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" I read a magazine called 'Cinefantastique' that had just come out with a making of 'Star Wars' issue. They had some very long and detailed interviews with a whole bunch of people at ILM. I think I memorized that whole magazine. "

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" I've gone through a whole series of careers where something started as a hobby of some kind. Almost everything I've been paid to do was something that was largely self-taught. "

John Knoll

Kind

Hobby

Gone

" Life's too short to be spending all your waking hours doing something you're not excited about. And when people are that excited, you can see it in the work. "

" Imagine a 'Mission: Impossible'-style spy or infiltration mission into the core, the very heart of the Empire's military-industrial complex, the most secure facility in the Empire. You have a small band of experts with complementary skills who, together, are able to do these amazing things. "

" I came in during the era of models, motion control, and optical printers. ILM had just started its own computer graphics division, after the Lucasfilm computer division had been sold off and became Pixar. "

" I've been on lots of movies where we've done a lot of planning of sets - how much you build, and is this big enough, and will this get us what we need? - just with foam-core models. "

" ILM was the first company that I had worked at that had a computer-graphics division. "

" If you need to do a movie where you have an army of 10,000 soldiers, that's a very difficult thing to shoot for real. It's very expensive, but as computer graphics techniques make that cheaper, it'll be more possible to make pictures on an epic scale, which we haven't really seen since the '50s and '60s. "

" Every film tries to advance the state of the art, at least a little bit. Brand new techniques? A lot of them are just evolutionary: we're just building on something that's like something we've done before and just trying to do it a little bit better or make it a little bit more realistic. "

" We were in an atmosphere in the household that you could accomplish anything you set your mind to. If you were willing to put in the hard work, nothing was beyond your grasp. "

" I've been lucky enough in my career to have opportunities to revisit things that meant a lot to me in childhood. "

John Knoll

Opportunities

Childhood

" Having been a cameraman, I think about, 'Well, if this was real, how would this be shot?' I try to inject as much realism as much as possible. "

" When I was a kid, I built miniatures, and that was actually the first thing I did professionally in the film industry. It was a demonstrable skill that I had, so I worked as a model maker. "

" On every show, there's some amount of work that is brought to some state of completion - or even finished - and then cut out of the movie. "

" I don't have any particular loyalties to one technique or another. I'm just trying to use the best for the job. "

" Visual-effects shots should flow into the rest of the live action, and you shouldn't be able to see a difference. "

" Something we often struggle with on pictures is the right way to shoot live-action elements that are for an environment that's very complicated from a lighting standpoint. An example is a starship flying through an environment that's constantly changing. "

" It's harder to get your second picture than it is to get your first one. "

" Eighty percent of my job is to ask the question, 'If this were real, what would it look like?' "

John Knoll

Job

Ask

" 'Phantom Menace' was a huge project. It was the biggest visual effects production ever done at that point, and it was a little scary how big it was and how many unknown technologies had to be developed to do that work. "

" 'Pacific Rim,' for me, was a chance to touch on those old Toho monster movies. 'Godzilla' and 'Rodan'... and then 'Ultraman' and 'Robotech' and all those kinds of things. "

John Knoll

Monster

Old

" When I first started in the industry, there were - this is prior to the era of computer graphics and all these digital tools - there were some pretty rigid, technologically imposed limitations about how you shoot things, because if you didn't shoot 'em the right way, you couldn't make the shot work. "

" Almost everything I've been paid to do was something that was largely self-taught. "

" Often if a picture is in trouble one way or another, there are ways to salvage it, through reshoots or whatever. "

" A lot of us got into the industry because of 'Star Wars,' and we all have this love of the original source material. "

John Knoll

Star

Got

" In high school and college, I'd set a bunch of goals for myself. I wanted to be the lead effects supervisor on one of these really big, innovative visual effects productions, something on the scale of a 'Star Wars' movie. And I wanted to work on a project that wins the Academy Award for best visual effects. "

" It's definitely an issue if the actor has passed away without stating any intention or desire about how his or her likeness should be dealt with. Then it falls to their estate. That's a problem that will start solving itself. Now the technology exists, and actors are aware of this and can make their wishes known. "

" Ideally, you will never know that you're seeing a computer-generated car. "

" I started off as a model maker, so the first part of my career was a model maker and then a motion control camera operator, so I shot a lot of miniatures. "

" There's no reason to think Disney is going to stop wanting to make 'Star Wars' movies if there's quality and there's interest. It has unlimited potential. It has a huge number of characters, worlds... It's a massive playground. "

" Reacting is so important to the craft of acting. "