phil
Marc:Because this guest that I have today is not the usual guest I have.
Marc:This is sort of like something Brendan and I talked about.
Marc:And he is essential in the history of cinema.
Marc:And what he represents is essential.
Marc:I'll explain it.
Marc:Let me explain that who I'm talking about is Phil Tippett.
Marc:And I'll get to that in a second.
Marc:So let's talk about I, you know, I've been doing comedy a long time.
Marc:And it's much longer than I anticipated, even being alive to some degree.
Marc:And I came up with something, it's funny, because it's rare that you out of nowhere delivered something.
Marc:I don't even know how to explain it, but I was like, oh my God, someone has to have found this before.
Marc:It's hard sometimes to talk about issues
Marc:Or or sort of controversial things in a way that's not either, you know, dickish or self-righteous, sometimes both, depending on what side you're coming at them from.
Marc:And it's just rare that you're given a gift of something from the comedy news where you're like, oh, my God, this is right.
Marc:This is the pocket.
Marc:This is like this is an angle that I haven't heard on something that everyone has talked about, but not enough men actually talk about this.
Marc:But I was just thinking about, you know, guns.
Marc:I was thinking about abortion.
Marc:I was thinking about these ideas and these issues and these terrible things that are going on in our country.
Marc:Around, you know, rights and also, you know, murder.
Marc:But I was thinking about the abortion debate and the idea of choice.
Marc:And obviously, I am a proponent of choice.
Marc:I believe all women should have the right to choose whatever they need to do with their bodies.
Marc:It's their body and they should have the right and it should be legal to do so.
Marc:It should not be infringed upon.
Marc:So right now, you know, given that we are living in what is becoming a minority rural country and that there are radicalized right wing governments in about half the states, you know, the shit is going down.
Marc:And I just was trying to figure out how to frame it.
Marc:You know, how do you get a joke out of it?
Marc:And I just thought, well, look, obviously all women have should have the right to make choices for their own body.
Marc:And I think maybe it's a branding problem in terms of dealing with the with the Christian right.
Marc:And they're they're taking over of the dialogue.
Marc:It's just that, you know, abortion clinics sounds very brutal, very clinical.
Marc:And it's easy to make it sort of seem menacing.
Marc:Whereas, like, maybe if we call them something like angel factories.
Marc:There'd be a different dialogue because then it would sort of put the ball in the Christian's court that they're angel factories.
Marc:Because if you think about it, like once they're born, it's a crapshoot.
Marc:But these are guaranteed angels.
Marc:So I think maybe if we could sort of push that out into the world, the type of Christians that would be out in front of an abortion clinic.
Marc:The ones that were used to just hold signs and horrible pictures and terrified people, maybe they'd be celebrating.
Marc:You could literally maybe put a counter on the building that has a bell to it.
Marc:And every time an abortion is done, it's just a number pops up and a bell rings and a group of Christians out in front just start clapping.
Marc:You know, when the bell rings, an angel gets its wings.
Marc:Goodbye.
Marc:Fly away.
Marc:So the idea of Angel Factory came to me, and I'm like, oh, fuck.
Marc:I got to text Dave Cross.
Marc:And I texted Lori Kilmart, and I texted Pat, and I'm like, anything?
Marc:Anyone hear of this Angel Factory business?
Marc:Because I came up with this, and I've tried it a couple times, and I think it's a keeper, and I think it's a great little poetic thing.
Marc:Anybody?
Marc:And no one had heard it, and people were, you know, they were happy for me.
Marc:But Pat's like, you better ask a tell and ask Stanhope.
Marc:It was funny to me that there was like...
Marc:only a handful of people that would come up with it.
Marc:But then somebody on Instagram said that there was a, I think when abortion was illegal in Germany, or maybe it didn't, I didn't get the context, but abortion doctors were called angel makers.
Marc:So that does, but that's fine.
Marc:That's a good source.
Marc:I think it was in, you know, in the thirties or I know nothing about it.
Marc:Anyway, just letting you in on the process.
Marc:And I'm pretty excited about Angel Factories.
Marc:So let me let me tell you about Phil Tippett.
Marc:OK, Phil Tippett, if you don't know, and I didn't know much of this and I had to research him.
Marc:He's an Oscar and Emmy winning visual effects artist.
Marc:He's responsible for some of the most memorable effects in movies like Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, RoboCop.
Marc:And his work is almost always rooted in stop motion animation.
Marc:This is what he is.
Marc:He's a stop motion animation guy.
Marc:Like, you know, the big elephant looking walkers from Empire Strikes Back.
Marc:Those are Phil's designs.
Marc:He's worked for ILM and DreamWorks, but he also has his own studio that's been doing visual effects for like on all sorts of shit since the 80s.
Marc:But here's the deal for the past 30 years.
Marc:30 years he's been working on this personal project it's a feature film it's his first feature film it's called mad god and and now it's finally complete and it's insane it's a full-length feature film of this apocalyptic journey or maybe a couple of journeys through this like apocalyptic landscape with all these dark dark jokes and all these figures there's all kinds of stop-motion you know
Marc:buildings and figures and industrial stuff and gooey stuff and hairy stuff and gloppy stuff and you know there's there's blood and guts and and metal and weird sounds it's future it's past it's like it's it's almost there's a prophecy in it it's it's everything this guy has ever had in his head you know dumped into this movie and it's so elaborate and so meticulously composed and and layered it's insane and
Marc:And it sent him to the fucking hospital finishing this thing.
Marc:But now you can watch it.
Marc:And it reminded me of those kind of animation things you used to see in the 70s where it was almost like it's obviously trippy, but it's like, you know, it's like it's Harryhausen on acid and more.
Marc:You know, they're just like there.
Marc:There's so many layers to it.
Marc:And it's so fascinating to watch and to know that it is the life's work, a labor of love and
Marc:And it's done.
Marc:And when I talked to Phil, it was all I wanted to talk about.
Marc:Because I said, I'm not a sci-fi freak.
Marc:And I know what he's done.
Marc:And I'm impressed with it.
Marc:But this movie was where I wanted to go with him.
Marc:We got into it, but you can watch it.
Marc:You can watch Mad God on the streaming service Shudder, which you can subscribe to on its own as part of AMC+.
Marc:It starts streaming on June 16th, and it's also going to have a theatrical release starting this week, Friday, June 10th.
Marc:There are screenings all over the country, so you can go to madgodmovie.com to find one near you.
Marc:That's madgodmovie.com to find a screening.
Marc:And you got to see it.
Marc:If you're a little bit of a sci-fi person, man, it's not a horror movie.
Marc:This is like it's a stop motion masterpiece.
Marc:Seriously.
Marc:So I'm going to get into it here with with Phil Tippett.
Marc:And I think we got into a groove, man.
Marc:There's a couple of beautiful moments.
Marc:And, you know, he's he's a real artist, this guy.
Marc:And it was an honor to talk to him.
Marc:I'm glad you're here, and I'll be up front with you in that I'm not a huge sci-fi guy.
Marc:It's not sci-fi.
Marc:I know.
Marc:I've watched the whole thing, and I'm not a huge animation guy even, but I watched the movie, and it's like this possessed masterpiece that I can see...
Marc:I know it took you a long time to make, but it reminded me, I had a lot of emotions around it as a piece of art in a way.
Marc:And I don't think that I really made the connection of how pure that type of animation is in relation to the medium of film.
Marc:It reveals the organic nature of what film is unlike anything else.
Marc:Yeah, I think so.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I don't know that I've had that experience before in making that connection.
