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" '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

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" 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

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

" When I was a kid, one of my hobbies was as model-maker. "

John Knoll

Hobbies

Kid

" 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. "

" You can hardly turn around and not see something that was done in Photoshop. "

" When you are shooting traditional motion capture, it's a big footprint on set. There are, like, 16 cameras that are needed and constraints over the lighting. "

" 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. "

" I certainly have opinions about things, but we're a service organization. Our job is to try and realize the director's vision. "

" There's things that you just couldn't do with an optical printer. Now, with digital compositing, most of the energy that goes into a shot goes into the aesthetic issues of, 'Is it a good shot or not?' "

" If you were a new guy at ILM, they put you on the night crew - my shift was from 7 P.M. to about 5 A.M. In my free time, I was working on an idea with my older brother, a software engineer getting his doctorate at the University of Michigan. Ultimately, it developed into Photoshop. "

" 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. "

" I just have this very simple idea about the rebel spies in the opening crawl of A 'New Hope' who steal the plans for the Death Star. "

" 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. "

" A lot of filmmakers understand that the work is done digitally, and it's technically possible to change it late in the game. "

" 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. "

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

" Any tool can be used for good or bad. It's really the ethics of the artist using it. "

" '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. "

" I loved movies. In particular, I loved movies depicting places and events that obviously you couldn't have gone out and shot. It was obvious you were looking at something that had been manufactured in some way. I was fascinated by that. "

" I have three daughters who grew up while I was working on the special editions and the prequels. They got to be big 'Star Wars' fans. And, you know, I would see them identifying with a lot of the male characters, and I just thought, 'Star Wars' could use more good strong female leads.' "

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

John Knoll

Job

Ask

" There was a 3-foot-long model that was built for 'New Hope,' and then there was an 8-foot model that was built for 'Empire Strikes Back.' The 8-foot model and the 3-foot model are kind of different. A lot of the details are different between the two of them. "

" The way that Lucasfilm used ILM was George never restricted his thinking to things that he knew could be executed with the tools at the time. He would write what he thought would be cool and what he wanted from a storytelling standpoint with the assumption that, 'Well, they'll figure it out!' "

" I think it's an important part of the visual effects supervisor's job to get really deeply embedded in production and keep us all focused on trying to generate the best result. I'm not proprietary about, 'I would rather do this effect than let physical effects do it.' No, let's do the smartest thing for the movie. "

John Knoll

Job

Important

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

" 'Baby's Day Out' is maybe not a great movie, but... No, I've enjoyed and learned things from every project I've worked on. That was an important step in my career at ILM. "

" 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

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

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