 I'm Mike Mattesino and I've had the privilege of helping celebrate the 40th anniversary of Close Encounters of the Third Kind this year. I'm currently putting the finishing touches on a brand new restored soundtrack release that's coming out soon. First let's bring out the author of a brand new, fantastic book called Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Ultimate Visual History, Mr. Michael Claster. And we have a gentleman who has the talent of making things look 25 times larger than they really are, an enviable talent. One of the great ninja effects artists ever, Mr. Greg Jean. To my left here is a nine-time Academy Award winner and a guy whose name you could also step on on Hollywood Boulevard, Mr. Dennis Muran. And the director of the visual effects photography for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and we'll talk about his many other things, the wonderful, amazing Douglas Trumbull. So this is certainly going to be a close encounter for all of us, because just think about this for a moment that in this room right now is represented 2001 of Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Close Encounters of course, Blade Runner, E.T., Jurassic Park, Star Trek motion picture, all in this room probably the greatest visual effects movies of all time are represented, so this is indeed an honored gentleman. So in a way this all started with 2001 of Space Odyssey with Doug, directed of course by Stanley Kubrick in 1968. And I have to just share from a 70-millimeter screening at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood from a few years back is my friend Neil here, is Neil? I'm trying to remember when this was. Was anybody at this legendary screening of 2001, I think it was maybe 2008 or 2009, where an honest to goodness acid trip took place that caused them to stop the film after the Stargate sequence. So I'm sitting in the first row of the balcony and suddenly this guy starts screaming and yelling Stanley Kubrick, Stanley Kubrick, and I think somebody had to punch him and then they dragged him out, they stopped the film, the cops came, he was tasered. So it's like I think we have just as recently as that legitimate 1968 experience of 2001 and you've probably caused quite a few of those. The rumor, the urban legend was that Kubrick planned the intermission so that if you dropped acid at the intermission the effect would kick in at the start of the Stargate sequence. Not true. Not true. But so many films were influenced by 2001, not least of which is Star Wars and Close Encounters, both of which came out in 1977, yet the two movies are completely, completely opposite. Is anyone around at the time that saw them in 77 or 78? So do you all remember that when Close Encounters came out, we'd already seen Star Wars and everybody was talking and seeing about how does it compare? And not only the visual effects but in every other way, they were completely opposite and almost the comparisons were invalid but one of the things that was unique about both of them is that there was nothing, those are two movies where you had nothing to look back on and say, well, this movie did that and we're kind of following that. These were both inventing things that we really had never seen before. And the pathway to that, Doug, you were at the center of because you had put together a team of people to work with Robert Wise on the Andromeda Strain and in the same year that that came out in 1971, you directed your first movie Silent Running and that team basically became the core of the group that did the original Star Wars. Could you maybe give some of that background how all this came to be? Well, when I was making Silent Running, which was a very low budget movie and the reason this movie got a green light was that Easy Rider had come out of the blue. The Hollywood did not understand the idea of a low budget independent movie and so Easy Rider made like $65 million on a $250,000 budget or some crazy thing and the management of Universal Studios just didn't understand what it was or how it would happen and so they decided to do kind of a social experiment of funding five $1 million movies and finding independently minded filmmakers that were not in the mainstream and allowed them to make these movies and Silent Running was one of those picked with first time early directors, weird subject matter and so Silent Running got a green light to get made and we had almost no money so I actually went to a big union meeting and said I want to use students to help make this movie and I had met some young people that I really like, Wayne Smith who became one of our production designers John Dykstra and many other people from Long Beach State College Industrial Design Department and so the union, I kind of threatened them because I had just made a trip to Japan for a completely other reason to see an expo project and I said if you don't agree to let us mix the crew we're going to go make the movie in Japan, that was a total lie but they went for it so they allowed us to have just a very limited union crew which was a very good crew, really seasoned Hollywood professionals as well as our young guys, John Dykstra, Wayne Smith and a bunch of other people that worked with us on the movie to make this movie at a low budget and then after Silent Running was finished I was very proud that I'm a first time director and I want to direct more movies and I was developing all kinds of screenplays at many studios I had deals at Fox and Warner Brothers and MGM and my career was kind of percolating really fast and George Lucas came and asked if I would do the visual effects for Star Wars and I said well no but I'd like to help you find the right guys and what happened at the time was that I was in what now is called Development Hell which is none of these movies were going ahead at these studios for all kinds of completely wacky reasons and so my career as a director was getting thwarted and I wasn't moving ahead and I had no work and when George said well could you help me I said well why don't you take this crew of guys that we just did Silent Running including my own father Don Trumbull and John Dykstra and a lot of the model builders and so he actually hired them to become phase one of what was industrialized magic out at the Van Nuys airport so they set up ILM there and did the effects for Star Wars and then a little bit later when I'm still in Development Hell Spielberg asked me to work on Close Encounters and I said yeah I think I have to do this and I had my own ulterior motive which was to get my hands on 65 millimeter cameras for the show scan process that I was developing at the time so it kind of worked for me and it worked for Richard Gersage so we put together a whole other team but we were all very friendly with ILM and all the guys there and so we were both of these productions of Star Wars and Close Encounters were going on fairly simultaneously and that's kind of how that all happened I hope that explains it Yes, thanks Michael so you have done this amazing book now Chronically the Production of Close Encounters and all the amazing work that happened in it we've read a lot about it before but could you encapsulate for us how that came to be for Steven Spielberg and the process through which he was able to actually start getting this movie made Sure, Steven had wanted to make this film starting from when he was a child he tells a story of as a six year old boy being woken up in the middle of the night by his father who said come with me he drove him out to the middle of a field in New Jersey and he laid down a blanket and they laid down and looked up and there was a meteor shower going on and Steven credits that moment as the first time he acknowledged the existence of the universe and he became very very fascinated with astronomy years later he had always had an idea in his mind and he started to think about it seriously when he was directing Sugar Land Express so he at the same time in post production when he was on the universal lot doing that he made the acquaintance of Michael Phillips who was there doing post production on the sting with his then wife Julia Phillips and Steven and Michael struck up a friendship and Steven decided to pitch a story to Michael who said yes, I'm in at the time it was also a time of around Watergate and Steven's original thought for the story was that this was going to be the alien encounter but about the government cover-up trying to keep people from knowing it the main character was not Roy Neary he was an Air Force officer who worked for an organization called Project Sign this was an actual organization their public face was to investigate sightings of UFO behind the scenes their mission was to debunk them and the main character was one of those debunkers until he has his own experience, his own encounter and then he's the one who starts digging behind the scenes to find out what the truth is and it led to the encounters between the two species over the course of time one funny story that Steven told me was while he was directing Jaws he had a visitor to the set was an NBC news anchor, a very respected news anchor named John Chancellor who also had a vacation home on Martha's Vineyard and Steven was very excited to tell him about his idea it's Watergate, it's the government cover-up they don't want people to know and Chancellor said to him well here's the problem with that don't you think if there was alien life on earth that we could prove that President Nixon wouldn't have given that up in a second to the media to divert away from the Watergate conspiracy and all his crimes and Steven said that threw the biggest wet blanket on a movie that I hadn't directed yet but happily he got a towel dried himself off and then it became the story of the common man in an uncommon extraordinary series of events so that's the basic beginnings of it well you've touched on a number of points that I'd like to come back to which actually relate to specifically the visual effects but we should also mention the movie Firelight which is a feature-length movie that he directed in the 60s before he moved from Arizona he was 16 years old that was his first full-length feature and it was about the lights in the skies and the mysterious disappearances of people and animals in this small little town he made it for a budget of $500 he rented out a theater for one night it made $600 so he was into profit on his first movie when we see clips of that which exist and I'm told that there's still one real missing but they managed to piece it together you see his approach even though accomplished very crudely to these colorful lights in the sky that were even different from every fine saucer picture that had been done in the 50s and 60s he had a unique idea in mind of what things in the sky should look like so it's interesting to just contemplate where did something like that come from do you think was it just really, does it all go back to that meteor