Marc:And I think it's only relative to seeing movies now or knowing what the technologies that exist now are that I could really there's almost an organic.
Marc:You can feel the humanity of it, of that medium.
Guest:Yeah, well, you can see that in the films of Carl Zeeman and Jan Svankmeyer and, you know, others.
Guest:Jerry Trinka, you know, but nobody watches that stuff anymore.
Guest:But they're really Carl Zeeman's just he was a huge influence on me.
Guest:And where's he from?
Guest:Czechoslovakian.
Guest:And is he still around?
Guest:Nope.
Guest:No, I kick myself because I was a huge fan of his.
Guest:I highly recommend that you watch his movies.
Guest:Not many in the States, but The Fabulous World of Jules Verne and Baron Munchausen.
Guest:He would use any kind of technique that he possibly could.
Guest:and just carry it through with continuity.
Guest:There'd be a lot of mis-match, but it didn't matter.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Marc:But there was also this sensibility that, not because I don't really exist in that world of animation, but I do exist in the world nostalgically or just in terms of who I was moved by as a younger person of kind of...
Marc:the hallucinogenic sensibility, the beatnik sensibility, there's some burrows in the whole thing to me in terms of the way he depicted things.
Guest:Yeah, come to mention, I hadn't thought of that, but yeah.
Guest:Everything goes into the hopper.
Marc:Sure, and who's the guy that did the work with Zappa, Bruce Bickford?
Marc:There was a world of art
Marc:That was sort of mind-blowing, and that was the intent of it, but didn't have to abide by any rules.
Marc:Even the animation when I was a kid, like Wizards, like Ralph Bakshi, that you could enter an experience that could go on for an hour and a half and not have to be defined.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:No, it was a huge... Of course, I was, as a kid, influenced by, you know, Ray Harry, Oz and Willis O'Brien.
Marc:How old were you when you saw that stuff?
Guest:I saw King Kong when I was six, 1955, and when I was seven, 1958, Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Right, because I remember seeing those, but they weren't new.
Marc:They were already on whatever channel it was, dialing for dollars or something.
Marc:But I imagine at that time, they were new, right?
Marc:No one had ever seen that before.
Guest:To me, yeah, definitely.
Guest:They were like magic.
Guest:And there were a couple of consequences that fell off of that that I didn't realize until a lot later.
Guest:But you didn't have access to the media that you have today, so it might not be another 10 years
Guest:before you see that thing on a black and white tv yeah and uh that really helped all of us you know we all kind of you know orbit around this um understanding that because we didn't have the access that is available today we just made shit up on our minds right you know right and so you saw it all it was all in color on screen
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you made shit up in your minds in terms of... Well, just remembering what it was.
Guest:I mean, you know, we would only see it once.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And so the rest was left to our imaginations and reconstructed.
Guest:No idea how to do it at all.
Guest:And it wasn't until many years later that Forrest J. Ackerman, who was the editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland, who was here in L.A., he had his Acker mansion,
Guest:And he was friends with Ray Bradbury, Ray Harryhausen, and had tons of the memorabilia from King Kong and Ray's stuff.
Guest:And so we were like in pig heaven.
Guest:So we would go over there, and that's where a lot of us met.
Marc:Who's us?
Guest:Dennis Murren, who went on to win.
Guest:almost as many Academy Awards as Edith Head.
Guest:And my other buddies, John Berg, Tom Sandeman, Ken Ralston, a lot of us that went on to make the Star Wars movies.
Guest:To make the world.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But where'd you grow up?
Guest:I was born in Berkeley.
Guest:So you're like Berkeley your whole life?
Guest:No, my parents captured me and made me go to San Diego.
Guest:Oh, man.
Guest:Yeah, I was not a big fan of San Diego.
Guest:Oh, geez.
Guest:How old were you when that happened?
Guest:I was right after Sinbad, eight, nine.
Guest:You're in San Diego.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But the good news was, I mean, I liked the beaches, and now I get skin cancer.
Guest:But it put me into proximity to L.A.
Guest:when I could drive.
Guest:And so that just plonked me down.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:doing commercial work in Hollywood.
Marc:But when you were a kid, were you trying out to, when did you start working with the stop motion stuff?
Marc:Because that's something, one of those, it seems that even with kids who have access to like a Super 8 projector, a film camera, that they start, it seems like some of the first stuff that people do when they try to make movies.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:I mowed lawn and hacked up ice plant to get a single frame camera.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And probably around 12 started goofing around with stop motion animation.
Guest:And, you know, I just I did a lot of tricks, you know, that, you know, I did Jerry rig things so I could look at things one frame at a time, which you couldn't do on a on a projector.
Guest:And so you're a little possessed.
Guest:I was possessed, yeah.
Guest:And my parents were worried about me.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Well, my mom was, as moms are.
Guest:And she wanted to go to a therapist, take me to a therapist.
Guest:And my dad was against that, because he was an artist.
Guest:And he had a library of books, and he knew that I was interested in monsters.
Marc:What kind of artist was he?
Guest:He was a weekend abstract expressionist.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, tried to get into the game, taught me a valuable lesson because he couldn't stand rejection, you know, and as a kid, I realized, well, if you can't stand rejection, you know, you better get out.
Guest:Right.
Marc:You did realize that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Eventually I did.
Guest:I mean, it sunk in, but he showed me books on Hieronymus Bosch and Peter Bruegel and his son.
Guest:And, you know, it's like all these things.
Guest:Things just, with me, everything takes a long time to gestate.
Guest:And eventually at some point I went like, God, you know, I want to make a Peter Bruegel movie at some point.
Guest:I'd love, or Hieronymus Bosch.
Guest:Well, I mean, you definitely, you definitely achieved that.
Guest:Well, he had, Bosch had both this sense of diabolical horror and whimsy to them, you know, which was, you know, I was always very attracted to.
Guest:To whimsy and diabolical horror happening simultaneously.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, I recently saw the Bosch paintings.
Marc:I was at the Prado, I think is where they are.
Marc:And when you see those in a book or something, it's one thing.
Marc:But when you stand before them, it's like, oh, my God.
Marc:Again, because...
Marc:There's something about engaging with the surface, too, and seeing the paint and everything else.
Marc:It's the same effect that I was sort of talking about when I watched your film.
Marc:I don't know that I ever had the visceral reaction to stop motion because in the film, I mean, this thing, it's covered with sludge and decay and blood and goop and hair.
Marc:There's a lot of stuff that you can just feel it when you see it.
Marc:So in starting to do that kind of stuff, I mean, if that was what compelled you when you were that young, what was the process to getting, I mean, obviously this took a long time to make, but what was your experience?
Marc:How did you get into the business?
Guest:Well, before I got into business, I collected mentors.
Guest:And the first mentor I had was Ray Bradbury, who I carried on a correspondence with.
Marc:You just reached out to him?
Marc:You wrote him a letter?
Guest:I was working on a guy's 16-millimeter low-budget version of Ray's short story, Sound of Thunder, the Tyrannosaurus Rex time travel deal.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was speaking at a junior college, and I went down there and gave him the script and showed him some pictures, and he wrote back and said, you know, if you make any money off of this, I'm going to sue you.
Guest:But that started a long conversation of letters.
Guest:You know, we wrote back and forth for years, and I lost them all.
Guest:You did?
Guest:You know, in subsequent moves.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, idiot.
Guest:But in the 60s, you know, Ray's...
Guest:Ray's rant was love, love, love.
