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[windmill creaking]
[Steve] It's a medium, God damn it.
[gravel crunching]
It ain't gonna fit me.
-[windmill creaking] -[gate lock clicking open]
-Look at that. -[gate clicking shut]
[reporter] Oh, it's exactly--
It's exactly what I have, but it's a medium,
I don't think it's gonna fit.
-[reporter] You need a large? -Yeah, minimum.
I can't wear a shirt unless it has a stain on it.
If you wear a shirt that doesn't have a stain on it,
it's not a shirt.
One of the biggest problems I have is my memory.
I just wanna forget everything.
Unfortunately, I can't.
-[woman] You raised her-- -[Steve] The past haunts me.
[TV announcer] Do these animals deserve the same protections
given to other species?
Or should they just be left to die?
[dinosaurs roars]
These creatures were here before us.
[door slamming shut]
[Steve] I guess Netflix is doing the thing on Jurassic.
They want to hear the real story.
Not a revisionist history version.
We're in "C" Theater
at 3210 Kerner Boulevard, San Rafael, California,
the old ILM facility.
In this theater is where we projected
every single one of the shots
that we knew was gonna change the entire film industry.
When the T-Rex took a step, you had a secondary jiggle.
So, I had separate channels of animation
of literally a digital bladder
hung off the hierarchy of the leg,
so it shook on the bone.
So, if the bladder shook,
the outside control vertices shook as well.
So, every time the Rex took a step,
you had to have a massive amount of shake
of this muscle.
A lot of people are always referring back to it
being the best of all the Jurassics.
And now, what is it?
World domination of everything--
I mean the "Giganotosaurus", that's the latest one.
It was like three times the size of the Rex.
"It is? Oh, I better go see the sequel."
Why don't they just merge Star Wars and Jurassic together
and come up with one big mega movie?
You know, it's like dinosaurs in space
and everyone's shooting each other, you know?
[somber music playing]
I'm naive, I guess,
when it comes to a lot of stuff.
And you get burned, y'know.
You get burned.
Things are so simple now, right?
Looking back at the ILM days,
it's almost like it was a weird dream.
Even though I was using machines as a tool back then,
I myself was stuck in a machine.
And this whole thing about blind curiosity,
trying to, A, prove it yourself,
and B, you know,
prove it to the world, you can do something.
Little did I know...
y'know, I created a monster.
[T-Rex roaring and growling]
And joining me now in the studio
is the chief animator at Lucasfilm, Steve Williams.
George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic Company,
the folks who provided special effects
for Star Wars, is going commercial.
[narrator] These hummingbirds are not real.
Animator Steve Williams sketches out a line drawing
on a computer screen.
[woman] It was never Steve's intention to combine
his classical animation training with computers,
but now colleagues marvel,
they've never seen anyone create life so realistically.
It was not biotechnology
that brought the dinosaurs to life inJurassic Park.
[reporter 2] Animator Steve Williams
used a computer to bring the T-Rex to life.
[reporter 3] The Universal Studios picture
could generate as much as $50 million this weekend.
[reporter 4] Other studios in town will not open
any of their pictures against it.
[reporter 5] Williams is one of the hottest
computer animators in Hollywood.
[reporter 5] Spreading his message
that computer animation is about art,
not technology.
I mean, is there anything that worries you about this?
[Steve] Oh, yeah, I-- I think it's pretty--
I-- I don't think it's a good thing, but it's--
[host] Well, so, you're sort of like Dr. Frankenstein.
[somber music playing]
-[rain pattering] -[thunder rumbling]
[Steve] Everybody thinks that chaos is completely random.
There is no such thing as random.
Every single variable is calculatable.
And math is nothing but a language
to try and describe what nature already knows.
We're so steeped in the rules...
so when you think differently, you're seen as a heretic.
♪
I know I was different, you know, I-- I knew it.
I've always been different.
I had visions about how things are gonna be...
and not should be, but just are going to be.
Especially about, you know, synthetic imagery.
Here's a low-resolution data of the T-Rex,
and most of these points here
where each one of the bones were.
Jurassic Park storyboards.
"SS approved" means Steven Spielberg approved.
Chase scene four.
75 frames. Took me four months to animate this shot.
Here's somebody that was fundamental
at that time, in-- in, uh, the-- the,
um, progress of this disruptive technology.
But, the way that I know him now,
he mainly likes to blacksmith,
and we end up hanging out in the shop
because he likes to get his hands dirty,
just like I do.
[Bill] We all called him Spaz.
Now, calling Steve Williams "Spaz,"
was, uh, a nickname,
like, that giant guy in high school
that everybody called Tiny.
[boy] Hey, Spaz, my, how you doing, buddy?
[Bill] That character with the pocket protector
and the thick glasses, he was the opposite.
Here was a motorcycle-riding,
leather-jacket-wearing guy,
who's the first one that I ever met,
that was an artist,
who had computer
and high-mathematical skills.
Like Michelangelo took corpses and dissected them,
Spaz is a guy who kind of dissected life a little bit.
[Steve] I was just amazed by how things worked.
My whole life I was driven by how things work.
Cartoons deviated from the rules
of the way nature operates.
It was sort of questioning convention.
-You're questioning reality. -[neighing]
Good he's got that going for me.
Got that going at me.
[Steve] Sheridan College in Toronto.
All of us are misfits.
We didn't think conventionally.
We're these, like, these strange artists.
I decided to take classical animation.
Then, I took computer engineering,
University of Toronto.
Then I joined a company in Toronto called Alias,
using computers to do animation.
No one really thought about it that way.
They thought it for data processing,
they didn't really think about it
for actually animating.
I was attempting to try and replicate the real world
in a synthetic environment.
There were very few people in the world that knew Alias,
three-dimensional computer graphics back in 1988.
I was working on a system called the "CIWS,"
it was a Gatling gun that, for the most part,
sat on Iowa-class battleships.
The simulation I was working,
had the fluorocarbon cooling system.
ILM, Industrial Light Magic,
got wind that there was somebody
that actually knew something about fluid dynamics.
[man] They're working on a movie
where there's a water creature.
[Howard] Now, you see water doing things
all the time, but back in the day,
you said, "Well, it's gonna be water that comes alive,
and then the face comes out of the water."
People would just blank out.
It was a big question mark for everybody.
What Jim had seen in computer graphics
up to that point,
was all the other prior films
that had used computer graphics,
like Last Starfighter, and Tron,
and even Young Sherlock Holmes.
CG had an artificiality to it.
We were looking for a photo-real thing.
His previous films, Terminatorand Aliens,
they were about thrills and action.
They were not about just a straight sense of wonder.
He really wanted to show that he could do that.
We clearly needed additional talent
and we found Steve Williams.
The quality was paramount.
If we were gonna be successful,
this stuff had to be not just good enough,
it had to be great, it had to be convincing,
it had to be something
that ultimately no one had ever seen before.
So I ended up at Industrial Light Magic,
and I got hired in October of 1988
to be Chief Animator on The Abyss.
We had two machines,
Silicon Graphics GT60 and a GT80.
The first thing I had to do
was figure out how to animate the spine
of the pseudopod.
"The Water Weenie" was the nickname.
[Douglas] Everyone's looking at us.
If we fail,
it would have been a tremendous setback.
[Mark] I was the first Ph.D. at ILM
in the subject of computer graphics.
We didn't have a lot office space,
but I got put in this thing called "The Pit,"
which was downstairs and was a sound room.