shower? it does, I mean Stephen Stephen was very very clear on that that the stories that started to come into his mind and he was also a very big science fiction fan and one of those movies that he quoted as one or cited as one of his favorites was the day the earth stood still but the difference was that in Stephen's mind he didn't believe that an alien civilization would come all this way to destroy all of the movies in the 40s, 50s and 60s when it involved aliens they were conquerors, marauders, invaders they were all here to either kill us or enslave us and none of them had any benign creatures that wanted to have an exchange with us on an intellectual level and there was if I remember correctly the possibility that Mr. Kubrick had wanted to present aliens in 2001 but wasn't able to or decided not to, whatever was the case so this was truly the first story that told of this momentous occasion and it told it in a very believable and honest way you all know about the J. L. and Heineck connection who was the advisor on Close Encounters I'll just try to tell you some bits and pieces of what I have heard I don't know if any of these stories are true I have no way to verify any of this but J. L. and Heineck who was really hired by the government to debunk UFOs was getting such interesting and provocative information from their files or from the experiences of reports that he turned and decided that he thought the whole phenomena was absolutely quite real and quite deeply important and so he had some influence on Stephen had written books about the subject matter and everything which he comes from is from J. L. and Heineck he coined the terminology of those three different types of encounters and in fact I think the script that was the one that Paul Schrader was asked to write was kind of a fictionalized version of Heineck about this guy that had a government job and then had an experience and it changed his the version that Mr. Schrader turned in was in the opposite direction of what Stephen had in mind but Doug is correct and that Dr. Heineck was originally a debunker with project sign and he in all of the cases that he looked at he said yes a lot of them were false obviously or they could be disproved but there was a certain percentage that there was no explanation for that he they looked in every corner every way they looked at it examined it and they could not explain it and that was the beginning of him becoming a believer and Stephen did in fact you know read everything that Dr. Heineck wrote and when he changed the title to Close Encounters he then got a letter from Dr. Heineck because that was proprietary material and Stephen was unaware of that he thought that was an already established title or categories and that's when they met and became involved on a personal level and Dr. Heineck was invited to be a technical advisor on the film originally the working title was Watch the Skies which is the famous last line of the thing from another world there were two titles prior it was Watch the Skies and A Meeting of the Minds was another title that was thought of early on are you aware of the Jacques Vallet connection? I am I believe you told me about him well there's another connection that only occurred to me much later because I wasn't aware of the resources that Stephen was using in drafting the screenplay that he'd written in himself and so one of the key characters is played by François Truffaut who plays Lacombe who is the French UFO researcher that's come to the United States to be part of this event and I never thought much about it at the time until many many years later I was working with J. Allen Heineck's son, Joel Heineck who is a visual effects guy and we were working on a project at my studio in Massachusetts and Joel said well you know you really I'd like to tell you a little bit of the history of my father because there's another connection that you should be aware of which is Jacques Vallet I said okay who's he he says well he's the real Lacombe and that Jacques Vallet had been researching the whole UFO phenomena all of his life that Jacques Vallet had seen a UFO in his backyard in the suburb of Paris when he was 11 years old it was corroborated by a next-door neighbor kid in front of his and it just utterly changed his life because it was so undeniably real that Jacques Vallet became obsessed with UFOs and trying to figure out what this whole thing was and so he was writing books about UFO stories that were being reported by people of being abducted or encountering a mothership or various kinds of craft and beings and grays and everything and had written many books about it and so the link was Jacques Vallet and I asked Joel so well can you tell me how to get in touch with Jacques Vallet and I want to meet him so I did, I made it my job to meet Jacques Vallet in San Francisco he's a Silicon Valley venture capital high-tech guy but his application is UFO research and Jacques said well I had written all the books that Steven Spielberg was reading before he wrote the screenplay and I said oh that's really interesting because that puts a whole new twist on close encounters because I said well was there a big meeting was there a mothership was there an exchange of personnel are all these real stories and he says well could be you know so that was when the whole thing switched in my mind that close encounters is not entirely fictional it's a fictionalized depiction of hypothetically real stories that Jacques Vallet could tell you the basis of and so Jacques has been a good friend of mine and I continue to be really involved peripherally in trying to do some UFO research myself that I think is really it's more interesting than science fiction because it's a science fact and I intend to get there on the mothership what are we doing? but I don't intend to leave okay well when it comes to the task of actually putting these things on film there's a lot of course Michael's book goes into a lot of it a lot of it has been covered over the decades in different publications in the movie yes in your cameo right the cuboid scene but what we don't get a lot of that I'd like to hear from you guys is you know as I said you have nothing to look back on is that this has been done before so we're kind of following the footsteps of something with either close encounters or star wars now your place was set up is at Marina Del Rey is where you've worked and then ILM was here in the valley in Van Nuys but at the time to have latest technology in an average home probably meant that you had push button telephone maybe a color television but you guys were suddenly coming into this and having to use the technology to create these amazing movies that we just now take for granted and we're now in a place where everybody's kind of got special effects on their laptop and can just do things you know just by almost thinking about them but the technical things aside what was the group of people like Dennis who was it like to come into the island in 1976 what was that you know who were these guys what were their backgrounds what was it just like to be among them I have no idea I'd seen 2001 when it came out and I actually come from what I always called the King Kong school of LA of guys that grew up on Kong and stopped motion and miniatures and the light acres and all I knew nothing about the technology at all and at Cascade where we worked you know we couldn't even buy another camera and buy a motor and money would be there so you just use the same tools over and over again so you see 2001 and it's like what the heck am I looking at I had no idea and some friends of mine said well I think there's some motors going on here and I didn't you know something or I just didn't comprehend it but I got real curious about it and when I heard that George was doing this you know Star Wars and I liked his film so much and it was being done in the valley I said you know here's a chance anybody on except I met John and just once or so and I said I want to try to get on this film so I walked into not knowing anybody or not knowing anything about the tool set but what John saw in me was someone who understood slow photography, stopped motion photography whatever like that trick you know running film backwards all the old traditional techniques and he thought that I could learn quickly the motion control stuff and actually visualize in advance what we had in mind and he was right it was really easy to me but it was hard to learn how to use the open but it was fascinating and all the time I'm thinking you know there's other ways to do this we could do this faster you know sliding it down on wires and stuff that Greg Jean and I had done in other shows the old fashioned way but it was taken forever but you get it all done and to me it looks pretty much totally fake with the funny moves the ship's making and the magic that people see in it that they don't understand and once we learned how to do it which I think came sort of later at ILN and the next shows we got everything looking much smoother and more fluid and had a more sense of reality so I totally bought into it I went by saying you know it's taken so long and poor George is going to lose all his money but we did get it done like all these shows somehow get done to the last month which is phenomenal how that happens two months to being a total advocate of that understanding technology to is a real tool to express what's in your head well let's just tell me about the people if we could just go back in time right now to that place in Van Nuys in 1976 what would we see, who would we meet well you'd see like Doug said you'd see a lot of guys from Long Beach State who were in the industrial design department from George on down who's there, a lot of the model makers were there Joe Johnston had been there and they really hadn't worked on very many films maybe someone worked on Silent Running and you know maybe and others had never been in a film or anything before a couple of them had so there was something there but it was totally you know no experience in it but there was this motivation to get this thing done and to lay it out like as a project with different departments doing it it's going to go from this to that to that to that and we have to staff up each department and instead of you know everything being made the way Greg would make it one at a time detail models there were molds being made and you'd crank out 12 X-wings out of this mold and it's like what the heck is this so it was a completely different way of working and of course they needed the precision stuff when they needed to on it but they also had a whole other way of working that I hadn't seen anything like there was like a mass production and I think that mindset went through the whole place that realizing of course they got to do two or three or four hundred shots and they got to get them done so it does take a different type of thinking and more of a and I've thought just recently