Guest:Do what you love.
Guest:Because if you fail at that, you'll be in a better place than if you did not even try.
Marc:Or fail at something you didn't want to do anyways.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And didn't know.
Guest:You didn't even know what you could reach to.
Guest:And that coincided with at the same time my dad not being able to...
Guest:Oh, I don't know.
Guest:You know, I get rejected all the time.
Marc:Oh, right, right, right.
Marc:So your dad was afraid.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And because of that, he didn't.
Guest:Well, and, you know, I can, you know, a lot of rope for that because he was a victim of the 50s.
Guest:And you're, you know, kind of forced into a corridor of being, you know.
Guest:And so, you know, it is so difficult for many people that want to, you know, raise a family to do that.
Marc:Well, yeah, well, that was the ideal, right?
Marc:So you're working.
Marc:I mean, that was the norm or the expectation that had to be.
Marc:broken in the 60s by the next generation.
Marc:That was the pushback on that, around those expectations.
Guest:Yeah, that was me.
Guest:It was like Bosch and King Kong and whatnot, but then in the 60s, I was 15 or so, and Bob Dylan had switched from...
Guest:Folk to electric?
Guest:Folk, you know, to the more surrealistic, you know, kind of collage stuff.
Guest:And that was like, holy shit.
Guest:You know, I didn't think about it at the time, but it was like, you know, eventually when I started thinking about Mad God, you know, I wanted to do something that was a lot more collage poetic like.
Marc:Yeah, sure.
Marc:And do you think that looking back, do you believe that your father had talent?
Guest:No, not particularly.
Marc:So even if he had the courage to face rejection, he was probably smarter to stay in his fear.
Guest:He was rejected for, you know, a reason.
Guest:Although you never know how anything goes.
Guest:You throw shit at the wall and, you know.
Marc:So when you're communicating with Ray Bradbury, how old are you?
Marc:Is that when you're in your teens?
Guest:Yeah, probably around 16 or so.
Guest:And his thing was love, love, love.
Guest:And so in our correspondence, as the nomenclature changed over the years, it would go from love, love, love to follow your bliss to that and the other thing.
Guest:And then it turned out being follow your passion.
Guest:So I looked up the word in passion, and it comes from the Latin patai, which of course means to suffer.
Guest:Does it?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, like Jesus on the cross.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Oh, the passion of Christ.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And that is all the creative people that I know that is their world.
Guest:You know, they follow their passion.
Guest:They suffer for it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Why do we do that?
Guest:We don't know.
Guest:No, but it is you're consumed, you know.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:In your mind, you have no choice.
Guest:Well, it's like, I mean, the paths that I took was very similar to...
Guest:Carl Jung wrote this book over 16 years without anybody being aware of it called The Red Book.
Guest:And Tashin had put it out and it's really worth getting.
Guest:It's really fantastic.
Guest:It's got all these beautiful paintings with gold and everything.
Marc:Mandela paintings kind of stuff.
Guest:Mandela paintings?
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:It's more very religious.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:But there are Mandela things in it.
Guest:And beautiful calligraphy in Gothic German and everything.
Guest:And so he wrote this for the better part of 16 years.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was essentially... When I read this, I was halfway through Med God and I realized, yeah, oh, this happens to a lot of people.
Guest:And it was the classic Campbell hero's journey.
Guest:As a creative person, you don't know what you're gonna do, but you want to find a what.
Guest:And you go down this path, and that leads to another path, leads to another path, leads to another path, leads to another path, and you get lost.
Guest:And Young got lost.
Guest:Young got lost.
Guest:And his family had to pull him out of it.
Guest:No kidding.
Guest:And he worked on this thing for 16 years.
Guest:I like to believe they sent him to a psychiatrist.
Guest:That would be great.
Guest:Not a Jungian therapist.
Marc:No.
Marc:So what's interesting to me also is that you obviously, alongside of gestating and then kind of manifesting Mad God that went on to take years and years, you were kind of...
Marc:Doing your job in another way, but engaging the same creative passion, right?
Guest:Yeah, that was living the dreams of a child out, you know.
Marc:So when does that start happening?
Marc:What's the next search for mentors?
Marc:Who do you go to?
Guest:oh god you know uh i um san diego put me in process proximity to hollywood you know i would went to the only uh place that did stop motion work a special effects company called cascade pictures of you know hollywood where was that at seward and romaine oh yeah yeah and you just show up as a kid or what'd you do
Guest:Well, I got in there as a 16 year old.
Guest:You know, I mean, I met the guys and they could see that I had talent.
Guest:So once I, you know, I started doing some stuff when I was 16 and I went to UC Irvine.
Guest:What were they working on there?
Guest:Pillsbury Doughboy, Jolly Green Giant, you know, Ford, Chrysler commercials, all that stuff.
Marc:You were there for that?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, Mrs. Butterworth.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So like when she pokes the Pillsbury Doughboy and he goes, hee hee, you saw that happen?
Guest:I saw it.
Guest:I was not a proficient animator at that time, so I mostly made models and did sculptures and things like that.
Marc:Jelly Green Giant, because he was half human, wasn't he?
Guest:Yeah, he was all human.
Guest:He was a guy in a green outfit until it turns into a cartoon.
Guest:Hee hee.
Marc:It's so funny, because those are the commercials from my kids, from when I was a kid.
Guest:It was a great school, because the turnover was really fast.
Guest:It was my graduate school, and you could do this, you could do that.
Guest:And we had a great mentor, Phil Kellison, ran the place.
Guest:And he let the lunatics loose a lot, and we could stay there after hours on the weekend to work on our own projects.
Marc:So this is when you were in your teens?
Guest:Probably mostly after I graduated from UC Irvine because I had to deal with the draft.
Marc:So you went back to that place.
Marc:You started there when you were in high school?
Guest:You know, right after high school, I got a few little kind of gigs.
Guest:But I worked for this guy, Gene Warren, who was really cheap, and he paid me...
Guest:Minimum wage because I was 16.
Guest:I got like a dollar and 10 cents an hour.
Guest:Wow.
Marc:What was he working on?
Guest:Oh, Gene did all kinds of things.
Guest:They did Projects Unlimited did the H.G.
Guest:Wells thing, the time machine.
Guest:Just tons and tons of stuff.
Guest:Oh, interesting.
Guest:And then you went to UC Irvine?
Guest:Went to Irvine to escape the draft, and the best thing that ever happened to me, or happened to me there, which was when I arrived, it coincided with...
Guest:essentially the birth of conceptual art.
Guest:And I was just totally taken by it.
Guest:It was like, you mean you don't have to paint or sculpt, or you can do anything.
Guest:Installations, performance art.
Guest:Anything, yeah.
Guest:And that was a really huge thing.
Marc:And in relation to the 60s, how much were you engaging with the cultural momentum of that time?
Marc:Were you going to Lovins or hallucinogenics or any of that stuff?
Guest:No, there was nobody that shared my worldview, so I just stayed in my room.
Guest:What was your worldview?
Guest:Monsters.
Marc:Very specific.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, that's interesting.
Marc:But I imagine you found like-minded people when you started executing the art, right, in working within the world.
Guest:Yeah, oh, definitely.
Guest:I mean, there were only half a dozen of us that were doing this stuff.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Really.
Guest:And so it was really easy to pick up gigs and stuff because, you know...
Marc:So after graduate school, you went to Kellison, and that's where you did the Pillsbury Doughboy and stuff?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And then what happens?
Marc:Where'd you go after that?
