But it didn’t give that moment of audience anticipation for seeing the cars and seeing him enter the trap. And so Luc had originally storyboarded it as if it was a tracking shot straight on the cab and you track with it as it enters the intersection, and then as Bruce Willis or Korben Dallas enters the intersection all of the squadron was there. I remember there was one shot late in post in the cab chase we were trying to figure out where his sort of one-point perspective style just wasn’t working for the shot, where it was a shot of the cab after escaping the police and Bruce Willis relaxing for a moment when he enters an intersection and there’s a whole squadron of police cars there laid out waiting to shoot at him as he goes through. I’d much rather set a camera looking down a street, having a cab rush towards me, and cut as it passes by, and then cut to a reverse of it passing by, and construct my film that way.’ So there’s a lot of single centered one-point perspective shots in the movies, and his prior movies, too, if you look at them. If you looked at his films then, he explained to me, ‘You know Mark I don’t want to do these ‘fancy panning around and seeing the whole world shots’. He has a pretty unusual style, especially then. He had some pretty clear ideas and communicated them very clearly how he wanted to shoot things. It was that more than it was me, and I was very lucky to become part of that project and part of that world. Really he wanted to make a deal with Digital Domain and he wanted his picture to be done there. And was happy to take me on almost based on that. Mark Stetson: Well, Luc was very impressed with my credentials, especially Blade Runner. What do you remember about those early days of meeting Luc and going through the script, and what his view and your view was on how some of these sequences would be done? But just sort of embedding myself with the film crew was a great experience, a great experience. I didn’t know what to make of the script, didn’t know whether to read it as a comedy or a drama, and had plenty of questions about that. And let him bless me for the job.Īnd it was all pretty wild to start. I knew nothing about Luc Besson really and my first job was to read the script, get on a plane, fly to London and meet him.

I was actually kind of shocked when they handed me that project.

And I of course had tons to learn, but it’s a good place to start. At least that was my foundational confidence, shall we say, my confidence in that sense. So that all led to it not being an unusual transition to go into overall visual effects supervision. And oftentimes I was the first person doing a breakdown on a film: what was going to be miniature, what was going to be matte painting, what was gonna be comp, what elements we needed, stuff like that.Īnd so I had plenty of support in that regard but oftentimes I was the first person to seriously look at a project. And so what I found is – I stayed with that for ten or fifteen years – was I really ended up fronting visual effects projects in the sense that model construction needed such a lead time that I really needed to sort of figure out the scope of the work. And running the model shop for Doug Trumbull was a huge deal in my world and in the visual effects world at the time. Mark Stetson: I sort of came up quickly through the ranks in miniature effects and I think Blade Runner was my third or fourth picture. Could you give me a quick background of what you felt like your area of expertise was? Prior to that you’d worked on things like Blade Runner and Hudsucker Proxy and Waterworld. It was Digital Domain 1.0 back then, and they really gave me a great team. And I was very supported by Digital Domain. I mean, it was sort of standard tent pole-ish at the time and I was confident that I could do that, but it was my first one and there was a ton I had to learn, especially about digital visual effects. Mark Stetson: I wasn’t afraid of the size of it. This was your first visual effects supervisor role – how daunting was that for you?

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