I'm sure this all comes from the spirit of the sixties and I don't want to think that about oh you know I don't know what you mean by that but we were incredibly optimistic in the sixties and prove away what we known before thinking that we've seen it it's kind of obsolete thinking here there's got to be a different way to solve something a different way to see something and I think that spirit was in like all these shows on close encounters too I'm guessing and on the Star Wars group that gave that energy and took those chances to do something because you've got an optimism all along you're going to succeed did you feel that way Doug with yours and Richard's group as well yeah absolutely I think I agree completely with what Dennis is saying that there was a weird kind of we could do anything kind of feeling and we were at a time when all kinds of new technologies were emerging almost every day just like one of the biggest breakthroughs that I was so excited about was pulse motors digital stepper motors that could do controlled motion at any speed you wanted and I started pioneering that at my company even before we did close before I did silent running these stepper motors from my father-in-law and I said well what's that he said well it's a motor that you can control digitally with a signal and I went down to some place downtown LA and bought a motor and bought a driver and a car battery and some resistors and and then my guy I was working with at the time Jamie Short whose brother Bill Short did the shark for JAWS he was a young kind of electronics wizard really very talented guy we figured out how to record square wave sound pulses on a four track tape recorder and play these pulses into these motors so that we could control the motor and actually play the tape again and repeat the move again and again and that was the beginning of motion control that would be digitally controllable and variable speed which we couldn't do on 2001 everything in 2001 is all moving in one direction at one speed because we had no digital control over ramping up speeds or changing speeds during a shot so that came to bear on Star Wars and Close Encounters simultaneously we had two completely separate teams of wizard electronics engineers building the first really workable motion control systems one for Close Encounters and one for Star Wars well just a week ago or so we had John Badham here talking about Dracula afterwards I talked with him about his movie War Games from 1983 and I said you know we had movies where computers ran amuck like Colossus or Demon Seed but they were usually government operations in big rooms and big huge computers and I said I really think War Games is the first time we saw a computer in somebody's bedroom in an average home and it was part of the plot because even the year before we had E.T. and Poltergeist there were no computers in those families' homes so and as I said it's like technology for average people in the years that you guys were making those two movies just wasn't in the house yet so I imagine that just one of the main breakthroughs of actually getting a computer to be able to repeat a camera movement precisely was just a huge huge breakthrough in terms of what you could actually do but the thing is about to go back to 2001 and the original Star Wars neither of those films I believe had too many shots where you had to worry about atmospheric depth it was in most of an outer space there was a few planet things in Star Wars but Close Encounters is the opposite because it's now all set you know in real real environments and therefore it's affected by its environments and in fact what you do with the lighting and so forth so again you know tell me about some of this technology and what it was like to experience these breakthroughs and maybe if you could talk about those two approaches of putting a spaceship against a star field in space versus having it to go out to a normal suburban environment and actually believe that something is in the sky because again I don't think nobody had ever really attempted that we hadn't seen a night sky in Close Encounters prior to that we hadn't seen UFOs other than flying saucers kind of plastered on a screen this was just we just hadn't seen anything like this and you guys invented it 2001 had a lot of space in it and most of it was hard edged objects discovery spacecraft or the pod or whatever against a star field very very simple stuff and so we were dealing with this kind of white painted miniatures superimposed against a star field which was animated really and that was pretty straightforward looking back we had to figure it out at the time and when George decided to do Star Wars it was similar in the fact that you see a lot of white painted spacecraft against a black star field and the advent of motion control meant that the spacecraft could move dynamically and the camera could move dynamic there's a lot more motion potential made Close Encounters intrigued me a lot because of the kind of things that Steven was asking for which was this diaphanous beautiful mysterious almost ghost-like imagery of glaring lights in your face and you couldn't define the shape of the UFO you could hardly see what the heck it was well I wanted to look like a 747 approaching the runway at LAX at night and you can't see the fuselage of the plane you just see these lights but they're in a pattern and they look like an object and it's obviously not natural and that's what led to the cloud tank and the smoke room and all the ways of creating these atmospheric effects and then kind of we were going through a developmental phase and an understanding of lens flares how do you make lens flares how much overexposure do you need in order to get the lens to flare and how to create beams of light and then creating an atmosphere on our stage which was a miniature atmosphere of smoke which just looks like air only condensed to the miniature size of the miniatures and Dennis had one of the I think one of the best jobs on the whole show which was shooting the mothership which was based entirely on that idea and Greg built this miniature and it was all based on this idea of a dense smoke atmosphere to create scale so you're basically taking the atmosphere like an LA atmosphere you say well you're here in Burbank and if you're looking at the mountains five miles away there's kind of a what we call aerial perspective of the atmosphere that creates a scale well I know that looks like it's about five miles away where you're taking that entire atmosphere and condensing it of eight feet instead of eight miles and then you have to make the atmosphere denser which was how we do with smoke and then the whole idea of what Greg was building for the mothership was based on tests that we did to show that if you put these lights these lit objects the mothership was lit up by itself it was an illuminated object from inside there's no key light or fill light on the mothership and there was but primarily it lit itself up and it was the smoke that made it look so spectacularly huge like a whole city when it was only about six feet in diameter you're going to talk about the mothership before we're finished here Greg I don't remember anything about this oh yes you do the other thing that occurred to me is that just conceptually of doing effects one of the things about Star Wars that I guess you guys it took a while to really wrap your mind around what George was envisioning had a lot to do with not so much accomplishing the effects but with this fast editing pace that he wanted which basically translates to that the effect has to just kind of work and if you cut them together you get an impression of images where you now are understanding a story filled with visuals Doug I know you like to have a shot that's so good and so believable that if you could hold a 30-40 seconds and the believability never collapses so can you talk about that whole idea and what you know how did George communicate what he was trying to accomplish and how did Steven communicate what he was trying to accomplish again two very different styles how did these guys have this in their head and what were they saying to you George just kept saying faster and faster and he talked in terms of frames this only has to be 32 frames long because he had this footage that he'd gotten from old movies he'd shot off TV real war scenes of airplanes flying and movies and all and cut these sequences together these dog fight sequences and everything and so in doing that he could see I can keep the energy going between this part be 32 frames long and then the next one be 20 frames long and the next one is like 65 or 90 frames long he got the feeling from that of an editor how the audience was going to feel the energy and we never thought of that for a minute because normally effects people shoot the shot they have to be in the end and you base it on your budget and you give them whatever you can and they do whatever they can but then that's it but he really stuck to it and it took a while to learn that and to try to realize to get the energy into these few frames is not easy because in a live action shoot you know say you're doing a race movie or cars or something you shoot tons of footage and you'll find those 32 frames but when you've got to come up with 32 frames of an X-frame doing something maneuvering out of the Death Star or something a lot has to be communicated in that when you in fact shot nothing so that took a lot of time to make the shots look like documentary like they needed to look the lighting had to make the objects readable the foreground and background and any other ships had to match and the camera moves there had to be dynamics and yet you have to think in this little tiny time stretch and then we have the deadline on top of that so it was and for me and all that Doug finished himself going from that into being able to sit there and linger at pictorial beauty going by was just mind-boggling for me and it was just like going to school's you know one right after another you know when one films school but the other is just much is just a completely different type of photography and it's beautiful and just completely different like you said and I learned completely different things on both shows so for you there was it was a hard Star Wars was done and then close count was no overlap yeah I had four days off between the two and that was it I knew that Star Wars was coming to you and I had a chance to get on close encounters and jumped on that to work with Doug and also to meet Steven I took both shows I was ready to get out of the business because there was no business but I took both shows beginning to meet the directors and to get to meet George and then to get to meet Steven and then I figured that's the end of it there won't be any more films like this and I'll go into something else I mean it's and George had done American Graffiti with not a single effect shot in it yes yes he did THX