Guest:Well, at that point, Dennis Murin and I were working at Cascade and Ken Ralston.
Guest:They got hired to do Star Wars.
Marc:Okay, so that's in the 70s.
Marc:Now we're in the 70s.
Marc:The first Star Wars, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then George wasn't happy with the material he'd shot for the cantina scene in England,
Guest:and hired our buddy Rick Baker to pull together a group.
Marc:I've interviewed Rick Baker.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, he's great.
Guest:Yeah, I've known him since I was 15 years old.
Marc:Wow.
Guest:So he hired him for the... Well, he hired Rick, and Rick put together a bunch of us stop-motion animators, out-of-work stop-motion animators together, and we built all the costumes, and we went to a little...
Guest:Insert stage on La Brea Avenue.
Guest:And George directed and Carol Ballard shot it.
Guest:And while we were working there, George would come by every week to check on our progress.
Guest:And he saw a stop motion puppet that I had made when I was 20.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that gave him the idea to do the chess set in Star Wars.
Guest:Right.
Guest:He was like, well, you got two weeks.
Guest:Can you make a dozen, you know, space aliens in two weeks and shoot it?
Guest:And it was like, yeah, we did it and spent three nights doing it.
Marc:Staying up all night just shooting the chessboard.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, man.
Marc:The night crew.
Marc:And that changed it.
Marc:That was, I mean, they must have felt that the integration of what you do of stop motion into these big pictures again.
Marc:Did it feel like there was a period there where it seemed like stop motion wasn't happening?
Marc:Absolutely.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it had kind of petered out.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, in a way.
Guest:I mean, and that was just a result of cycles, you know.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I've been doing a lot of stop motion work up until then, you know, mostly, you know, props are setting up, you know, different kinds of scenes and different commercial houses.
Guest:You know, that was how we were in big heaven doing that.
Guest:But we had no idea, you know, that Star Wars was going to become Star Wars until we went to the premiere.
Marc:Well, what did you think you were working on?
Guest:Just some sci-fi movie that... Well, we were always fans of George Lucas's from THX and American Graffiti.
Guest:And it was like, well, here's this guy that we... He's not that much older than us.
Guest:And we have the same film education as each other, so we can do that Vulcan mind mill thing.
Guest:We know exactly what we're talking about.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And...
Guest:Yeah, he was just a really terrific guy.
Marc:But you had no idea what was going to happen.
Guest:Well, he had shown us the cantina scene and the chess set.
Guest:And it was like, wow, this is a movie you always wanted to work on.
Guest:But not until we got to the premiere.
Guest:Or it was a cast and crew screening.
Guest:And you were like, what?
Guest:The guys at ILM that were smarter than me bought stock in Fox, you know, and I have no idea about that.
Guest:Me neither.
Marc:But I have to assume, so you had no idea what the scope of the movie was?
Marc:Nobody did.
Marc:You just were working on your thing.
Guest:Nobody did.
Guest:So when you saw it all put together.
Guest:Only George did.
Guest:And it was a Herculean task.
Guest:Nobody understood what the hell he was doing.
Marc:So was your experience watching the completed Star Wars similar to when you were five seeing a Harryhausen thing?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, that but different, you know.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:You saw the future for, I guess, for a minute.
Guest:You know, my mind was spinning.
Guest:I didn't see anything.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Except, you know, I wanted to see it again.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And then what happens next?
Marc:You go on and you make another movie with him, right?
Marc:Or do you have stuff in between?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then I went on and did Piranha with Joe Dante and John Davison.
Marc:What was the job on Piranha?
Marc:What did you have to do?
Guest:Make those fish?
Guest:We made a bunch of rubber fish.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And John and, you know, so we shot in the L.A.
Guest:Swim Stadium and came up with these rigs where we pulled these things underwater and went to San Marcos, Texas and shot there, you know, in the giant pond that was the source of the San Marcos River, which was really fucking scary.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because there were huge alligator gar that were like 10 feet long that were there.
Wow.
Guest:And they got those teeth, right?
Guest:They have huge teeth.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And there were crawdads that were the size of lobster.
Guest:It was like The Lost World.
Guest:It was really fantastic.
Guest:And water moccasins and all kinds of fun stuff.
Marc:Those are the scariest things to me, things in the water.
Marc:And that's where you did the piranha?
Marc:We did some stuff there, but most of it was in the L.A.
Marc:swimsuit.
Marc:Oh, I remember that as the ones jumping out of the water and biting off chunks of face.
Guest:That was probably Piranha 2 or 3D.
Guest:All of ours were really cheap.
Guest:They were just all under the water.
Marc:Oh, just flurries of blood?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Bubbles.
Guest:Yeah, the Aqualine bubbles being the bubbling and stuff.
Guest:But Joe and John were big fans of stop motion.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:So...
Guest:they had me put in like a little character for half a dozen shots or something, you know, in just Dr. Hook's laboratory.
Guest:Hoek's laboratory.
Guest:Kevin McCarthy played Dr. Hoke.
Marc:So how does things change from...
Marc:Star Wars to Empire.
Guest:Well, during that period, you know, I was working with the associate producer Jim Bloom, who was down here in L.A., and I was living in Silver Lake, and, you know, we got into, like, kind of negotiating and whatnot, and I just said...
Guest:I don't want to negotiate.
Guest:Just give me whatever you got and I'll do it.
Guest:So George hired me to do, there's this character at the opening of Empire, this two-legged kind of dinosaur camel-like thing called Tauntaun.
Guest:And he asked me to come up with some ideas for it.
Guest:And so I spent a day just, you know, it could be this, could be that, it could be this, could be that.
Guest:Picked one and said, can you make a three-dimensional maquette?
Guest:And I did.
Guest:And he said, okay, that's it, you know.
Guest:That's it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's the way he worked.
Guest:You know, I found him much more like... He wasn't one of these... He wasn't a micromanager at all.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, he hired people that knew more than he did.
Guest:You know, he'd go like, well, no, you're monster guys.
Guest:Make the monster.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he responded very well to three-dimensional things, which is what I do.
Guest:So I would make maquettes.
Guest:But instead of having something on paper that he had to interpret, or could I see it from another angle, you know, should we put this, you know, thin on that leg, which, you know, like a lot of productions do, he would be able to hold, you know, like Admiral Ackbar up and turn it around, and it was like he could see the movie in his head, you know, right there and there.
Marc:And I guess you could as well.
Marc:I mean, you pictured things three-dimensionally.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, I have this...
Guest:apparently it's like an indication of possible autism, where I can, as I'm talking to you, I can't look at you, but I can see, I can imagine a symmetrical box that,
Guest:That has no scale to it.
Guest:And I can turn it red.
Guest:I can turn it blue.
Guest:I can turn it white.
Guest:Like that.
Guest:Oh, I see.
Guest:And what is a maquette built from?
Guest:I use this material called Sculpey.
Guest:That's a crafts thing that you can get in any art store that, you know, it's a thing that kids can make little sculptures out of.
Guest:And you cook it.
Guest:It's like clay.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And then you can cook it and it hardens.
Marc:So was there ever a point in your life where you thought you would be a sculptor?
Guest:I was a sculptor.
Guest:I was all self-taught and all this stuff.
Marc:Right, but you didn't want to do big conceptual art pieces.
Marc:You were sculpting as a collaborator.
Guest:I only did conceptual art stuff when I was in college.
Guest:And I certainly had a great experience
Guest:you know, viewport into the art scene.