And we turned it into this kind of wild, wacky office.
Spaz was put down there too.
My first impression, he walks in,
he's got, like, a tight, white t-shirt,
crew cut, Dudley Do-Right chin,
old school jeans rolled up at the bottom,
and wearing engineer boots.
It-- it's, like, a '50s biker thing
or, you know, this kind of strange,
macho Canadian thing or who knows what.
[Steve] There's this fucking hippie and I'm thinking,
"Ah, God damned fucking hippie,
God damned Californian," you know?
And he's got his feet on the desk
and playing on the stereo
Alice Cooper, "Love it to Death."
That's the first fucking album I ever had and he goes,
"That's the first album I ever had."
And that was it. Game over.
[Mark] We hit it off right away.
I mean, it's funny, even though we're very different,
we like to have fun.
Have fun, be fun. That was our motto.
[Steve] We were outsiders,
only because we had this technical animation solution,
but we hadn't really worked on films.
My job, you know,
was to try and figure out the nuance of the animation.
Mark had come up with this code
that allowed us to put little sine wave distributions
over the surface to create a rippling effect.
[Mark] How to take surfaces and make them undulate
like they're water, even though they're tubes,
that was a big pain in the ass.
We had to just find solutions.
[Douglas] Jim sent us back scans
with the video we had
just drawing on it with a marker, he faxed them.
Ultimately, we were able to accomplish
what Jim was looking for.
Cameron had said, had that scene failed,
he would've just yanked it from the entire film.
But it ended being one of the premiere scenes.
Everybody looked at it and went,
"How in blazes was that done?"
And that's where the deal changed.
I knew darn well this would be the best
that I would ever do.
Ever.
I just knew that there wasn't gonna be
any more creative hurdles,
there wouldn't be anything like what we were doing at ILM.
When you grow up in Canada, it's like...
you grow up with eight colors, okay?
So, you have to learn how to design and draw,
and paint with these eight colors.
When you come to the States,
you're instantly, across the border,
given 20 colors.
[cheerful upbeat music playing]
It blows your bloody mind.
You can have a '65 Cadillac without any rust on it.
Engines, gas,
bullets, beer, everything, just like that, snap.
Everything's a half an hour away.
It's great. It's like being in Disneyland.
One, one gun, ah, ah, ah, ah.
In America, anybody can do anything.
All you have to do is put in the dedication
and the sweat,
and you can get whatever you fucking want.
That concept didn't exist in Canada.
Growing up in Toronto,
you're growing up in suppression.
You're growing up in bureaucracy.
You are not qualified to do this.
The prime minister at the time
was a guy named Pierre Trudeau.
And Pierre Trudeau said,
"If you don't like it here in Canada,
move somewhere else."
So, I said, "Okay, fine. I'm gonna."
And I did.
So, this is the original mousepad
that I used to build Terminator 2.
I was there so much I ended up wearing out the pad.
Pretty funny, eh?
[Van] The pseudopod sequence was a validation
that this was a technique that had a lot of promise.
But it took Jim Cameron on his next film,
Terminator 2, to kind of take it to the next step
of what you could do with it.
The Abyss encouraged me to take it a step further,
or many steps further.
He knew to try and push it.
And that was the good thing about Cameron, he pushed it.
He believed in it,
even though he didn't know the technology
or the technique and he let myself and Spaz
and everyone run with it.
[Steve] Everyone's neck was on the line, including his.
The biggest technical challenge
was building a human in data, it hadn't been done before.
[Mark] Robert Patrick is the T-1000.
We're gonna study his body,
we're gonna watch his movements,
we're gonna find a way to capture his quality.
[Steve] There was no motion capture back then.
So, Mark and I thought
"Okay, well, let's do what Muybridge had done."
Put a grid, but not on the background.
Put a grid on the guy.
[Robert] The day I got cast,
I'm flown to wherever the hell ILM is.
Spaz and Mark start to paint these grids over me...
and I had no idea what the fuck they were doing.
Pardon my language, but, you know, they're animators,
I don't know what they're doing, but they--
they seem real interested in what I'm doing.
[Steve] All right, oh, man, oh, man.
-I'm one of the biggest-- -[Steve] No, no, you're not.
Yes, I am. I could have been a T-1000.
[Steve] You can only pray to have lines like that.
I think that's the only time
I ever seen you with a smile, Robert, huh?
[Mark laughs] He's out of character.
[Robert] Mark and Steve were so inquisitive
about what was I thinking,
where was I getting these ideas?
If you're my target now,
my left leg and my hip would drop back,
my hip would lead me, and then the target's there.
[Steve] Gotcha.
[Robert] Immediately, it clicked with that.
We had, like, our own theory,
our own T-1000 talk, our own jargon.
And they were kinda close to my age.
And I could tell they were young and eager,
trying to make a name for themselves as well.
We were all pretty passionate.
And I remember thinking,
"T-2 man, it's a whole 'nother level up."
[Robert] The walk out of the fire,
the first unveiling of the special powers
the T-1000 had.
[soft music playing]
The first take I did, I went in there
and I could smell my shirt burning.
And I could feel it on the back of my ears.
My ears were getting singed.
[Steve] The first shot I had to do
was CC1 walking out of the fire.
There was 375 frames long,
fully skin walking T-1000.
[Robert] I remember shooting that,
and I remember everybody being frustrated.
I remember me being very frustrated,
because I thought I was fucking it up
for everybody.
I think we did like 27 takes or something, I don't know.
I do remember that day,
Jim and I sitting somewhere in that canal,
off to the side in the shade.
I think he could sense at how frustrated I was
and he said, "Hey, man, this has never been done.
We're making movie history.
This is history right now."
[Steve] At ILM,
we shot all this great reference material
of Robert Patrick walking.
I'd come up with a method to actually build the T-1000.
[man] Okay, ready to roll camera?
All right, roll "B" camera.
Action!
[Steve] I started with a set of bones.
[Robert] Spaz, he actually animated my skeletal system.
[Steve] So it operates like any standard puppet,
it's got 30 channels to it
that go from anywhere from controlling
the speed of his legs
to the speed of what his fingers are doing.
This is really the first successful step
to adding real life
to an otherwise inanimate piece of geometry.
We are destined to do that or nothing.
We knew that other people had come so far,
we wanted to go beyond that.
Once that shot happened, that was it.
Everybody knew.
That was a new beginning.
[Van Vliet] ILM was evolving.
If you're lucky, you will find a place to go
where they will continue to subsidize your insanity.
Stories that wanted to be told ten years ago
couldn't really be told
because there was limitations in the effects industry.
You know, so...
Every time we did something that became better and digital,
more experts moved in, that we'd never seen before.
More managers moved in.
More people to tell you what you were doing wrong,
even though they didn't even understand
what you were doing.
Many folks, particularly in the beginning,
didn't embrace it, nor did they feel, like,
they had the capability to embrace it.
You didn't want to lose your job
to anything that was new.
Right away, we knew, "This is coming."
A lot of people were terrified by it,
"It's gonna put model makers out of work."
It was a live conversation happening all the time
'cause it was a threat.
That's how we saw it.
So not only did they not want to embrace them,
they actually wanted to see them fail,
in my opinion.
But, this was the future.
And I just started buying gear.
Throwing money into digital.
Now, we started hiring.
And we needed to hire people to do Terminator 2.
[Geoff] On The Abyss,
there were probably seven or eight, um,
computer graphics artists.