yeah great film Stephen had done Jaws which I think had some rotoscoped water and a couple of meteors but otherwise everything in it's in front of a camera every moment with a shark is either the mechanical shark or real shark photography and then he does this has this vision of this thing you know that we really if you had just seen do in the Sugarland Express and Jaws you didn't necessarily see close encounters coming from Steven yet he had this in his head and then had to try to communicate what he wanted and how how this needed to look and yes you could have sketches and whatever but then you have to figure out how to do it so again this idea of the realism of it where I just don't remember any movie prior to that that actually looked like places where we actually were at night but objects in the sky we really believed that they were there there was you know they were just embedded into it did not look matted on did not look plastered on and I guess that has a lot to do with your focus on always using 70 millimeter so that when you finish with all the optical stuff and it goes back down to 35 millimeter it doesn't announce itself as a visual effect shot so tell me about just how that all came out and your thought about how do you make that work I think there's kind of a continuity if you're actually in the business like Dennis is trying to get out of it at the time if you're if you have a continuity of job after job because my my work before 2001 was a movie called to the moon and beyond for the New York World's Fair shot in 70 millimeter Kubrick and Clark saw that and it kind of validated their idea oh you can put some stars and some black sky on a dome screen in a planetarium and it'll look okay it was temper of 70 millimeter but that was what validated Stanley Kubrick and Arthur Clark that you could actually do this and get it on a screen and so then they decided yes we can make 2001 so 2001 had Kubrick's version of these long lingering uninterrupted shots because his objective was to make the audience feel like they're in space he decided to abandon conventional melodramatic editorial style and have these just epic shots that just stayed on the screen for a long long period of time while music plays just a view it was a visual trip and it became called the ultimate trip so Kubrick was very into these uninterrupted spectacles and he kind of felt an obligation to do this spectacle because he was following on to the wonderful world of Brothers Grimm or how the West was one you know these epic three strip and then ultimately 70 millimeter Lawrence of Arabia type movies and when you have this giant 100 foot wide screen you have kind of responsibility to put something good up there instead of cutting really fast and so I think there's also a linkage between the giant screen and a conventional screen in terms of your editorial pace when you get into that territory of IMAX type movies you cut much more slowly you don't make action movies because 24 frames doesn't even hold up on a giant screen that's a problem you get blurring I'm yacking about blurring all the time but for Close Encounters one of the things that really intrigued me in my partner Richard Jurisic was the fact that Star Wars was going to be these hard edged objects of spacecraft against black skies with stars and you could use what's called you know traditional traveling matte you could use blue screen or you could use a cutout or you could use a high contrast matte or any number of the ways that Dennis could tell you about it better than I could and Close Encounters needed all these soft edged non-cutout things of lens flares that actually scattered all the way across the frame and Richard Jurisic started working up really clever ways to use optical printing and not use hard edged mats we would actually use the lens flare itself that had been photographed on the original negative and use that as a mask in the composite so that it wasn't a hard edged matte it was a it was a mask of itself that had this kind of continuing diaphanous quality to it and it was a whole technique that he worked out with the guys on the optical printer to create composites that still retain softness and that blurry mysterious almost spiritual kind of looking at ghosts in the sky kind of thing rather than objects I have to just chime in about lens flares because in sort of what they teach you in photography is that you position your camera to avoid lens flares but the thing is that when you're doing effects what happens is this sense that well if I'm seeing a lens flare then obviously there's really somebody there with a camera shooting this because it's not perfect so it's like you're taking what we're taught to avoid and actually including it intentionally because then our eye sees it and we actually believe someone just is shooting this UFO going by. A couple little things about lens flares and clothes which was part of my learning curve when I was working on 2001 with Kubrick Jeffrey Unsworth who was the cinematographer on 2001 was an incredible cinematographer who had grown up on black and white photography most of his movies were black and white and when you're working in black and white you really learn how to use light as a edges of light against dark or dark against light or you paint with light and so he was a master at that and he was part of the team that built all the lighting into 2001 so we're doing the effects and we're doing the space stuff and we started and Kubrick wanted lens flares too he wanted the sun to be so bright that it was like super vivid and burning out so we ended up doing some tests and we said well you need about 30 stops overexposed to get a lens flare to happen and so we had we had little cutouts of the sun and we'd have a very bright 5k light on the animation stand burning up into the camera lens to get a lens flare and then we started doing stuff with Jupiter and planets and he started asking for stuff that I thought was really intriguing and was new to me he says well you know that the sun is going to enter the shot from the left or the right or something but it's not going to actually be in the shot yet but you want to know it's coming and so we would actually you know in the gate of the camera there's usually a little ribbed black edges to absorb any light that doesn't want to get to the film we would go in there and tape tin foil to the inside of the camera gate so that if something was off camera it would actually reflect inside and get exposed onto the film even before it entered the frame and that was on purpose so you'd see these weird lens flares that would anticipate the illumination and there's stuff in close encounters too there's a shot where you'll remember the shot is from behind the guy that's at the console that plays music and the mothership is up there but the mothership's not really up and they shot a live action shot kind of a tilt down or a tilt up camera which it was but we wanted to sell the idea that there was a really bright big mothership up out of frame so we just shot a bunch of lights with this tin foil thing out of frame and burn it into the shot as though the mothership was out of frame and it worked really great and we actually moved on it so that the lens flares shifted during the tilt down and there's a bunch of those shots and there's extra lens flares that we added with lights off camera just to sell the idea that there was some really brilliantly illuminated thing just out of frame before we talk about the mothership model and the other miniatures Michael could you tell us about some of the concept artists that Steve engaged in and what they did to actually try to illustrate some of these ideas about what things would look like in this movie well there was the main artist starting from the beginning was no? oh my god George I'm sorry and George basically read the script and he talked to Steven and he came up with these works of art that and not only as many production artists do they'll do black and white sketches and hand them over George did paintings, he did full on paintings that really helped Steven in terms of the way he plotted the shot and I would imagine helped you guys in terms of the way it was shot and the effects they were absolutely brilliant works of art and I'm thrilled that I have so many of them in the book but that was truly he was the first guy there and he also worked with Joe Alves the production designer in all of the stuff of Devil's Tower and then the Box Canyon, the landing site as it were and we have a lot of great stuff of scenes that unfortunately were not able to be done one of them being the cuboid sequence which was Doug's lost cameo in the movie but if anybody defined or could sell what Star Wars was originally going to look like it was Ralph Macquarie with his portfolio of amazing paintings and then he came over to do the main mothership concept paintings is that correct? because that was done technically in post production during the entire shoot Steven still didn't know what his mothership was going to look like he had some ideas the first one was that you really didn't see the mothership very much it came across the sky as a very dark object something so black it would blot out the stars that's probably the principal photography stuff has shadows moving over people does it bother you when you see that that it's this illuminated object of a mothership? I think that's the magic of movies it sells the idea of some big object looming into the shot so that shadow actually works in the context of it actually being very bright at the same time and we were consciously aware of that when we were shooting because I was also building these weird reflectors like a four by eight sheet of plywood with a million pieces of broken mirrors on it to try to refract light onto neary to Richard Dreyfus and other actors in some of the shots where they're looking up there's all kinds of light on their faces color gels and stuff so we were simultaneously aware of it being bright and creating a shadow at the same time it's like the shadow of the moon or something that's the kind of license you can take in movies it sells an idea that was really beautiful and Vilmos, you know, he and his guys did a great job so was it this Macquarie painting that we've seen a lot that basically was the basis for now building this thing this mothership model and how would you decide Greg is going to talk now how would you decide like the scale the size and you know I frankly don't remember seeing many drawings of the mothership it was something that Ralph did but I remember I made a little maquette about this big out of wood with wire and spires on it and that's sort of what everybody said okay go ahead and do that but there was no real blueprint drawing of anything we just sort of went with that so that was the second mothership the first mothership we built was that what four or five foot cone that was glossy black that was split down the middle and we started