Guest:Because my, you know, teachers became my mentors, then my friends Michael Asher and Bastian Otter and Via Selmans, you know, were right at the cusp of the conceptual art movement.
Guest:And they're like, you know, some of the gods of conceptual art.
Guest:So I got to hang around them.
Marc:What were they working on?
Guest:their own projects.
Marc:Because I don't know their work.
Marc:Was it large pieces or was it performative?
Guest:Mike worked with spaces and did different kinds of things, ephemeral things, things that you wouldn't even know you were there until you spent a little bit of time.
Guest:Or until somebody told you, hey,
Guest:Did you feel that there was air going through that place you just passed through?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:So he was working right on the edge of perception.
Guest:Okay, yeah.
Guest:Perceptual psychology type of stuff.
Guest:Boss worked with emotions a lot.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:How's that?
Marc:Like how?
Guest:And there's one piece called I'm Too Sad to Tell You.
Guest:And it's a, I don't know if he did a video of it, but there was a still of just him crying.
Guest:And he had written I'm Too Sad to Tell You.
Guest:And there was something going on in his mind.
Guest:You know, that we'll never know.
Guest:I mean, his dad was a Calvinist preacher that saved a lot of people from the Nazis.
Guest:Heavy.
Guest:And Boss, I think, always kind of felt that he was never as good as his dad or something like that.
Guest:He'd done a great thing.
Guest:And Boss ended up...
Guest:disappearing you know and one of his last a lot of his stuff was about um danger and he would put himself in dangerous situations like riding a bicycle across at the top of a house and falling onto the ground or across uh you know falling into a river or whatnot so there was always a self-destructive side to him
Guest:And he ended up disappearing.
Guest:He, in a 14-foot boat, tried to make it across the Atlantic, and they found the boat just floating off the coast of Spain, and a gas thing blew up, and they never found him again.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:And so what was your conceptual work like at that time?
Guest:it was like i did this thing uh with video yeah that was just like a it was like a pull-up bar that was like seven eight feet off the ground and that's all you saw on this black and white video screen was just this horizontal line that cut it and then i hired i mean hired i um provoked a bunch of the students at uc irvine for a contest whoever can hang on this bar the longest yeah gets a six pack of beer
Guest:They got a long line.
Guest:And so in the picture, the pull-up bar bisects the frame about one-third from the top, and all you see is a hand coming up, and it's swinging.
Guest:just like this.
Guest:And then it drops.
Guest:And some of the, you know, like the fat people were just, you know, just be a flash.
Guest:And of course, the, you know, guys, sports guys won the beer.
Guest:And so that was one.
Guest:And then I did another one that was at UC Irvine.
Guest:Their spaces were, painting studios were just terrible because they had awful echoes.
Guest:They were huge.
Guest:They were square, high ceilings.
Guest:And so I got, I had,
Guest:a reel-to-reel tape recorder.
Guest:And I got my friends, fellow students, 20-minute tape to say the vowels.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:A, A, A, A, A for 20 minutes.
Guest:And then go through all the vowels.
Guest:I did hard and soft.
Guest:I could have different voices.
Guest:But breath would be what would establish the rhythm.
Guest:And so then I got all of the reel-to-reel tape recorders that I could find at Irvine.
Guest:and got sculpting pedestals and put them in this square space four feet off the wall.
Guest:And turned them on.
Guest:And depending upon the proximity of where you were to the tape recorder, A would be stronger or U would be stronger, depending upon where you were.
Guest:And they were all put out in the configuration of a pentagram.
Guest:But because, and I didn't plan any of this stuff, like everything else I do, is like in the center of the space, because of the acoustics of the space, everything mixed.
Guest:And it sounded like some kind of a weird alien or proto-human language, you know?
Guest:And it was like, that was really cool.
Marc:It's almost like alchemy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like you manifested something through the ritual.
Guest:Didn't know.
Marc:I'm a demon.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, that's wild.
Guest:And so, you know, everybody thought I had a really great career in art, but just the art scene was not for me.
Guest:You know, it was just too political.
Guest:I'd hang out with Mike Asher and John Baldessari and, you know, those guys.
Guest:And, you know, they just talked about the art racket.
Guest:And I saw.
Marc:It's weird.
Marc:I dated an artist.
Marc:It's horrendous.
Marc:It's like, look, show business is show business, but there's something fundamentally disingenuous about the art world.
Guest:Yeah, and then you're alone.
Guest:And I always like working with people and a team.
Guest:Because I am, by default, a loner and spend a lot of time alone, which I prefer.
Guest:But then working with other people makes me civilized.
Marc:Well, yeah, yeah, and it's nice to be able to be a collaborator and be part of something bigger than yourself.
Marc:You don't strike me as a religious man.
Guest:No, not overtly.
Guest:Yeah, but Mad God kind of skewed that way one way or the other.
Guest:Mad God did?
Guest:Well...
Guest:Yeah, in regard to it being that hero's journey kind of thing.
Guest:You can't think about it in any other way as like having some kind of profound meaning for you.
Guest:I mean, it put me in the psych ward for a few days.
Guest:I mean, it fucking broke me.
Guest:What year was that?
Guest:It was like just about the year that I finished it, you know?
Guest:Recently?
Guest:Oh, no.
Guest:This must have been three, four years ago when I finished it.
Guest:When you finished Mad God.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was right at the tail end.
Guest:And I still had... I got other ideas, so I went on.
Guest:But it... Yeah.
Guest:It really popped my cork.
Guest:And I was like at this place where...
Guest:totally unbeknownst to me.
Guest:My friends told me later I was disintegrating.
Guest:I looked like a homeless person.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, my hair was long.
Guest:I had a huge beard.
Guest:My clothes were torn and covered with paint.
Guest:My hands were all banged up from working with tools and whatnot.
Guest:I was hunched over.
Guest:And, you know, they were really surprised to, you know, when I heard, you know, they heard me say, I hate this.
Guest:I fucking hate working on this.
Guest:You know, it's just like getting behind the mule and and, you know, doing penance.
Guest:And, you know, so it was what happened in the psych ward.
Guest:Well, the food was terrible.
Guest:And I stayed away from everybody.
Guest:But it took me the better part of six weeks to recover.
Guest:For the first 72 hours, I just sat in front of the TV and...
Guest:And my adrenaline was just going so fast.
Guest:I just couldn't do anything.
Guest:And eventually, I'd get up and walk around the room, then go out and walk down the block, then go around the block.
Guest:I built myself back up.
Marc:But did you experience any of this?
Marc:When did you start working on Mad God?
Marc:What year was that?
Guest:It was right after RoboCop 2 in the late 80s.
Marc:So you were still, like, that was the heyday of what, you know, before I get into this, can you tell me the difference between stop motion and go motion?
Guest:Stop motion is taking a three-dimensional object and infinitesimally moving it one frame at a time.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But when you take that picture, it's a very clear...
Guest:like a still photograph.
Guest:But when you shoot a horse or a human, whatever, that are moving through the frame, you get this characteristic motion blur on it.
Guest:And so animators have been trying to affect that for a number of years, but it was too cumbersome, and it wasn't very successful.
Guest:But the first time I went into RLM, Dennis and Ken were working on the night crew.
Guest:I saw the motion control equipment that John Dykstra had developed, and it was like, you know, if you could combine a stop-motion puppet with this stuff, you could possibly do it.
Guest:And so when we moved up to Marin, San Rafael, Ken Ralston and I pulled out, the only puppet I had at that time was the one that I did from Piranha, and we hooked that up.