And by the time we got to Terminator
it had grown to around 15.
We were kind of new to this whole field.
We were inventing it as we went along.
[Schlag] I went into ILM my first day,
and they crack open a binder full of storyboards,
and I'm turning through the pages
and looking at one thing and saying,
"Oh, well, how are we gonna do that?"
And they said, "Oh, we don't know yet."
I turn a few more pages and look at something else
and, "Oh, how do we do that?"
"We don't know."
And I thought, "You people are crazy."
[Michael] What I knew was geometry and animation,
and a little bit about lighting.
I didn't know anything about compositing,
I certainly didn't know anything
about traditional special effects.
I wasn't even a big movie buff, really.
[Stefen] I had no training in film whatsoever.
Not a single day of film school.
Every filmmaker who wanted to do something new,
came to ILM.
But, doing traditional effects,
blowing things up in camera,
and then optically printing them
was very much still the norm back then.
As the manager of the company,
what I really needed to do is foster change,
so I needed to take some of the computer graphics people
and put them in with the old school masters.
And I carved out, like, a week of time
of these people to be together in a seminar
so that they could teach each other.
It was like oil and water.
And this is, uh, C-3PO, huh, you know.
[Scott] The computer graphics people
that were being hired had very little time,
nor interest, in old school technology.
And let's see how his vital signs are.
Well, after all these years he still holds up.
[Scott] It was like, you know,
your high school students saying,
"Why do I have to study math? I don't need to study.
I have this thing, it's a calculator."
[Mark] We all loved ILM and we loved George Lucas
and we loved all that stuff
'cause it had an impact on our lives.
But, we weren't, like, mad fanboys.
We believed in kind of the irony of it all, you know?
So, it wasn't, like, to be taken so seriously,
it wasn't, like, uh, uh,
we wanted to deify or worship all these things.
So, we were-- First of all, we were casual about it.
Hello, how are you?
My name's Dobbie, Dobbie Dickwit.
[Bill] Steve Williams was a combination
of brilliance, naivete, some childishness,
all wrapped into one package.
And I think, uh,
some of that rubbed management the wrong way.
He drove me crazy.
He drove everybody crazy in that marketing department
'cause he did not do what we wanted him to do.
And he almost had, like, a secret glee,
by not doing what we wanted him to do.
[Bill] If you're gonna have a successful company
with creative people in it,
you gotta give some leeway to these unusual types.
They are young, full of energy,
and some of them are oddballs.
Well, hi there, I am Hickory, I own this farm.
-Nice to meet you. -[puppeteer] Ow!
Let go you fucking asshole.
[puppeteer yelling]
There was a lot of serious work there,
but there was also a lot of nonsense.
And you have to have a lot of nonsense
to actually get creative stuff done.
It's part of the equation.
[Mark] We would have these parties
called "pit parties."
[Steve] We hung up fliers all around the company,
it said, "Nailed, an evening of social penetration."
-[upbeat music playing] -[crowd chattering]
We had two big bowls,
"Mystic Masonic Punch,"
and "Our Lady of the Berry Wine."
There are people running around drunk out of their heads.
[Stefen] There's really no guidelines
or no established standards
of how we were supposed to behave
or what we're supposed to do or not do.
So, there were certain drugs were consumed,
and, well, I took some mushrooms
and watched some black and white movie in reverse.
[Scott] The fact that they were down there
in the pit, they could let off a lot of steam.
Steve would have a hockey stick and he'd be bashing something.
I end up falling off the desk
and falling into a pile of glass.
I didn't have any feeling for a while.
I was suspended twice,
because we fucking destroyed the place.
[Scott] You needed to allow people
to make mistakes and experiment.
You also needed to allow them to understand
that it was a business.
[Steve] There was a lot of politics at the time
because it was a high-profile film.
[Stefen] In The Abyss,
you know, there was a small sequence.
James Cameron had basically said,
"If this does not get done on schedule,
I can just cut it out."
Now, for Terminator 2, it was pretty clear
that if computer graphics didn't work out,
that would be a problem.
So, the pressure was on.
Somehow, everybody around us just had to trust us.
[Steve] If the studio was about to spend
five or six million dollars,
they want somebody that's got some cred, right?
Not us young punks.
For a group of computer graphics people
who are trying to prove themselves,
you had to have a face for that, and that was Dennis.
[John] Dennis Muren looms big over everything.
He is Optimus Prime.
[Geoff] Dennis had all the experience
and such great credentials.
[Scott] He was the leader of the pack.
He was the guy with the most gold statues,
he was the guy that was still standing in there the longest.
He was the guy.
Computer generated images are a way of coming up
with new effects.
You're starting to see, I think,
a lot of the limits of traditional effects.
So, I've all the time,
been sort of pushing for this stuff to work.
[Scott] Dennis not only supported
digital technology, but embraced it and pressed it.
[Mark] He always, I think, is looking big picture
and understands how all the elements fit.
He could look at an image, "It's not working."
He's the kind of guy that could say
what'll make it work.
And that's a big, big talent.
He's one of the best.
That's why he's so well respected
and won so many awards.
[Tom] He had the vision to see where it could go,
but the specifics of making it go there,
as far as the actual doing,
fell, somewhat, to other people.
You know, hierarchies being what they are,
at some point you find yourself now reporting to someone
who knows less than you do
about what it is that you're doing.
Dennis comes from a camera background.
He knows that area really well,
but he was relying, certainly, on us computer geeks
to try and bolt everything together
and get the shots through.
There's no one person who can know or do everything
and, so, you have to rely on people who have expertise.
If you're smart, you get into that organization,
you play by the rules, you make connections,
but you have to have a bit of humility.
[man] The Spaz-Dippé personality style
I don't think fit.
[Van] They had more of a punk sensibility.
The way they liked to dress
and the way they liked to do things
was not the norm at ILM.
There were several times when they almost got fired
[Van] During the making of Terminator 2
there was a dinner.
[Mark] And it's at Skywalker Ranch.
The ranch was sort of verboten.
We were sort of, like, the bastard step-children
that lived on Kerner and ate at Foodles.
[Steve] Mark and I are invited to the ranch.
[Mark] We ride our motorcycles up Skywalker Ranch.
We park them on the front, like, 25 motorcycles.
This office building is a house.
[Howard] We went into the executive dining room.
The food's being served. These two guys get bored
and they decide to get up and take a walk.
[Mark] We're just walkin' around the house.
And then at the very end, there's a little, like,
sunken den.
They found their way to George's private sanctum,
the anteroom to his actual office.
And they walk into the office and they sit down--
[Tom] Smoking cigars, into George's liquor cabinet,
feet up on the desk.
[Mark] Now, unbeknownst to us, everything is alarmed.
They have pressure sensitive carpets up there.
And all of a sudden, out of nowhere,
the Skywalker police show up.
Skywalker had their own police and fire department.
"What's going on here? Who are you?"
"What are you doing? You're in George Lucas' office."
They had done the unthinkable!
They had actually gone in and defouled the chambers!
Spaz says, "Well, my name is Scott Ross."
Dippé gave his name as Lincoln Hu,
which caused a certain amount of chagrin
for the real Lincoln Hu.
Lincoln Hu's one of the only other Asian guys
I can think of, even though I'm only half Asian.
[Scott] And the security guy said,
"We know who Scott Ross is. What's your name?"
And Spaz says, "You got me, my name's Ed Jones."