that and we never finished it Steven had these illustrations that what's his name? the illustrator the George Jensen had done and had painted this object that kind of looked like a kazoo kind of a weird old oblong thing with a circular gizmo on it looking exactly like a kazoo I said well I don't think that's going to sell and I think one of the funniest first stories was when I first came on the movie before I got hired to come on the movie they were already experimenting with UFOs and motherships on a stage using the old 1950's techniques that Dennis was just talking about they had neon illuminated disc shaped objects on wires flying through smoke on a stage and that's exactly what it looked like they kind of wobbling it was really B movie crap that they were working on see that's why I had to get out of the business that's the best you could do with that stuff it's not any good yeah so that was when Steven realized well we got to go a complete major step beyond this or this movie is going to be not very good looking and we had to find a completely different way and there was another period where he wanted to try to get his feet wet with the whole idea of computer generated stuff and there was some experiments in triple I John Whitney Jr and Gary Deimos and who else was there well it was a they actually they wanted to be able to track the camera and then add the mothership or visual effects using computer graphics at that time and that was the objective and they had been kind of sold this expectation that this was feasible and there was some very early tests that those guys John Whitney Jr, Gary Deimos and one other man I can't remember I'll probably get shot after this but they had done some tracking tests of actually shooting camera pans and tilts with markers in the frame and then these were going to be read by a computer to generate information to inform a computer generated image how to be superimposed and track and match and this was incredibly early on in that world and it took forever they were writing code for weeks trying to get this tracker to work because it was like a ballistic missile tracker and like a NASA kind of thing that they were trying to solve because triple I was based on this idea that they had talked this triple I company was Information International Incorporator that had a Cray computer I mean this was the first big super computer the super computer was not Disney at night everybody went home so they made a deal to use the computer at night that was what they were doing and so I said well make a lens flare well they spent weeks trying to make a lens flare which is actually not easy to do to write code to build something rays of light and atmosphere and everything and it just went on and on and on and on and we all realized that we were giving them a shot at it but that they were failing it was just too early for the CGI to be able to do it or pull it off or make or deliver anything on time it was similar to the problems that hit Star Trek the motion picture a little bit later so we just said well we're going to have to go back to motion control and physical objects and models and pound it out but it was very visionary at the time that was the first time I've heard them connected with close encounters work I mean we knew about their X-Wing test which is what we brought to you when we talked to you at ILM and that you know to actually glimpse the future you couldn't do it yet but it's like there was definitely something something there to what those guys were on to that's a whole other subject that we can get to but in terms of building this mothership I mean again how would you decide on the scale how would you decide how to light the interior and make it self self-lighting and again we've heard stories about I think on 2001 as well as Star Wars about rating model kits and how we create these things so I mean really how do you go about building this mothership my approach for the whole sense of scale deal is I didn't want to use any model kits to be recognized per se if you want to see how big the mothership was I've got two pieces out there that are part of the Manhattan ring that we did a quarter detailed section then mold those and then made a complete ship out of them we had different terms for the different levels of lighting we named them like the Bronx, Manhattan Coney Island, Harlem etc so code out like well light up this section now light up that section now the main detail pieces are from model railroad kits they're basically model railroad ties that hook the tracks together we used a lot of those I handled I sort of approached the model like a serrat painting I didn't want any flat surfaces that would give a fake sheen any areas that were flat we took some modeling paste and stippled it on there so it wouldn't give any reflection it would just be very refractive some of the other crazy parts we use like I'm sure you know about the mailbox and the Volkswagen bus and the TIE fighter and the R2-D2 and the cemetery there's some other things just to break up the scale and just make your eye go like what the hell did I just see is that a shark oh okay you all seen Star Wars by that time but when you stuck R2-D2 on it oh yeah R2-D2 was not my idea it was done by one of the model guys Dave Jones who had just gotten off of Star Wars and he had put it in the background and I think Doug saw it and said what's a good idea let's put it up front and so I made another one with a fiber optic in it so it would light up and we stuck that in front if you don't know it's like in the very first shot of the mothership as it comes up behind Melinda Dillon looking up at it the mothership rises up and basically glued upside down is R2-D2 well I think it deserves mention that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas and Francis Ford Kovla and a number of other and several other directors were all buddies at that time the USA Film School people they were coming up together and they were collaborating with one another and showing each other dailies and trying to one up each other and it was really charming and so the idea of sticking stuff on the mothership that reflected Star Wars and then other stuff that's in there that reflects Empire of the Sun that was not yet in production 1941 excuse me so there was like airplanes World War II airplanes on the mothership which also kind of evoked the opening scene that was basically the opening scene I said oh let's put the adventure model where they find those that lost squadron and there's a matte painting where the camera's up kind of high and you're looking at the rim of the mothership actually the names of all the people in the matte department painted on the outside of the mothership so it's just like inside jokes that you could get away with because no one would know unless you knew what to look for and the visual cues we get with the design of the mothership are very interesting in that we have almost a traditional saucer shape on one side projected grid that almost resembles what I think would Steven said if you're stood on your head on Mulholland Drive and looked at the valley at night the other side is what looks like a skyscraper of a giant city and of course it comes over one way and there's a flip and that's very interesting because it kind of gives us the idea to give us some sense of the scale yeah absolutely that was a trick to just say well that's a city at night like Manhattan which Greg's talking about that would kind of set the scale because if you think well that must be 10 square miles this happens in your mind and then there's the other most fundamental trick which was to put the mothership behind Devil's Tower that instantly set the scale if it was in front of Devil's Tower it could have been 3 feet from the camera 300 feet from the camera or whatever but by being behind a mountain that means it's big right and they added kind of oddness which we don't think much about of this ingenious idea of having it come up rather than descend come up almost out of the ground in a way very very interesting you know this all kind of reaches this unbelievably iconic shot of the mothership behind the mountain which we have the mothership we have the mountain we have the live action of the base of operations very small you have stars in the sky in the background so in that moment the Devil's Tower is also a scale model and landscape and you built all of those landscapes as well as for the early part of the film when the initial UFO encounters happened what were your landscapes and the mountain specifically a lot of eye strain for one point like with the toll booth we had to site that and build it by looking through the camera lens we had a frame of the actual shot and then we had a guy out there like well move it down a little farther mark that area off in space we just sort of built it that way that was one of the trickiest shots we made for the saucers going through the toll booth as far as the landscapes go we actually managed to sneak two perspectives into the Crescendo Summit that was all designed by Dan Guze one of the illustrators and I think one of the first things we did was the intersection where Neri sears the train light they go crazy and we took a Polaroid I think we sent it to you in Mobile you said where's that location that looks pretty good Doug? Greg did some amazing stuff based on site location scouting photographs of the area that we were shooting we saw some great stuff the other night that illustrated how you had the Crescendo Summit set which was built on the same dirigible hanger as the next door married with the backgrounds of your miniatures and then adding to that the UFOs that cast by with interactive lighting and stars in the sky which was fascinating to hear you say that don't show your stars out of focus but again those are shots there where again it's like for the first time I think in a movie we actually believe the night sky so I mean it was a bunch of elements had to be put together just for that one seemingly simple quick moment that's where you hit the wall with some really tricky and difficult compositing issues because tradition in movies if you're gonna superimpose actors on a foreground set piece into some background you'd use blue screen and blue screen just look cut out I never liked blue screen and it was very troublesome and certainly wouldn't have worked very well for a scene like that so I suggested to Steven that we use front projection which was what was used on 2001 for the Donna Mann sequence which is you're projecting an image onto a giant screen that's way out behind the set but the light is being reflected back into the lens and it looks like it's really there I used it extensively on silent running as well because anything in the foreground is sitting in its own shadow so it just exactly fits its own shadow it's a really clever optical arrangement of a 45 degree mirror and the camera is looking through the mirror and they're all perfectly