Guest:Afternoon, we shot a test, and it worked.
Marc:So you get a different kind of flow, different kind of continuity.
Guest:You get motion blur with the thing.
Guest:It was very, very, you know, just on one axis.
Guest:But that went on to a much more elaborate thing for the movie Dragon Slayer, where we essentially made a computerized, you know, boomeraku kind of a puppet thing.
Marc:Huh.
Marc:The engineering of this stuff is so much part of it.
Guest:Technology changes everything.
Marc:Yeah, and so John Dykstra, what was the machine he had created?
Guest:It was motion control, but primarily for cameras, where you could repeat moves, multiple moves.
Guest:Oh, I get it, okay.
Guest:But it was, every time the technology changes, the brain has to change.
Marc:Was the GoMotion, that's what was used basically for Jurassic Park?
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:That was all computer graphics.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:That was the first big, you know, ILM had done Young Sherlock and Terminator movies, but this was the first time they were able to put actual skin on something that looked like a thing.
Marc:Oh, okay.
Marc:But so Robocop was GoMotion.
Guest:I wasn't working at ILM, and they had all the... I had my own studio by that time.
Guest:So, yeah, I didn't have access to that kind of equipment.
Guest:But I was able to fake it for some shots by stupid ways, like driving a wedge underneath some 2x4s and wiggling the table and stuff like that for certain kinds of things.
Marc:So, because I'm just looking at when you start...
Marc:When you start Mad God, that's like, you said 1990?
Marc:Around then, yeah.
Marc:Because that seems to sync up with the technology changing.
Marc:Yeah, right around that time, yep.
Marc:And in the sense that like, because it seems the big difference between stop motion and go motion and whatever evolved into CGI was that you lose the human seams that kind of come through.
Marc:Like, you know, there's something...
Marc:still organic and filmic and... That depends on who you are.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Doing it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, and I mean, for Dragon Slayer, you know, because we were working with these 16 axes, you know, motors, you know, we're driving this thing.
Guest:instead of sculpting in time and light with stop motion, I had to build up things because they were on all these axial movers, axes by axes by axes.
Guest:So you had to just completely visualize it in your mind, the performance, and go through and...
Guest:I mean, it wasn't programming like typing, but they had these controls that would move the motors around and whatnot.
Marc:So you're almost one step removed from setting the things up.
Marc:Not in my mind, but yeah.
Marc:But in actual tactile engagement.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So do you think that for the beginning of Mad God, did you have a series of visions or imagination around, you know, these almost vignettes, these pieces of this, you know, apocalyptic story?
Marc:Do you think that some of it was a reaction to almost to that type of creation being left behind?
Marc:Do you know, like it seemed like the end of like CGI comes.
Marc:So stop action.
Marc:It's sort of like done.
Guest:Yeah, well, on Jurassic Park, I was over-emotional about it.
Guest:And the younger computer graphic guys that were coming in were kind of like the young gunslingers.
Guest:And so there was that whole kind of weird vibe going on.
Guest:And yeah, I just got over-emotional.
Guest:And I got pneumonia.
Guest:I had to go to bed for a couple of weeks.
Guest:And so it was up to my wife, Jules, who ran the company, and Dennis Mirren and Craig Hayes, who designed the ED-209 robots and the Starship Troopers, which just came up with this input device that was essentially a stop-motion animator and an armature that fed into the computer.
Guest:And so stop-motion animators could do that because the computer graphics guys were not up to that level.
Guest:In terms of movement.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, there was only one place that taught computer graphics, really, in North America, and that was Sheridan in Canada.
Guest:And so all of those guys were schooled in Disney classic animation, squash and stretch and flying logos and all that stuff.
Guest:But it's a different thing.
Guest:There are too many moving parts with putting a creature into a shot.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:So do you think that some of it was driven by fuck you?
Marc:No.
Marc:Like, you know, like, I'm going to... I will destroy you!
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I have complete control.
Marc:This is my world.
Marc:No.
Marc:Where'd the kernel of it come from?
Guest:Well, I mean, again, like, I just have relied and sought out mentors all my life.
Guest:And one just happened to cross my path.
Guest:You know, my wife was in the editorial department of Amadeus.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And so we'd go hang out, have dinner with Milos Forman.
Guest:As a young filmmaker, I'd ask him if he would give me any advice.
Guest:Gave me the best advice I ever got, which is what allowed me.
Guest:Once I kind of got it and started thinking about Mad God, was if you want to take a good shit, you have to eat well.
Guest:And it was like, you know, I mean, that told me, you know.
Guest:That's a Milos Forman quote.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's like, it's like you take your time with stuff.
Guest:You let it cook.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You don't do it on a Hollywood production schedule.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, you take as many years as you like.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And unbeknownst to me, I mean, that God took me 30 years to 30.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I shot in the late 80s about three minutes and then realized that the scope and scale was too big.
Guest:And I lost my RoboCop crew to Henry Sollick that was doing Nightmare Before Christmas.
Guest:And so I put it to bed.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But that didn't stop me thinking about it.
Marc:And what was it you were trying to...
Marc:In your mind, what is the story?
Guest:Let me put it this way.
Guest:Pablo Picasso was asked once in an interview what he was looking for in his paintings.
Guest:He said, I do not seek, I find.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that's what artists do.
Guest:You know, ask an artist, what are you doing?
Guest:It was like, how did I know what was going to happen with those tape projects?
Guest:Sure.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So I guess what I'm asking is, were you thinking in vignettes primarily in terms of like, because there's a lot going on.
Marc:It's quite a hellscape.
Marc:And, you know, it suggests a lot of things, you know, none of them necessarily about a bright future or, you know, wherever that place is that the film takes place in or a number of places.
Marc:There's just a lot of machines.
Marc:There's figures that get smashed, that get burned, that get thrown in holes.
Marc:Then there's a couple of heroes, these goggled beings.
Marc:So...
Marc:I guess what I'm asking is, do you think in sort of like, well, I'm going to have these giant metal pylons crushing guys, and I'm going to have a hole, and that's the thought.
Marc:And then you integrate it after?
Guest:You know, it's like a combination of a whole bunch of things, depending upon what comes to me at the moment.
Guest:Initially, starting with those first three minutes, then the next 20 years where I just didn't let it go.
Guest:I have no idea why I didn't.
Guest:But between gigs and on the weekends and whatnot, I do storyboards, design characters.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And we just start building up this idea.
Guest:And I was able to get, based on the first three minutes, I did a Kickstarter and produced another 15 minutes or so.
Marc:Did you ever try to get legit showbiz financing?
Guest:No.
Guest:No, I've been through that plenty of times before.
Guest:And I'd always gotten, with things that I tried to make conventional, the thousand yard stare after like five seconds from the studio.
Marc:It'd be hard to pitch this one.
Guest:Well, all of my stuff, John Davison and Neumeier informed me that all my stuff was art damaged.
Guest:What does that mean?
Guest:Art movies don't make money.
Guest:Ah, yeah, right, okay.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:So because like, as I said before, there is something about like, it really is an art movie.
Marc:And it really is a masterpiece of what you know, what you do, I think, you know, in that form.
Marc:And what's amazing is that you have.
Marc:All of these things, when you try to sort of focus on what they're made of or what the construction is, they all bring out human feelings, which is, I guess, the effect that you want.
Marc:That through all of it.
Marc:I guess.
Marc:No, but even all the figures.
Marc:When you see a figure that is barely human get thrown in a burning hole, you have a human response to it.