So, the next morning the call comes in.
"What the hell did you guys do?"
"We didn't do anything, we were screwing around!"
"Well, they think you did something
and you're in deep shit."
I go, "Like what?" "They want you fired."
"What?"
Doug Norby.
Doug Norby was the head of Lucas Film at the time.
[Scott] My arch nemesis.
He calls me on the phone and he says,
"George is beside himself and I want you to fire
Lincoln Hu and Ed Jones."
I said, "Well, first of all, it wasn't Lincoln Hu
and it wasn't Ed Jones,
it was Steve Williams and it was Mark Dippé."
He says, "George wants them fired."
I said, "I can't fire them."
"Listen, this is what George wants,
-he wants them fired." -Okay.
Let me just put you in the picture.
If I fire these two guys,
Jim Cameron
and the entire Columbia Legal Department
is gonna be in your office tomorrow
because these two guys are what makes Terminator 2.
And if I fire the two of them, the film doesn't get done
and you're gonna be sued.
"Okay, let me get back to you."
-"Thanks, Doug." Click. -Damn it! You know?
So, what they had to do is they had to figure out
how to penalize us.
So, what happened was we had to sit
on a tribunal.
Me and Mark on one side
and all the head brass of Lucas Film.
They're asking us the weirdest fucking questions
in the world, they're going,
"If you're having a party at your house,
and you see that people have gone into your bedroom
during the party, would you be offended?"
I said, "No! Are you kidding me?"
They're-- I said, "At my parties,
everyone's in the bedroom!"
This-- We-- we-- we-- This is ridiculous.
Mark and I go, "Look, we'll quit right now."
We said we'll quit. "Oh, no, no, no."
"They can stay,
but they are banned from the ranch.
They are no longer allowed on the ranch."
[man] From that moment on, they were persona non grata
at the ranch.
[Scott] Lincoln Hu winds up getting a phone call
and it's Doug Norby.
"I know it wasn't you, I know it was the other guys
and I'm really sorry that I used your name,
but I really wanna thank you for the plate of cookies
that you sent me."
And Lincoln says, "Doug,
I wouldn't eat any of those cookies if I was you."
[laughing]
I'm Roger Ebert of theChicago Sun Times.
And I'm Gene Siskel of theChicago Tribune
and our first film isTerminator 2.
Thanks to some truly spectacular
and mystifying special effects,
this is one terrific action picture.
I enjoyed it a lot more than the original.
It hit the press big.
Tons of publicity and stuff.
Accolades.
No one had ever seen anything like it before.
Mark Dippé and I, we were like these superstars.
The press was crazy.
Dennis and I did a Timemagazine article together
and the way it was shown was like,
uh, the sorcerer and his young apprentice.
I think Dennis was a supporter of the idea, but...
you know, he's like-- A-- He was worried.
[Dennis] I didn't go into this show
relying on CG to be able to do it.
I had a backup plan.
I was ready at any time to start pulling out the--
To get the model shop going and getting the foam beam,
you know, whipped up, and castings
and everything like that if we had to
and try, you know, other techniques to do it.
[Steve] Those guys were working with limitations.
Technical limitations.
When computer graphics came along,
we're really trying to do better
what the guy did before.
[Geoff] Steve really pushed on everyone.
He knew what we could do
and that we could push it further.
Maybe that's where some of the friction came from.
It will be no secret
that Dennis and Spaz's relationship...
was not always the friendliest thing.
Oddly enough, the biggest obstacles
I ran into were the experts at ILM.
They were the obstacles. It wasn't the technology.
They were the obstacles.
He was like having the crazy grandfather
in the room that was in World War II
and is mumbling stories about World War II,
but you're supposed to listen to him
because if you don't, you know,
it's considered politically incorrect.
[reporter] The big shift in your time, I guess,
was from optical to digital
and, so, you went through, what,
a kind of crisis or a period of learning?
The credit was given to the person
that actually didn't even understand how it was done.
The Abyss just looked amazing
and I thought, "This is gonna work."
And I don't understand it.
This was such a new technology, he wouldn't have had any clue.
I got that big van Dam folly book on CG,
I read that just from front to back over a period of weeks.
[Steve] After The Abyss,
he got an Oscar for it.
And I'm here for Industrial Light and Magic
and thanks everybody who worked on the show
from up there, John Knoll and, uh,
everyone in the computer graphics department.
And thanks so much, especially to Jim Cameron,
my wife, Zara, and Gregory.
Thank you!
[audience applauding]
[cameraman] No, I missed that, uh, where-- What's this?
[cameraman] For The Abyss? What-- It looks a little soft.
I think in any environment like that,
you're gonna have some, uh, jealousy.
Everybody is jockeying for a position.
But I don't think, uh, Steve Williams
was jockeying for anything.
He was not a ladder climber.
He just wanted to have fun and do his art.
He was the one actually hands-on creating.
He would work late nights in the pit.
That's when he would focus the most
and follow his own instincts.
[Steve] Politically, you don't see this stuff coming
because you're so engrossed in what you're doing.
[Adrienne] There's always been bureaucracy
and red tape and politics
and there were politics at ILM back in the day, too.
You know, there was a big man on campus,
bigger than Steve.
Won numerous Oscars.
I'd like to thank my mom and John Berg and Phil Tippett
and Ken and all the camera department.
And thank you very much to Mike McAllister, uh,
Mike Pangrazio, and the math department.
I'd very much like to thank Bruce Nicholson,
Mike McAllister, Mike Owens.
Well, thank you to the Academy,
and Steven Spielberg, George Lucas,
Kathy Kennedy, Frank Marshall, and Robert Watts.
This is a big thrill.
We'd really like to thank the Academy,
Joe Dante for doing his great direction,
Mike Finnell, of course, Steven Spielberg-
His name was gonna be at the top,
regardless of all the people who were working underneath
and there were dozens and dozens,
Steve was just one of 'em.
Secondly, there's the concept of, you know,
there's your story, there's my story,
and there's the story.
I think, you know...
history is written for the victors.
The Oscar goes to Dennis Muren,
Stan Winston, Gene Warren, Jr.,
and Robert Skotak.
Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
[audience cheering and applauding]
Thanks to, uh, everyone at Industrial Light and Magic,
and especially my incredible computer graphic team.
To Janet Healy, Mark Dippé, my wife, Zara, Gregory,
and Gwendolyn, and especially Jim Cameron.
[tense music playing]
[Steve] He didn't mention me.
I remember I was so mad, I put my fist through a wall.
I never thought about, politically,
how to play this fuckin' chess game.
We were thinking about creating the art, right?
Creating these ideas.
We weren't thinking about,
"What does this mean for my future?"
♪
[Adrienne] There's always gonna be a bigger fish
who's gonna get the credit.
That's how the game is played.
That's life.
If you wanna stay in the industry,
you gotta play the game.
Steve didn't play that game.
He didn't know how to. He didn't want to.
That's why he stood out.
You learn a lot in an environment like that.
Not just about how to do,
what is, ostensibly, your job, but how it fits with the rest.
Not everybody really fits that environment
and you function within this hierarchy.
This is the sort of through to the bone moment
where you realize, "Yes, the game is changing."
[Steve] In June of '91, this meeting happened
at a place called Yu Shang across from ILM.
So, Mark Dippé and I are sitting there
and Dennis Muren's there, John Schlag's there,
Mike Natkin is there, Stefen Fangmeier's there.