lined up so the image that's coming out of the camera by the projector is actually hitting 100 foot wide screen way across the hanger and then coming back into the lens and so it makes Melinda Dillon and Kerry Guffey and everybody seem like they're actually in front of it and it's actually so the screen actually creates the brightness then so therefore what hits the people is too dim to register so the screen is magnifying the brightness by about 200 times because of these little beads of glass that are just bouncing rays of light back at the source so the light is actually shining on the set and on the people but it's so below the threshold of sensitivity of the film you don't see it it just doesn't record and that's a front projection is a great technique to this day, 2001 looks amazing there are still places where I would use front projection in certain circumstances so you have this mothership model built now you have to shoot this and again to come back to the atmospheric depth and this use of a smoke room and Greg's been around you mentioned 1941 before I don't think there's a shot in that movie miniature unit or main unit that doesn't have smoke in it but that was key wasn't it to actually making this thing exist in physical space on film was creation of the smoke room so take me through the shooting process for these shots and was it was it just a you had a list of shots to accomplish or was something experimented with and then just maybe worked with editorially later? I think a little bit there was some experimenting for exposure and the smoke density they were all sort of shot as separate passes and I wasn't involved in the need to design but I was always working with Doug and Richard to give them what they needed and they could say here's the one we like and then it could be a matter of then shooting the shot but the shots were all predetermined we knew exactly what the cut was going to be and there were essentially two sets there was the underbelly where you saw that and there's the wide view when you see the top and the whole underbelly and they were shot each one took about like two and a half months to shoot each one of those two and then they were intercut and that was kind of it and I had no idea when I came on to what it was going to be I just heard it's like four or five months work and ends up being the mothership and the end of the movie but breathing the smoke especially for the wide shots when you see the whole model of it we had to breathe no matter how we tried we had to breathe the smoke that was in the air for like months and I think I came down with pneumonia I don't remember if that was when that happened or something like that just regular mold smoke with a mold smoke is that right? oil smoke? I think it was regular mold smoke everybody was so tired of it by the time we finished this movie that they didn't want to ever do it again so when Star Trek came up and Apogee was working on Star Trek the motion picture because we subbed out some of the work they said we just can't bear the smoke so they tried to figure out how to do smoke with water vaporized water or steam which turned out to be so volatile and unable to control because atmospheric pressure and temperature they had to give up and then they switched over to instead of mold smoke it was mineral oil it was baby oil they thought well it's good for babies it's okay for us well it's actually not really but you know it was me Scott Squires and then at night Hoyke Aikman shooting this stuff and we had a room that was a quarter of the size or much smaller than that a fifth of the size and we could look out of to see where the smoke area was and the model and everything so it was supposed to be free of smoke in there it's still gotten in there and we were coughing of smoke for months afterwards after the show was over and it was just in your lungs in your lungs and I kept thinking oh it's gonna kill me but it'll be a long time before I'll be 40 before that happens now it may have been very you know it may have been good for us were these shots done with multiple passes so with the computer camera the computer? Yeah but not double exposures everything was separate pieces of film there were a few very few that were actually rewound and shot again for some of the stuff that needed it that we could composite but a lot of them the mats were shot separate and sometimes you could split the focus a little bit so we could double expose them on top of themselves because it was taking too long to do it an F16 or something like that but it was basically elements going so that they could figure out what they wanted but we would do you know sometimes we do three or four exposures on of the lit ship or on the underbelly as one pass and then that would just be one element then but then we do a separate map pass and maybe we had another one that was also used for something else I don't know what I think that's right Doug right? Something like that? Yeah I mean it's been a long time the mothership was actually simpler than most of the UFOs the UFOs were some shot at smoke and some shot not in smoke and some with neon and some with beams of light and LEDs and not LEDs but fiber optics and so some of them were seven passes that had to be exactly matched Are you putting this on the same film each time? On the same film seven passes onto the same piece of film and that's where the computer control comes in because the computer has to exactly match everything has to come back to the same starting point and shoot all those frames again with that same move and if you make a mistake or don't calibrate it right? All 65 millimeter You have to shoot it again so that's where you get guys like Dave Stewart who was mentally so focused he would get it right and you can really count on the passes matching up Would this all happen generally in the same day or would it be you looking at one to be on the same day the next day you'd see the daily of that pass and the next day of the next pass No, you would get all the passes in one day I don't remember any time that we would actually ever shut the machine down and come back and shoot more passes on another day I'm not aware of that And we worked 24 hours with two crews so there were three crews that we had to because anything could happen the room could settle, the temperature could change if you waited the machine would not line up absolutely guaranteed Any earthquakes? Don't remember There was an earthquake but they squeezed by We had an earthquake during silent running as well but I'd like to make one point though as we're talking about this and we're using the term computer it's not a computer like we have today it had counters digital counters they had to do the calculations they had to run and count the pulses that it took to get from one point to the other or to rotate everything so it wasn't like you sit down on your keyboard and go execute and it did it it was so much more complicated which is the and the point ultimately that you have to make about this whole movie is that these people did this entire movie with a crew of about 40 people and the effects more than still hold up today and it's the same effects that it takes 800 people when you see you know a movie today to do who are all just sitting in cubicles whereas these computers were actually sending commands to very big you know equipment gears moving around but tell me so when this shot came back what was it like it wasn't just render and okay I'll go have a cup of coffee and it'll be rendered and I'll see it you had to actually probably wait for it to come back from the lab the dailies in the morning you know and sometimes Stephen would come in Lake with his cowboy boots on and you hear these boots walking in on the concrete floor oh Stephen's coming Stephen's coming it's just like anything else we had dailies at 8 or 9 in the morning amazing thing happened though near the end we had a lab run that went out to MGM at like 4 or 4 30 and we had 8 a.m. dailies and I thought my god they processed it and made a print in like 4 hours how come we don't do that all the time and I thought that I was thinking I've talked to George a couple times up north let's set up a lab that just runs all the time so it's right there you know 4 hour dailies it would be amazing we actually did do the back to the future right oh you did? we set up a lab right at my studio excellent and we could get dailies back in 2 hours anybody miss the back to the future right how come nobody picked up on it I love that right in IMAX so the live action element of the landing strip you probably all know Mobile Alabama they couldn't find it sound stage large enough it was center support it's actually a giant blimp hanger no it was actually an aircraft it was an airplane hanger the story is it gets a little confusing because we looked at a blimp hanger in Tillamook, Oregon we could have shot this movie in Tillamook, Oregon there was a beautiful blimp hanger you'll see it occasionally in television commercials they do car commercials in there regularly it's this big elliptical wooden structure it's really quite beautiful it was made for World War II and so it was a blimp hanger it was just enormously big but it was a regular airplane hanger the hangers identical side by side at the Air Force base that had been closed down so how would you get the shot of the entire thing that then becomes just a tiny little component of this mothership arrival shot what's that process of integrating the miniature with that and the ship well there was one the base I don't know if you're going to see any pictures of it it's kind of a U shaped there's George on the set and then it faced as though it faced out onto an open plane kind of thing and so on the live action set Joe Alves actually built this giant tent that went outside beyond the hangar doors so there was some dirt and some landing lights and stuff that actually went out for a while that ended up blowing away and it would kind of tornado but then to do the reverse I just went out there to the end of that set and shot back into the set to get that plate so it was just a lock off shot pretty simple to do you were cheating perspective because we couldn't get to be a mile away we just had to shoot it with a wide angle lens and kind of hope you didn't notice we didn't notice so now it just still looks great to this day and that's what's amazing about this movie is that you actually still totally buy it and I know that you have been constantly pushing us to get things more believable more spectacular you've devoted your life to this and Dennis you were on the front lines of this transition to graphics and I still think that the original Jurassic Park the CG work in that still holds up magnificently and in spite of how much has been done since but you know there's only six and a half minutes of CG in that film we have Stan Winston's full motion dinosaurs and all of that but what we're hearing about with close