Marc:That's funny.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It is funny.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Just the ongoing, the never-endingness of it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But when you began that first three-minute one, we've talked about Joseph Campbell and about Jung here and about the hero's journey.
Marc:You know, what was the journey?
Marc:Were you able to identify it or were you just sort of flying blind and just reacting to your vision?
Guest:Again, you know, go back to other artists.
Guest:When you look at the equivalent of reviews with Bach, Beethoven or Mozart.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:When they're asked how they do their thing, they say, I just transcribe it, you know?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it comes from God, you know?
Guest:And it was like that.
Guest:It was.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was just like there was a tuning fork that like, you know, kind of tuned me in.
Guest:You know, I was just following.
Marc:Did it stay constant or come in and out over 30 years?
Guest:It was so slow, you know, I couldn't, you know.
Marc:Because the process of making it is slow, right?
Yeah.
Guest:by default right so did you have the full vision and then you have to spend absolutely not know but with any piece of it did you have to because it seems to me that like you'll have these these pieces of it and then you got to spend what six months making it well it depended because I did have these three minutes of material that were kind of parts of it that were spread out before I actually had a narrative yeah you know it doesn't really have a story per se but movement
Guest:Well, it's got a through line to it, but not a conventional narrative.
Guest:And so I took some of these first images that I did years ago, and I was archiving them.
Guest:And some of the guys at my studio that were inspired by watching the making of Star Wars and Robocop and stuff wanted to do that kind of stuff, and light miniatures and stuff with real lights.
Guest:And, you know, that era had long gone, and they were computer graphics artists, and they saw me...
Guest:you know um laboring away well no you know archiving this three minutes yeah and they go what the hell is that you know and they thought it was some long lost you know something or other oh yeah right and um and so they got really excited and they offered to do a shot and so i i rebuilt one of the crumbling puppets the
Guest:main character that we call the assassin.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And I showed him, you know, here's how I build this set.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Here's how I light it and, you know, go for it.
Guest:And they did a really good shot.
Guest:And it just went on from there.
Guest:Can we do another one?
Guest:Sure.
Guest:So they're having a good time.
Guest:Oh, they're in pig heaven.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I would give talks at like local Pacific Film Archive and students, you know, college and high school students would volunteer.
Guest:And I would get as many as 15 people on Saturdays.
Guest:To work.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I would spend Sundays figuring out all the processes, because a lot of these people never used an X-Acto blade before in their lives, and they found out really quick.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And so I'd figure out all the process.
Guest:Do this first, do this second, do this third.
Guest:And...
Guest:Yeah, we just did it like that.
Marc:So I imagine there's a lot of people, like a whole generation of people that had this experience with you, you know, working on this epic vision you had that would never have gotten the opportunity to do that kind of work before.
Marc:It probably changed their entire perception.
Guest:Well, yeah, I mean, but it starts like this.
Guest:It starts with, you know, 15 people.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And of course, you know, it's just like it shrinks down to, you know, between 10 and a half a dozen people.
Guest:And there was one set where the assassin is driving his car.
Guest:It's like a German command car through these mountains of dead army guys.
Guest:And that was like thousands and thousands of little 36 scale army men that I showed these guys.
Guest:We do this, you do that, you build this and you build that and you melt these army guys and you put it on it.
Guest:That set took three years to make.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:So you bought army guys and melted them?
Marc:Tons of them.
Marc:Bags.
Marc:Bags of army men.
Marc:Which I always loved doing as a kid.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Melting army men?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So at what point do you go into the last stages of Mad God?
Marc:Because if it took 30 years, and obviously you're telling me that some of these sets take a year to build or more, right?
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:And it was stop and go, right?
Marc:So what made you kind of like, I gotta fucking finish this?
Guest:Passion, in the worst sense.
Marc:I was suffering.
Marc:And when you finished it, did you get any relief or just go right to the hospital?
Guest:no i mean there was you know the mad god was never done you know sure it could go it seemed it could go on forever well you know it's like you know any any artist is a great story of um you know i don't want to go off track but yeah you're just never done you know sure and uh you work right up the wire and i had to get kicked off of it i'd you know by who
Guest:producers you know mad god well producers on mad god where i was the producer of it yeah and i didn't that meant i didn't have to listen to anybody about money sure you know and uh but producers came in when it came to marketing and all of that stuff and making sure that it would get to shutter at the right time so that this would happen
Guest:And so, yeah, up until like, you know, what was it?
Guest:The cutoff date.
Guest:The sound designers, I was so lucky to get Dan Wool, who I'd met through Alex Cox and Richard Beggs.
Guest:Is that guy still around, Alex Cox?
Guest:He was in Mad God.
Guest:he was the only human character in it.
Guest:It was kind of a flashback in the middle of the thing, where there's this castle being attacked by zombies, and he's the guy in the castle.
Guest:Oh, okay, okay, wow, okay.
Guest:So we've been friends for years and tried to develop stuff,
Guest:He'd work with a composer, Dan Wohl, who mostly did kind of Sergio Leone-type things for him, because Alex liked to make these Western kind of things.
Guest:But I discovered that Dan was a lot more kind of experimental, like I am, and more ambient, and was willing to take these huge risks.
Guest:And I had to...
Guest:I had the bass player, Klaus Fluoride, that was the bass player for the Dead Kennedys trying to do some stuff.
Guest:And it was just too much on the nose.
Guest:But Dan works with a lot of counterpoint and is much more artistic.
Guest:And then I was just like, again through Alex, was able to rope in Richard Beggs, the sound designer who goes back to Apocalypse.
Guest:nowadays Academy Awards.
Guest:And it was like, they just saw this unique thing that was like, you know, if you guys do it, I won't bug you at all.
Guest:You know, I don't know what you do.
Guest:I, you know, I don't micromanage people at all.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And if we're spotting something, I'd go like, yeah, it'd be kind of, you know, I'd like this and like that, like that, you know, but do your version of it, you know?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And that was about it, you know?
Marc:And it all came together.
Marc:So after it's done, after you wrap it, it's gone off to Shudder, which is, is that a horror network primarily?
Marc:Yes.
Guest:And this is not a horror film.
Guest:No, but this is where it's gonna go.
Marc:It ain't gonna go on Netflix.
Marc:Right, but are you doing any theatrical screenings?
Guest:Yeah, I just saw the list today and there's a shitload of them.
Marc:Because I think that'd be amazing to see it like that.
Marc:I just loved it.
Guest:Where did you see it?
Guest:Is it a screener?
Guest:Yeah, a screener.
Guest:Oh, you gotta see it big.
Guest:I know.
Guest:It was built for the big screen.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, I gotta do that.
Marc:So after everything's done, what's the window of time before you gotta go to the hospital?
Guest:I wasn't done.
Guest:So I just had to get better, and then I could start kind of fresh again.
Guest:I'd go like, oh, no, I need to do this.
Guest:If I do this, this will make a lot more sense.
Marc:Did they tell you anything you didn't know about yourself at the hospital?
Marc:Was there a diagnosis?
Marc:Was there...
Marc:No, no, just like cracked up.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:So now with, did you have anything?
Guest:Oh, well, no, there is a side to that.
Guest:And I actually, after I had cracked up,
Guest:I was working on some other stuff that I wanted to do.
Guest:And it was the scene where these two children, blonde-haired children, come in as terrorists and they set a bomb and they blow up this wall.
Guest:And so I was like, oh, I need to motivate the city blowing up.
Guest:So I got to do this.