Muren said Steven Spielberg is coming up with this new film
based on Michael Crighton's book
called Jurassic Park.
It's about a bunch of dinosaurs in a park and it goes awry.
When Jurassicstarted,
there were three different approaches
in companies that were going to handle it.
Stan Winston's group would do the physical creatures,
the close ups.
Phil Tippet's group would do the medium shots
via stop-motion where you could see
all the action of a dinosaur.
And then ILM would do the far away heard shots.
[John] The long shots.
Oh, they're way over there
and they're only this big in the frame
and we can get away with all kinds of cheats.
These are the decisions we made.
Here's where we're going. This is great.
So, Steve Williams, Mark Dippé said,
"Why don't we just build the whole thing
on computer graphics?
Let's just do the whole thing."
Yeah, that's a tough one, um--
Sure. Yeah, um--
We're all like, uh, okay?
We're ready for this, we can do this.
-We gotta fuckin' do it. -Oh, no.
No, no, no, no, no. Nope. Nope.
Muren, he's just blank. Like, Orphan Annie eyes.
Fangmeier, he jumped in right away and said no.
We're in the last stretches of completing Terminator 2.
We're working 16-hour days, we're all worn out.
So, I think we were rather cautious.
The amount of work is so large and unknowns, so many.
People were being negative.
Now, look, you've done chrome,
you've done water,
but you've never done anything living, breathing.
The liquid metal, poly alloy Terminator
was simpler than a dinosaur.
[Mark] We knew we'd never done it before.
Even The Abyss, I'd never done that before,
but I said I could do it.
T2, same thing, I'd never done it before,
but I said I could do it.
[Jody] Steve Williams and Mark Dippé
knew that the time was right.
They could just see it.
The opportunity was there, they wanted to seize it.
And I think other people was like "Whoa, that's--
No, we're not going into this whole new realm."
[John] The powers that be were just so concerned.
Phil was definitely a nay-sayer in the beginning.
[Phil] I kinda felt it was, like...
the Wild West.
These new guys were coming in.
The young gunslingers, you know,
it was like, you know, I can outdraw you. [laughing]
[Scott] Phil Tippett, the enfant terrible
of stop motion visual effects.
He'’s the real deal.
[man] Watching Phil Tippett work,
it was real apparent real quick
that he was one of those magic people.
When you have that much talent
and you have that much knowledge
and you have that much work discipline,
it makes you a sort of super,
uber effects geek.
And that was Phil.
[Jody] Phil Tippett and Dennis Muren both worked
at Cascade at the early parts of their careers.
They worked on Dragon Slayer together in 1981.
They'’d had a long relationship.
[man] Right from the start, Dennis was in the position
of having people that he knew
that he wanted to make sure they were a part of the mix.
Steve knew what we could do,
and that we could push it further.
[Phil] I perceived just a slight amount of,
you know, competition on their side,
you know, needing to prove themselves.
[Steve] That'’s why Phil got mad.
Because we were trying to do a stop-motion film
using computer graphics.
[Mark] He led the camp that
that is the wrong road to go down.
I think from Dennis'’ point of view,
he was worried.
He'’s, like, "“Dude, this is a lot different
than liquid metal."”
And then Phil was like,
"“Computer animation, that'’s the wrong approach."”
The stop-motion footage was the selected solution.
Full-scale animatronics with Stan Winston.
That was the approach that was agreed upon
and that was the road they were going down.
[Steve] Everything had been assigned.
Stan'’s doing this, Phil'’s doing this,
Stan'’s doing this and that'’s it.
This is the technology we are using.
There is no room for a new technology.
There was something about being told no,
um, you know, if you'’re rebellious,
you know, "no" is actually really, um, a fuel for you.
[Douglas] He took it upon himself to just prove it
and the only way to prove that is to show it.
Steve, Spaz, starts by making a skeleton.
[Steve] I literally did exactly what I did
with the T-Rex that I did with the T-1000.
I just built the bones.
I built the damn thing, secretly, on my own time.
It was a complete act of rebellion.
I think one of the reasons they tried to stop
that type of innovation is because
the visual effects gurus who didn'’t theorize it,
would be seen as having egg on their face.
I just believed we could do it.
But actually having to prove it,
that was the challenge.
Because it was all about proof.
I remember Dennis Muren, actually,
he had heard a rumor from one of his little
weaselly minions that I was building
a set of T-Rex bones.
He told me, to my face,
"Don'’t bother trying to build the T-Rex."
Phil'’s doing it.
[Dennis] I was saying, "Guys, don'’t do this,
"you know, Phil-- Phil'’s my buddy,
he'’s got the job for everything else, you know?
And just let this play out."
That'’s what he said. That'’s what he said.
And he hadn'’t seen anything yet.
I don'’t worry about hardly anything, ever.
Although...
you know, I'’ve got this anxiety
that'’s like the sword of Damocles
that'’s hanging over my head.
Sometimes, I just feel like
something terrible''’s gonna happen.
Steve Williams, uh,
on his own, put together a Tyrannosaurus skeleton
and did a walk cycle.
♪
I don'’t think we fully realized...
how...
that was going to change everything.
[Steve] It was all secret, no one knew about it.
There was a big meeting that was going to happen.
Kathleen Kennedy,
Frank Marshall, Dennis Muren, and Janet Healy.
[Schlag] Janet Healy is the producer,
Dennis Muren is the visual effects supervisor.
I looked at it as, like, "Oh, this is mom and dad."
They'’re in charge.
I didn''’t know when the entourage was gonna come up,
but I knew they were coming up eventually,
so I got wind of it.
Frank and Kathy had come in because Steven couldn'’t come in.
[man] Kathleen Kennedy was Steven Spielberg'’s producer.
[Steve] Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall,
they were gonna come walking in on a Monday morning
in November in 1991.
[Geoff] And I guess the hard part of that
was he had to find a way to get that
in front of Kathleen Kennedy.
And he found a way to do that.
[Steve] This was not supposed to happen.
Dennis and Janet, they didn'’t know it was gonna happen.
I had a playing on a monitor,
and everyone came walking in.
She immediately sees it right away.
and she goes, "“What'’s this?"”
I said, "“Well, I was just working on
this walking T-Rex bone thing."”
Kathleen Kennedy pats me on the back and goes,
"“You have a very bright future."” And that was that.
That'’s the first and only time I ever met her.
I never-- never saw her again.
That'’s where everything changed.
Dennis Muren said, "Okay, this is really interesting.
[Dennis] I didn'’t know how close we could get.
And then eventually some of the guys did some tests
on a T-Rex which came out really great
and surprised everybody and then we skinned that.
All we had at this time was a skeleton and we were going,
-"We can do it!" -Stan Winston is gonna set up
a five-foot model. Mark and I cut it up into bits
and we put it in a cyborg scanner and scan all the pieces.
I have to reconstruct
all the data to have the proper contour muscles.
I built the skin version of the T-Rex.
It was all working.
[man] ILM, you know, largely through Steve Williams,
Mark Dippé, and, uh, Stefen Fangmeier
put together the first dinosaur tests.
[Michael] The film couldn'’t have happened without them.
It certainly couldn'’t have happened
without Steve'’s ability to model,
uh, first the Terminator and then later the dinosaurs.
[Stefen] The film, at the same time,
also was very much still on track
to do, uh, stop-motion.
Back then, everything that we did
hadn'’t been done before.
I mean, certainly, nobody attempted
to do dinosaurs before.