encounters is everything is in front of a camera and you're telling a story in which things have to believably be in physical space and that's a limitation that you spoke of Doug Friday night at the event that Gene hosted where you're adding the blur later and things like that and you want to try and we're starting to see a movement back towards physically building miniatures and actually putting things in physical in front of a camera because they exist in real physical space which things in the computer do not so what is the pathway to use the CG technology that we have but still get back to this believability well I think it's a lot of stuff I think I actually think the computers can pretty much do the work the problem is it's been broken up into pieces and people are broken up into specialists and there's no and you don't have any opportunity to look at the thing in front of you and tweak this and tweak that and move over here and raise that up and paint that over there you don't have any chance to do it and it's too bad because it when all the pieces come together and it looks like the storyboard someone calls it a final so that's the end of it and it goes out and if that in the storyboard guys are working and worked on four other films that year that are doing the same stuff I don't think it's very hard to put anything new in it it's got to start with the director and then he's got to have it clear in his mind that he wants something and find a team that's going to be up for doing it and willing to take the risk but I you know I think you can do it I think the computers can do it the problem is not that the problem is the way we're not putting enough into it we're not getting enough backlight to go off the services the textures or aren't reflecting correct they're stopping too soon it's not a matter of detail though it's a matter of a complexity that when you look at it you aren't even aware it's complex but it's all around us here right now and half of what I see in here right now I can't find the edges of something you know your hair in front of it in computer image you'll see the edge of everything you'll see your edge sharper not just sharper but something's off between that and in front of her hair so everything just looks or not everything but a lot of it looks funny maybe like a randomness to it you were talking about the cloud tank and how happy accidents happen things that you don't plan because it's subject it's affected by its environment but in a computer it's not affected by its environment so tell me about your sort of mission to get that back into film well it's not that I want to get it back it's just that I'm going to take us further I'm really glad we got rid of optical printers digital compositing is really cool and the fact that we can put images together and we don't have any matte lines anymore and we can smoosh it and photoshop it and do all this stuff to make pretty seamless composites is really fabulous so I'm not trying to go back to the good old days but in the context of a really good miniature like the mother ship or like the space station in 2001 these are really beautifully elegantly made miniatures that are photorealistic for all intents and purposes and if they're light if they're lit and photographed properly they can look like exactly what you want and so you can look at those shots 50 years later and they still are convincing whereas computer graphics is often as good as the algorithm of the month or the shader of the month or whatever the next new improvement is which is going on continuously in the world of fcgi and it's getting better and better all the time which is always good but I'm going to let Dennis he's in this world I'm not in this world at all of obsolescence where you can say something that looks really good but three years later it's not as good as what's current so there's a runner yes what about blade runner oh yeah well I'm not going to be derogatory in any way well that's set just two years from the first blade runner set just two years from now in Los Angeles and in certain parts of town it's starting to look like that old shop location so it's 215 how's everybody feeling how's everybody doing for time whatever you want how are you all feeling good do you have questions or should we go on to maybe talk about the ETs a little bit I mean you guys didn't really work on that but maybe since they're close encounters all leads to do Michael do you want to tell us a little about accomplishing the ETs for this film well they said I had to do it a number of ways um the basic E.T. was um someone in a leotard um for the hands they had tried making articulated fingers gloves but those became very cost prohibitive um and you know a lot of the problems they faced were in terms of costs and the budget was constantly rising and Columbia Pictures was fighting against that budget rising so there were bowls produced for the heads they were basically wearing a head some gloves and the leotards and another reason why they are in fog or smoke was because and this is something that that Steven is a master of is obfuscation of not being able to see every little detail that's going on and to hide and to create more suspense also makes you kind of on a squint right you did it with E.T. also in E.T. right so this back lit you know um have to squint to see this detail very very clever and there were so most of the film in Alabama was shot that way but there were also problems that arose because the climactic scene where Francois Truffaut meets the alien and they do the hand gestures the rubber gloves weren't cutting it you could see the seams you could see it just wasn't going to work so in post production Steven had to new aliens created because he didn't want them to look the same because he wanted to show there was a diversity in that society so he called upon a gentleman named Bob Baker who was a master puppeteer to create the first alien that spittly spider-like alien right which was influenced by um Steven's love of the artist, sculptor I'm thinking Ian Elliott Jackamon Jackamon thank you very much and they filmed that but then because he wanted for that final scene Lacombe something even more special he called Carlo Rambaldi who had won Academy Awards and had not long earlier done all of the articulated um facial and things for King Kong and the giant hands so Rambaldi worked very loosely based on what had started as they were called the waves all of the major extras but he made some modifications and it became a fully articulated puppet if you, I believe there's a picture in the book that shows him standing in the middle of a sound stage and there's wires and everything leading into a huge console where people are pulling levers and pushing buttons to in a way this was like a proto exactly, well Steven referred to this alien as Puck which he later dubbed E.T. as well so and Rambaldi was the one who created E.T. later on so and when he smiles that was Steven was operating the lever to get that smile so it was a combination of a lot of different efforts and you mentioned the hand signs and one of the things I love about this movie is the amazing idea of using music as the form of communication it's the universal language so if you show music to anybody on the planet if they read music they know what that says why nobody thought to apply this to extraterrestrials until now was incredible but then you have to visually represent it on the light board and to take the color coding of fifths and ideas like that and then the hand signs that was something that you presented that the hand sign just completely inadvertently through another friend of mine I became aware of a thing called the Kodai K-O-D-A-L-I method of teaching deaf people music and so they developed this whole hand sign thing really quite beautiful and I introduced the idea to Steven to use in the movie and then he shipped my friend down to the location to teach it to Francois and use it under his direction as a way of being an accurate depiction of hand signs that represent musical tones I thought it was really quite beautiful it worked and what's great is that nobody's excluded from the movie because if you say you're a deaf person you will understand the hand signs the colors and the lights if you're a blind person the music and the sound includes you also so I mean there's this sort of message of inclusivity and that sort of everybody because the Royneery character is just a very every man basic guy from the Midwest so there's just this wonderful theme of inclusivity about the project that all just gel just as a result of everybody's talent I thought the idea of an either cosmic method of communication via music was a beautiful idea I don't know if that originated with Steven or someone else but it was a really interesting example of the kind of collaborative planning you have to do in a movie because Steven's working with John Williams who's going to do the score but he will do the score in post production although they had to come up with the five tones and therefore John Williams has to really figure out what the entire music cue is going to be like at the end of the movie which was based obliquely on When You Wish Upon a Star from Disney which they had licensed from Disney there's another version of the movie that was tested in a preview of actually When You Wish Upon a Star at the end of the movie the actual song from Perkyo the actual song from the Disney When You Wish Upon a Star and they actually tested that with the audience I was part of that, we were in the Medallion Theater in Dallas and we set up infrared cameras in the theater unbeknownst to the audience and we filmed the audience during the screenings I don't know if anybody's ever told this story because it's probably a violation of privacy but yeah, Steven wanted to know if this was going to be because there was kind of a too cute potential of doing that which turned out to be too cute and so that was thrown out but if you think of When You Wish Upon a Star you'll hear it in the score even though it's not that specifically it's just a few notes off that and it was trying to get to that and you hear it on a music box that's in Roy Neary's workshop you hear a few notes he's got the Jiminy Cricket music box playing it so setting itself up and they have a conversation about going to see Pinocchio and one of the things that Steven said about the reaction of the audience to the screening where they used Wish Upon a Star was he felt that by having that song where it was at the very end gave some people the idea that the whole movie before had been a fantasy and that was another reason why he decided to to cut it out he's also cited that to get back to the music one more point about the music which I don't know comes up I came up with it when I was researching it and just recently wrote about it is that Steven's mother was a classical pianist and his father was a pioneering computer technician and if you look