Guest:And I built this big wall.
Guest:and started, oh, I'm gonna do a Jasper Johns on this wall.
Guest:It was like, no.
Guest:The next day, I come in and I'm gonna do Robert Rausch.
Guest:No, next day, it's gonna be Ed Kienholz.
Guest:No, and then it would just keep building the stuff out.
Guest:and um i was like okay it's you know enough today i'm gonna go home and it's like open the door the stage and was like oh i forgot my you know wallet and you go back in and you walk past this thing and you go like oh you know what
Guest:And then like two hours later, you're still there working on it over and over and over.
Guest:And, you know, I realized, you know what?
Guest:This is not normal for a human being.
Guest:But I'd existed this way all my life.
Guest:And so I went home and looked up, went online and looked up bipolar and it was like every...
Guest:Tick mark.
Marc:Oh, no shit.
Guest:Yeah, and they call up a psychiatrist, and I am diagnosed as unipolar.
Guest:I don't get depressed, unless there's a really fucking good reason to get depressed.
Guest:But I'm manic, and that's what blew my gasket.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Really.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I just could not stop.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the only way I could stop myself was by self-medicating with alcohol, which did not help my brain popping.
Guest:But I just had to, at the end of the day, put brakes on.
Guest:But now there's medication that deals with that really successfully.
Guest:Nice.
Guest:Leveled you off a bit.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I can actually control it.
Guest:I can kind of play it.
Guest:That's great.
Guest:In that, like, I can feel it coming on.
Guest:In the morning, you take it, okay.
Guest:In the afternoon, I can feel it.
Guest:And I've kind of moved into a new deal.
Guest:One of the things that happened at the end of Mad God was, bang, I lost all interest in making things with my hands.
Yeah.
Guest:What?
Guest:And I prolifically dreamed.
Guest:I was a prolific dreamer, and I used the dreams to help me figure out the Mad God narrative because there was a narrative to a bunch of my dreams, although oblique, but it really did inform me about, you know, cinematically how to construct the thing in that, you know, my intention or design such as it was was to make these shots
Guest:that were so detailed that there was no way you could really encompass the whole of it in the three or four seconds that it was on before the next shot that had so much shit in it was, it would cancel that out.
Guest:The best way I could think of affecting a dream is just to stay in this moment.
Marc:Like, everywhere you look is a whole other possible world.
Guest:Yeah, or you're just like drug along.
Guest:Right, right, right, right.
Guest:So, yeah, that was intentional.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:So, like, it's interesting when you look back on that method of working, that sort of, you know, compulsive, like, you know, not landing on things but putting everything in, you know, that's sort of a kind of testament to the manic imagination.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Marc:It is.
Marc:I had no idea.
Guest:I've been that way all my life.
Guest:that's exciting have you seen the movie uh tim's vermeer yeah i did i did see that yeah you know remember the scene he gets to this point where he just like throws down his whatever he's doing yeah and he goes fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck i hate this this is worse than being in a bad marriage yeah i mean that's where i was at right with this thing yeah oh man i'm glad it's out of you it's like an exorcism yeah i would never do it again no
Marc:Well, you might not have 30 years.
Guest:I don't want to be negative.
Guest:Well, exactly.
Guest:No, but I've got, well, I wouldn't call it a sequel.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Well, no, I mean, it can't be.
Guest:It's like- Is this the happy ending?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, hopefully.
Guest:I mean, one of my mentors was Tex Avery.
Guest:Oh, great.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I worked with him on commercials and stuff.
Guest:And he would show me how to, you know, work dummy sheets and stuff like that.
Guest:So I went this next thing in the 60s.
Guest:A college buddy of mine and I were smoking dope.
Guest:And I don't even remember what it was, a story or whatnot, a character.
Guest:But we came up with this word, this whatever it was, term, Pequins, Pendiquin, P-E-N-D-I-Q-U-I-N-S, apostrophe S, P-E-N-D-I-Q-U-I-N.
Guest:And I have no idea what it was.
Guest:But it just stuck with me since college.
Guest:And so Pequin is a character.
Guest:And I want it to be more like a 1940s, you know, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones kind of cartoon.
Guest:No, stop motion thing, you know, like Mad God.
Guest:But, you know, as they say, the canary sings one song.
Guest:And so, you know, I'll try and I'll be good.
Guest:You know, I'll make a version of it.
Guest:If anybody lets me, that will be good.
Guest:have like gore and stuff in it but I'll design it in such a way that that can be cut out you know so they can it can be presented because I've got to look for money sure these things cost a lot of money so um yeah we'll see and do you since you've sort of gotten a handle on
Marc:The mental thing, do you... How's your... Because it feels that Mad God, as funny and dark and... I just like that there's all this decay and goop and things, but it's bleak.
Guest:You know, it's the zeitgeist.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Of today.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, you can't avoid the void.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So this this this sequel in your head.
Guest:Is it?
Guest:Oh, it's much more playful.
Guest:OK.
Guest:You know, it's very hopefully a little bit.
Guest:No, it's pretty boilerplate.
Guest:You know, it's it's really a hero's journey.
Guest:Oh, good.
Marc:Well, I mean, I tell you, as a guy who doesn't, you know, I'm not a sci-fi nerd or an animation guy.
Marc:I really enjoyed it.
Marc:And it felt like a deep, rich, you know, it just it felt like a life's work kind of thing.
Marc:And it resonated with me.
Marc:I couldn't take my eyes off it.
Guest:Thanks.
Guest:I appreciate that.
Guest:I mean, I was a nervous wreck when it was premiered in Switzerland at Locarno.
Guest:And the composer, Dan Wohl, and I, our hobby was to sit at the back of theaters and watch how many people would walk out.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we had just no idea.
Guest:I was, like, really nervous.
Guest:And we sat at the back, and there was a mom and dad and a 7-year-old and a 5-year-old little blonde boy.
Guest:And, you know, I told the mom, you know, I wouldn't bring my kids to see this.
Guest:And then, like, it wasn't more than, like, you know, 30 seconds in, you know, they got up to leave and said, you were right.
Guest:And we're like, yeah, it gets worse.
Yeah.
Guest:How did it go over, though, in general?
Guest:Oh, God, it just took off.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Great.
Guest:Yeah, it was just exponential, you know, and it just hasn't stopped.
Guest:I mean, it's found its audience.
Guest:I have no idea if there's a bigger audience, except I do have some faith that, you know, because of the state of things and the so-called content, which is just hot air, you know, means nothing.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:that if you make something unique, you know, if you build a better mousetrap, the world will be the path to your door.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And we'll see.
Guest:I have no idea.
Marc:Yeah, and I'll get the theatrical release dates and stuff.
Marc:Yeah, it was great talking to you.
Marc:It really was.
Guest:Yeah, it was fun.
Guest:I appreciate you coming.
Guest:You know, time just flew by.
Guest:Cool, man.
Guest:And I knew all the answers.
Guest:It's all you.
Guest:Thanks, Phil.
Okay.
Marc:That was me and Phil Tippett.
Marc:Again, the film, Mad God, is streaming on Shudder, which you can subscribe to on its own or as part of AMC+.
Marc:It starts streaming June 16th, but there's going to be a theatrical release starting this week, Friday, June 10th.
Marc:Screenings all over the country.
Marc:Go to madgodmovie.com.
Marc:Here's some guitar.
Marc:I keep doing it.
Thank you.
Guest:guitar solo
Yeah.
Guest:boomer lives monkey la fonda cat angels everywhere man