They made a convincing computer graphic Tyrannosaurus.
[Steve] The first fully skinned version.
And we had it walkin'’. In daylight.
Then Dennis and Janet with Tippett went down
to Universal to show it to Steven Spielberg,
but I wasn'’t allowed to be there.
I got a call from Dennis Muren at ILM,
who already had the job
of doing Jurassic Park with Phil Tippett.
And Dennis said that he thought
that he could pull off a full-sized dinosaur
that would be authentic to the eye.
Spielberg suddenly went absolutely insane
and said everything was gonna be computer graphics now.
[Steven] That'’s the future.
That'’s the way it'’s gonna be from now on.
[dinosaur roaring]
[Jurassic Park theme song playing]
[dinosaur roaring]
[Jody] That first shot of the Brachiosaurus...
my jaw dropped, I had literally--
[dinosaur roaring]
And then that wide reveal
of them all out there on the plain.
♪
That'’s still the one that gets my heart.
[Howard] I swear to God, it looked like
National Geographic went back in a time machine
and shot real dinosaurs, and that'’s what I fucking saw.
Those things looked real and what they were representing
was not some sci-fi thing.
As far as we know, those things moved around
like that and that'’s what they looked like,
that'’s what they did.
Jurassic Park took everybody by surprise.
Nobody saw that one coming.
For almost 75 years, the technology
and the techniques were pretty much the same.
Jurassic, that'’s when the computers came in.
That'’s when the tsunami hit.
[reporter] Jurassic Park opened tonight
with predictions that it may be the biggest hit in years and,
like any great event,
people are camped out to be part of it.
We got here about 11 o'’clock this morning.
[reporter] 11:00 this morning for what show?
Uh, the 10:45 tomorrow morning.
[man] That was the turning point of visual filmmaking.
[reporter] People, especially kids,
- like dinosaurs. -[announcer] Jurassic Park!
Where the giant dinosaurs live again!
With all the excitement
-of the movie! -[kid] Dino damage!
[announcer] Only at Jurassic Park!
[Steve] The film was supposed to be a stop-motion film.
Computer graphics came in
and completely deposed all of it.
It destroyed one thing, but it begat another.
I had come up with this test that--
It seemed it revolutionized everything.
The call came down-- Dennis called me at home
and said, "I'’m afraid I have some bad news.
Steven'’s decided to do the whole show CG
and I-- You know, like the Bombay doors just,
[makes crashing sound & screams]
You know, I saw, you know, like,
the-- the end and I-- "Oh, shit,
now what am I gonna do?
I thought, because I was animation supervisor
on, um, Terminator 2, which is very successful,
you know, I was gonna be
animation supervisor on Jurassic.
I literally ambushed them with the image.
I thought, "How much more can I do
to actually to prove that I came up with the idea?"
I thought for sure it was a slam dunk.
There was no definition
about what the jobs were on Jurassic Park.
So, I asked Janet Healy,
I said, "“Well, you know, what'’s goin' on?
What'’s my position?"”
"“You'’re just an animator on the film."”
"“What? Who'’s the animation supervisor?"”
[Phil] Dennis, in all of his brilliance,
he has a plan B. [laughs]
[Steven] Phil Tippett wanted to actually
do storyboards three dimensionally
with little figures of dinosaurs and people
that would completely imitate my storyboards,
but flesh out my storyboards and give them dimension.
[Phil] Storyboards don'’t show you
any of the-- the temporal cadence, the sequence,
the timing of it and, uh, the animatics allowed us
to-- to block out the entire, you know, sequence.
[man] Phil was able to turn himself
into the director of the CGI dinosaurs.
He knew so much about dinosaurs and the behavior of animals.
I go into dailies at 8:00 AM
and there'’s Phil Tippett, who'’s now functioning
as the animation director for Jurassic Park.
Wow! And the Oscar goes to...
Dennis Muren, Stan Winston, Phil Tippett,
and Michael Lantieri for Jurassic Park !
♪
[crosstalk]
Thanks, ILM. Thanks, Tippet Studios.
Thanks, Steven Spielberg. Thanks Mike--
[overlapping thanks]
[Steve] I'’ve always believed the people
that worked on the work should be acknowledged for it.
Any time an individual took an award
and took the award home and took the accolades for it,
to me, it was theft.
ILM had won 14 Oscars at that time.
Not one of ''‘em were at ILM.
Not one!
So, these guys had the audacity
to actually take this piece of shit home with them
when it was representing 30 or 40 people.
Regardless of what they do...
this is what their credit is on the film.
And if it wins an Oscar
for visual effects, they get it.
That'’s the way it works.
If you point to any one person
it couldn'’t have been done without 'em,
it probably is Steve, ''‘cause I don'’t know
that anybody else could'’ve modeled those dinosaurs,
I don'’t know that anybody else could'’ve set
the standards for animating them.
I don'’t know that we would'’ve even tried.
[Steve] I'’m not a diplomat.
I never have been.
To a fault, I'’ve been a very bad diplomat.
I'’m not political, I'’m not political,
I've-- I'’ve never been political.
Right? I'’m not good at it.
You know, I-- Look at me, for fuck'’s sakes,
man, I look like fuckin'’ Popeye.
You know? Fuck.
After Jurassic, I did a bunch of interviews
and stuff like that and I told the truth about what happened.
The entire film ofJurassic was--
[reporter] This is Jurassic Park?
Right.
[Steve] I was told not to do it
by my supervisors and I did it, you know?
I built it.
Dennis Muren got mad at me a few times.
He pulled me into his office and he said,
"I don'’t know why you'’re saying all this."
And then I said, "Well, Dennis, this is what happened."
And he goes, "You'’re committing political suicide."
That'’s what he told me.
[news anchor] Steve Williams foresees the day
when it will be commonplace for computer generated actors
to star alongside real actors.
I think that you'’ll have characters acting
with current famous people, um, that are computer generated,
but you'’ll also be able to introduce characters
that have been dead for 50 or 60 years.
In the future, I mean, it'’s quite obvious what'’ll happen.
It will actually scan the actor in a polygonal data set
of computer generated data--
Are they worried about this?
-If I was an actor I'’d, uh-- -[Steve] Actually, SAG,
the Screen Actors Guild, is very interested in it.
[man] Are actors right to have concerns
that they'’ll eventually be phased out all together?
This will be abused and-- and--
and the trick is for all of us to stand up
and say, "No, that'’s wrong,
This is a violation,
this is not what we should be doing.
Synthetic actors are inevitable, there'’s no doubt.
We'’re talking about the morals!
This is unfortunately what'’s happening.
To be human is to bleed,
is to have a soul, is to breathe.
See-- see, we'’re not trying to duplicate human beings,
but what you'’re seeing is subjective already.
How many times have you met an actor
who'’s either shorter or smaller in person?
So, what you'’re seeing is already an "interpretation"
-of what they look like. -[man] Absolutely.
-This is what we'’re trying-- -[host] We'’re down
-to our last two minutes. -[Thomas] Good afternoon,
my name is Thomas White, I handle Artists' Rights
Enforcement Matters for the estate
of Fred Astaire, the estate of Orson Welles,
and the director, Stanley Kramer.
All uses from my clients get licensed.
If they don'’t get licensed, they get prosecuted.
-It'’s that simple. -[man] Good.
And the damages-- the damages that we seek
and the attorney's fees are extraordinarily high.
Thank you all very much and I think we'’re done.