at close encounters and what has to come together to actually make this communication with the E.T.'s happen it's combination of music and computer technology so whether he's claimed that he was completely unaware of this connection but it was almost like a merging of both of his parents it's a very very very personal film despite the epic scope and all the effects it still has this incredibly personal aspect to it and that's kind of what makes it pulled up why we all still care about it and are affected by it why Steven is Steven because a lot of these ideas the hand gestures and everything how many directors would have just rejected that oh that's a cute idea for something else Doug sorry goodbye but Steven sees it as oh my god it's personal I can relate to it that's what the genius of a great director and there are a few great directors that will take ideas from everywhere and use them in shows with him and you've seen that every movie has not just him at all there's a few guys around there that just are open to it and they see it as part of a whole and they don't want to repeat the same thing they want to add something to it and Steven was really into that and George was into it and Cameron's into it everybody's into it and music is really powerful anybody who makes a movie finds out that the music makes the difference as George found out on Star Wars it's been terrible if John Williams hadn't done that score the way he did it could have been really bad and there again the music made it for the same composer not those two scores are nothing alike Star Wars and Close Encounters are nothing alike both influenced by 2001 certainly but neither one feeling like we'd ever seen anything like it before and if I draw us what would that have been like without that sound without the music I mean it was a long tradition of music often being played on the set of silent movies right it's really it's very emotionally evocative and good directors recognize that use it Kubrick played music during the centrifuge shooting we always heard him blasting music whenever there was no dialogue we would play music he would play music to get the mood Spielberg has always said 2001 was a big influence on this picture some of that comes out in the music too with the way John took some of this avant-garde sound of what Kubrick chose existing concert hall music to represent you know the monolith and all that Billageddi and that kind of sound the ETs always seem to bear a slight resemblance to the Star Child at the end of 2001 as well were you aware of any of this connection and of course the fact that you were on both of those you know we sense some kind of continuity there I think I actually think the continuity is inadvertent and I think that it has to do going back to lens flares and blown out exposures to kind of hide the artifice of it all that the Star Child was way over lit and way over gauze in order to make it so indistinct that you couldn't be annoyed by the fact that it was a plaster model and it was the same for these little girls with these big heads they backlit it and smoked it up so much that you couldn't see that it was a bunch of little girls it would just be more magical because you're hiding behind light you're using light as a way to mask and create this daffinous mysterious kind of you know spiritual almost thing so I think that's where the similarity really lies I don't think it was copying one or the other and you were there all the way through principal photography and with album or right so you saw all these attempts to put them on wires and fly them around and had the ETs running around playing with equipment and part of the cuboid sequence there's just certain things they just don't work the cuboids didn't work and the wire rigs didn't work but there's also realities of shooting wire rigging is really hard it takes a lot of time slows everything down and there was supposed to be this kind of anti-gravitational levitation thing happening people would walk out of the ship or people standing near the ship would just start floating with anti-gravity and just very hard to create non-gravity when you have gravity take another week well but there was one element that was added to that it wasn't just about the girls being flown on wires the technicians who were on the ground they brought in a group of mimes and they wanted the mimes to move super slowly as the girls were walking around were floating around so that when they cranked it it would look like the technicians were walking normally and that the girls were floating you know a little more quickly so they they tried that but the mimes just couldn't quite cut it and when they saw the finished shot it just wasn't convincing enough and that's when Steven cut the shot and there was no longer an anti-gravity field in front of the mother ship so he's got this a lot of ideas but at the end of the day when it's cut down to where is we now believe this is the moment of humans contact with extraterrestrials and sometimes the simplest answer is the best there was a shot that we tried I don't know if you heard about this of an alien inside the house we had an alien coming down the stairway and we couldn't make it work we all just forgot about it and moved on it just wasn't convincing because of the nature of the stairway it couldn't backlight it couldn't make the glow it didn't make any sense sounds like something out of polder guys doesn't it it's also going to say you don't have any zero-g girls flying around the mother ship but you have these ghosts flying around the lost ark at the end they didn't need to be flying they could have walked out well they had a problem with the marionette too because the guys on the overheads and this giant stick figure was coming up and he was bouncing around like a thunderbirds puppet so I got on the bottom and grabbed his feet so camera pan down a little farther and I was looking at him like this and he was bouncing like that well I think at the end of the day I mean all of the work that ended up in close encounters is absolutely perfect still holds up it comes from a period of time where this amazing cinema was just sort of bursting onto the public of things we had never seen before with these indelible movies that we still look at today and don't see any reason to change it at all and they still affect us profoundly at an emotional level also and you guys were there to invent it I would like to say one final thing I haven't seen the restoration I imagine many of you have well I haven't seen it yet because I've just been too busy to go see it and I hope they got rid of our matte lines they did get some matte lines gone yes I think they did a superb job with the restoration it's a horrible time in movie history that when they do a restoration they don't call me I did not know that there's this whole isolation they didn't want to forget about the guys who actually did the work if I had say you would have been my first call you would think so that's unfortunate but maybe we'll do it again that'd be nice but anyway guys are you up for a couple of questions from the crowd here or should we wrap up? questions? asking Greg about working with water and miniatures I didn't deal with it that much it was many of the effects guys like LB Abbott his crew and 80 flowers they tried to make it look in the scale it was really hard to do but it was what it was Dennis was it during Star Wars that you had contacted Ken Rawlson to come up to Island? and how did you meet Ken and what's the little more background in that story? well Ken and I and Phil Tippett and John Berg and Jim Danforth that all worked at Cascade and a few others on and off through the early 70s and the occasional work that we could find and I knew Ken and I broke away from that when they had financial trouble I broke away from it over onto Star Wars to learn that stuff and convince Ken to come on to it as my assistant and then we really had to practically kidnap him to come up to ILM up north he didn't want to make the move at all and we managed to get him up there and the rest is history? the rest that's right, yeah the question is about the documentary on 2001 that I was working on several years ago with Warner Brothers and it's not ever going to happen sadly I was working with a guy named Dave Larson who was just completely his entire life got consumed by researching 2001 and he knew more about it than I did and he's been working on it for 20 or 30 years it's quite amazing archive of interviewing everybody who's ever worked on the movie getting artifacts from the movie and so he and I were going to collaborate on this making of 2001 documentary that would really go into it and we had a whole list of about 50 people still alive who would do on-camera interviews and we were going to do green screen to superimpose them into the sets that they built it was really a cool little project but for some reason Warner Brothers killed it and just we were in the final negotiations of actually signing a deal to do it and they just stopped it for some reason so we'll never know why it didn't happen and they didn't want it to happen and that gave me a very bad taste because if you don't have the support over the studio you can't make a documentary because you can't get clips you can't use the stuff it's all copyrighted so that's never going to happen but the 50th anniversary is coming next year and another writer book guy friend of mine named Michael Benson who does these beautiful big space books decided to do a book about 2001 which is going to come out next year and so I put him together with Dave Larson we had all this archival stuff and so a beautiful book on 2001 is going to come out but it's not pictures it's more talk and more interviews and insights into what was in the minds of those working on the movie I think it'll be quite an extraordinary glimpse into 2001 and it'll come out next year and then we're working with some other people on doing a special 50th anniversary event at the Seattle Cinderella Theater on 2001 Paul Allen owns that theater and has his own personal print of 2001 and so we're going to make quite an event on that I loved the one that you did at the academy with Tom Hanks that was great that presentation was that that? wasn't that great so one more I'd just like to mention that Dave Hardworker's here Dave is very famous he's a I've worked with Dave on many movies and he's really one of the most reliable special camera guys you're ever going to get your hands on and he's alive and well well you guys were around visual effects artists all weekend in town for the visual effects Society Summit both of you were Dennis and Doug entered into the Hall of Fame and I hope you enjoyed Thank you End of the weekend with the people who actually love your work still go out to the movies and still love great art put on film so thank you all for coming of course enjoy Michael's wonderful book on close encounters of the third kind we are not alone