[applause]
[Steve] They all denied what we were doing.
And, to me, that'’s a fight.
You wanna fuckin'’ get in a fight, man?
You wanna fuckin'’ drop the gloves?
You wanna go? Let'’s go.
[rock music playing]
[screaming]
When it comes to special effects
in the movies today, the question really isn'’t
what can they do, the question is what can'’t they do?
For the most part, I like having fun and having a good laugh.
Cartoons are what got me into this thing.
[anchor] Animation supervisor Steve Williams,
whose credits include The Abyss and Jurassic Park
has been a cartoon buff all his life.
[Steve] After Jurassic, I just didn'’t give a crap.
Everybody can go fuck themselves.
These are the fuckin'’ good days, man.
[Adrienne] He was uncontrollable.
This masculine, tough guy that could not be harnessed.
That was kinda my first experience working with him.
When you are in Steve'’s orbit,
it was like you were in the spotlight with him.
You knew if you were gonna be in his company
that you were gonna feel like the queen of the world.
We grew to fall in love with each other.
We started a relationship that was very intense.
We wanted to start a family and I moved up to Marin
from the city and it was like boom, boom, boom.
[Steve] I'’m starting the clock. It'’s supposed to be--
[Adrienne] I'’m totally shaking.
[Steve] It's supposed to be two minutes.
[Adrienne] Okay, I just peed on that thing.
It'’s fucking pink!
[Steve] I know, I don'’t believe it!
[Adrienne] I think you did it.
You big stud!
You did it!
[Steve] We never got married.
We'’re gonna be like hippies, man.
Not get married and have a kid, and it was great, you know?
Hannah came along and that was a new world,
that'’s for sure.
You think you know it all, but this door gets opened.
Fatherhood.
What do you got, Hannah? Tell me about your new car.
Um, I don'’t want to.
[Steve] Okay, are you gonna take it for a drive now?
[Hannah] It'’s really easy to hold on
to those perfect experiences
or a perfect time in your life
or when "“everything was better."
The movie making world changed.
He was right there, you know?
He was on the frontlines of doing that.
[Steve] Dippé and me in a meat locker!
"The revolution is them."
[chuckling & sighing]
Jurassicopened the doors for all movies,
so it transformed filmmaking.
Everybody wanted digital.
Computer graphics was the hot, new thing.
[Howard] After Jurassic Park,
filmmaking went off the rails.
Computers allowed them to--
to make these spectacles.
Producers are always looking for the magic ticket,
the secret button, and they suddenly said
if it'’s got digital effects,
that'’s the button you press that makes a gazillion bucks.
They think the more of this little thing
that'’s great, you know, and by increasing it
in these films, it'’s gonna make the film better,
and it hasn'’t, it's actually destroyed filmmaking.
More junk, more junk, more junk,
faster, more junk, more junk--
[monkeys screeching]
A successful movie is built on a triangle.
You have art, on another point you have technology,
and the other part you have business.
And if any side gets too big or too small,
the motion picture will suffer.
[Jabba screaming]
And it became more about style over substance.
We saw all kinds of horrible movies
with lots of visual effects.
You know what we got rewarded for?
For fuckin'’ Jurassic Park?
Casper the Friendly Ghost.
I hated Casperwhen it was 2D.
Uh, Hi?
The concept became, "Let'’s redo everything digitally,"
right, that was done in a two-dimensional medium.
I mean, if you look at something like Scooby Doo,
this ridiculously stupid-looking cartoon dog,
it'’s like, "No! That thing does not exist in our world!
I refuse to believe it! Take it away!"
[Flintstonestheme playing]
♪ Let's ride with the family down the street ♪
♪ Through the
[John] This was the period when
motion pictures stopped being director-controlled
and started becoming corporate-driven.
And this was the beginning of the end.
[gunshots blasting]
The corporations have just kind of
taken everything over.
And fucked everything up.
And...
But they can still sell, you know,
lots of Coca-Cola, you know?
And...
crummy superhero movies.
[Steve] Because of the success of Mask
we ended up producing a very popular comic
at the time called Spawn.
[dramatic music playing]
[creature screeching]
That was Mark and my foray
to getting into making our own films.
So, we leave ILM, boom. Gone, you know?
Then we end up hiring back the company
to do the visual effects.
♪ The itsy-bitsy spider climbed up the water spout ♪
♪ Down came the rain and washed the spider out ♪
♪ Out came the sun
After Spawn, I don'’t have a job.
No job.
[Adrienne screams]
[Steve] So, I was asked to do the visual effects
on The Hulkat ILM.
and then that article comes out about pencil neck geeks.
♪
Dennis Muren basically said,
"How much more of this do we have to take?"
[whistles] Gone from ILM, kicked out.
I was done with them, they were done with me.
After all these years...
I'’ll never forget it.
What made him brilliant and a maverick
and a magnetic draw for many of us
soon became something
that I felt he needed to outgrow.
[violin piece playing]
[Steve] She just didn'’t like my antics.
She didn'’t like the drinking.
Everybody who'’s with me changes, right?
But they have to understand that I don'’t change.
I'’m always the fucking same.
Always. Right or wrong.
-Hm? What keeps me from-- -[man] From changing.
What keeps me from changing?
Stupidity. [laughs]
I know nothin'’ else.
He was really good in the therapy sessions and...
the moment we got home he was like,
"“Oh, fuck that shit, you know, I'’m not gonna change, you know,
this is who I am, this is who I am,
this is what people love, this is what people expect,
I'’m Spaz, you know."
And I kind of naively thought,
"Well, let'’s give it some time and maybe he will change."
[Steve] Give me a smile, honey.
Hi.
I'’m just kind of in a rush right now, as usual.
And as soon as Hannah discovers I'm gone,
then I will have no extra hands--
[Steve] I figure it'’s a good thing if I have
the camera on, then you won'’t yell at me.
[Adrienne sighs] I don'’t yell that much.
Excuse me. Steve, please, okay?
[Steve] Hi!
-[baby babbling] -Where are we going, sweetie?
Hey, look!
Visual effects supervisors strapped to the fence!
Isn'’t that funny?
What? I'’m sorry.
-What-- what did I say? -[Adrienne] [indistinct].
What am I not allowed to do now?
[Hannah] My parents split up when I was three.
It kind of just became normal
that my parents weren'’t together?
You know, my mom moved to San Rafael,
my dad still had the house.
[Adrienne] Steve decided to take his career in a new direction,
so he was off feature films
and he was starting to direct commercials.
[grunting]
[Steve] Blockbuster campaign.
It was very successful.
We get approached by Disney, who has a film called
The Wild, and so we end up working on this movie.
[Ellen] 2003, I was working as an assistant editor
for the movie, The Wild.
Hello, Spaz!
I was just so in love with Steve.
I really felt like he was my soulmate.
And we made a fantastic home together.
[Steve] Okay, Christmas! 2005!
[Hannah] Christmas! -Christmas!
[Steve] 2005!
-Here, look, Hannah. -[Hannah] Hi!
[Ellen] He put a lot of love
and craftsmanship into that house.
It was warm and cozy,
unique, fun, creative place to be.
We decided to get married in the backyard.
[dramatic music playing]
Oh, yeah, baby!
♪
[Ellen] When we got back from Toronto after The Wild,
it was really hard for those of us
on the film to get work
because the film was so poorly received.
It was a drag. It was a drag.
And then, so, I went back to commercials again.
[commercial customer] Which one would be better,
to knock a guy off of a motorcycle?
[announcer] Road Rash 3D.
[Steve] You know, either you'’re the flavor of the month
or you'’re not.
It'’s just a very fickle business.
Things just stalled for me.
[Hannah] The commercials, those dried up.
Nothing was really coming in that was substantial enough.
[Phil] The world had changed.
Sometimes, you'’re rewarded by,
uh, your longevity in-- in doing things
and, you know, those guys were relatively new to the game.
And, uh, they moved on very quickly
to wanting to direct their own stuff.
So, they moved into a whole 'nother zone
and then they kind of didn'’t come back.
The problem with this racket is that
if you'’re not...
in it, you-- Then you'’re not in it.
And he hadn'’t been in the game for a long time.
You know, you just get forgotten.
[Steve] I reapplied to ILM.
They shut me down.
They don'’t want me back there and I don'’t blame ''‘em.
I don'’t blame ''‘em at all.
If I'’d been more political...
I wouldn'’t be struggling right now
to pay my God damn mortgage.
[wind whooshing]
[Steve sighs]
[Hannah] That rejection on a big stage...
I don'’t think I'll ever know
the true effects of what that feels like for him.
All of those feelings, like, just completely resurfaced
and he didn'’t know how to handle it.
It was a snowball of...
bad memories, guilt,
lack of clarity about certain things.
He just started drinking more.
[Ellen] It'’s a way to cover up
all the things you feel shitty about.
We were down at the pub every single day,
drinking for about three hours every night and then
that sort of grew into drinking before we went to the pub,
and, um, just getting into,
just the worst knock down, drag-out,
awful fights when we got home.
So, I finally worked up the courage
to walk into an AA meeting.
You go, you keep going back, and I got sober,
I stayed sober and, I'’m gonna sound like an AA thumper,
but by the grace of God I'’m still sober
and my marriage fell apart.
I knew that if I didn'’t move out,
I wouldn'’t stay sober.
It'’s common where...
two alcoholics, one gets sober and the other doesn'’t.
Well, I thought we were doin'’ okay.
[Ellen on phone]
[Steve] Ellen, please, I--
[Ellen sobbing]
[Hannah] She left to light a fire
under my dad'’s ass, like, "“Hey, you gotta clean up your act
or I'’m gone for good."
[Ellen] The train was goin'’ 200 miles an hour.
I was either gonna go into the wall with it,
or I was gonna get off
and hope that Steve could get off before it-- it killed him.
So, I think she wanted to scare him a little bit.
And it only made it worse.
[somber music playing]
[Steve] Boredom is destructive.
[can hisses open]
I'’m just waiting for another mission.
I don'’t have a mission anymore.
[Hannah] He completely isolated himself.
Lost a bunch of weight.
You know, he just looked sick.
It was awful.
He was waking up at noon.
Drinking.
Passing out at 4:00.
Waking up again at 7:00.
Drinking.
Passing out at midnight,
waking up at 4 AM to drink.
To see him...
plummet...
like, headfirst...
into the deep end...
that was one of the hardest things
to ever deal with.
♪
[Steve] I don'’t think it'’s gonna end well for me.
God damn it.
I think it'’s gonna end bad.
[metal clanging]
-[object clattering on floor] -[Steve] Fuck you!
[sniffles]
[sighs]
[Steve] I'’ve never been an adult.
I'’ve never been an adult, I'’ve only been, um...
I'’ve been a child, right, that kind of...
grew up, but, you know...
loves Saturday morning cartoons
and I-- I kind of wish that every day
was a Saturday morning cartoon, but it'’s not.
You know?
I'’m an alcoholic.
And... I lost my family.
I lost them all.
I just need a mission.
I have to invent the mission.
And what is the mission?
To sober up.
Hopefully, that'’ll--
You know, resolve and some of it works out.
♪
It'’s Diane.
She'’s a sweetheart. Hi, Di.
Diane'’s a nurse, she'’s an RN, yeah.
She knows I'’m a mess.
[Diane] Ready? What''’re you drinking there?
-[Steve] A cider. -[Diane] Hard cider?
[Steve] Yeah.
[Diane] Can you not drink that, please?
-You'’re on the property. -[Steve] I'’m sorry.
-All right. -[Diane] Don'’t drink that!
Gimme that! No, you-- you can'’t.
-[Diane] Give it to him. -[Steve] I'’m sorry.
[Diane] Okay. That'’s all right.
We gotta get you in nursing and get your intake done.
So, you can, uh, grab your stuff.
[Steve] You have to leave your camera in here.
[cameraman] Yeah, I got it.
[Diane] Just a couple of these...
♪
[Steve] So, it was time to smarten up.
Time to grow up.
I wouldn'’t be standing here if I had not made
that decision eight months ago.
Um...
It'’s a lot quieter.
I'’ve sort of shut down all the old ways,
all the old places, all the old people.
You know? Now, I'’m just stuck with me.
Which is good and bad.
I have to be very careful because beer was used
to run away from myself and I have myself only
and I have to be very, very careful.
You know, I always occupy my mind with things to do.
That''’s the most important thing.
Even if it includes something so simple as doing the dishes.
Being an adult is a very strange thing.
But looking in the mirror,
you'’re not frightened of yourself anymore.
So, where the journey'’s gonna take me now,
I don'’t know.
At 57, that'’s a good question.
This is kind of like being at a bus depot
and the next bus that comes along,
you don'’t know where it's going.
But, while you'’re at the depot, you get to pick up
some of your old hobbies
that you enjoyed and not have the threat
of taking your finger off ''‘cause you'’ve had a six-pack.
[upbeat electronica playing]
He'’s a lot more self-aware now.
And he'’s a lot more aware
of I'’d say, people and their needs.
I think the pain
of certain things in his life will never go away.
But he still has so much to give.
[host] Welcome to the expert series.
We have, uh, Steve Williams,
he'’s here to share with you his expertise.
[crowd cheering]
You guys are gonna have a good time, he'’s a lot of fun.
[Steve] The thing about being an artist
I want you guys to remember is that everytime
there's plotted out path for you and rules,
-fuckin'’ break ''‘em, right? -[crowd laughing]
-[woman shouting] Yes! -And remember,
art is always about questioning established systems.
[applause]
[Adrienne] To continue to be relevant,
that'’s what we all want.
Is to have some kind of body of experience
that'’s going to educate and inspire other people.
That'’s the gift of getting older.
You allow yourself to make mistakes,
like, really big mistakes.
Going to the wrong door and finding your way out.
That'’s where the gold is.
[Robert] When you say pioneers, it makes you think of
a certain spirit of a person
that'’s willing to go out and risk it all
and-- and go for it.
Face whatever dangers they'’re gonna face
and be willing to try to fail at things and, uh,
take it to the next level.
I don'’t know when there'’s going to be
another breakthrough
that is as transformative as making the transition
from old-school effects to digital effects.
Is new ground being broken today?
Yeah, but experimentation
is left to scrappier, upstart maverick people.
[Mark] We'’re all believers in our point of view.
Even though you have a lot of talent
and you're very passionate
it'’s still not easy to survive or to succeed in this world.
[Bill] In some ways,
talented people are talented
because they are able
to stay in touch with sort of a childish nature in them.
Your ability to touch pure reactions to things
are kind of like seeing the world for the first time.
Anyone who can draw on that kind of
childish thinking has the opportunity
for greatness in them.
♪