hil Tippett has been creating visual effects since 1977, when he collaborated with his friend George Lucas on a little movie called Star Wars. Following that success, Tippett went on to supervise the ILM creature shop for the second and third installments in the Star Wars trilogy (the Tauntaun and giant Imperial Walkers in The Empire Strikes Back were his), and other blockbuster films, including Jurassic Park, Robocop and Starship Troopers.
For the 1978 film Dragonslayer, Tippett co-developed a new animation technique called "go-motion" (as opposed to the previous method of "stop-motion") and received an Academy Award nomination for his efforts. In total, the prolific designer has won two Oscars and two Emmys for his work in visual effects. He also is the founder of the busy FX house Tippett Studio, which has contributed to more than 50 films, television series and commercials.
But as the saying goes, what Tippett really wanted to do was direct. And in 2001 he got his first chance to do so with the direct-to-video sequel Starship Troopers 2, which will be released June 1. The film centers around a unit of troopers trapped in an outpost on the bug world Planet Zulu. What the troopers don't realize is that there is just as much danger within the walls of their supposed haven as there is outside.
Science Fiction Weekly recently talked with Tippett about his experience at the helm of Starship Troopers 2 and his thoughts on the influence of visual effects on cinema today.
Having worked with many directors in the past, did you find it easy to cross over to that role?
Tippett: Well, I certainly understood all the production processes because of my day job as a visual-effects supervisor. They usually got me in the shoot really early on in preproduction. I was usually one of the first people hired that would work out a lot of the logistical things with the writers and directors, and of course you have to deal with every department very intimately. Not just in production, but you're very involved every day in shooting your scenes, and then you're very involved with all of the post-production as well, and sound is a very important aspect of that. So I had a very good understanding of the entire process of filmmaking and loved the entire process.
Why Starship Troopers 2?
Tippett: I've been looking for a project to direct for a number of years, and this is the first thing that came up.
Given your experience, did you take a more hands-on approach to the visual effects in the film?
Tippett: [Tippett Studio] did all the bugs in the first Starship Troopers. That was kind of their rationale for letting me do this. So one of the young guys that I'd hired on the first Starship Troopers, Eric Leven, has worked with me for the last seven years, and this was also his debut as the visual-effects supervisor. Eric handled all the visual-effects supervision, so I just handed that over to him. I designed pretty much all the shots in terms of the storyboards and the continuity flow, and Eric implemented them.
Do you think it's an advantage as a director, coming from the world of visual effects?
Tippett: Well, yeah. It was also a huge advantage having a studio at my access. There's a lot of down time, so I spent a great deal of time with people that were in between projects. They have, like, a day here and a day there in down time, and in my years of working with other directors like George Lucas and [Steven] Spielberg and [Paul] Verhoeven, I had really learned the value of preproduction and planning, particularly in doing as much as you can to previsualize things. So we made a lot of models and miniatures that we would use as talking tools. Even while I was framing the story with Ed Neumeier, the writer, we had a lot of very concrete things that we could talk about, so it wasn't in the abstract. And then we would design. A great deal of the design was done in the year that it took to write the script.
Were you conscious of not letting the effects overtake the story?
Tippett: Oh, absolutely. In fact, I'm not a big fan of big special-effects pictures. You just see so much of it that it ends up becoming numbing, I find. The story and the characters are really the interesting thing. And then the visual effects is just another aspect. It's like if you tried to make a movie centered completely on costumes or production design. They're boring shows. So I certainly learned that lesson by working on a number of turkeys [laughs].
Did you take inspiration from Verhoeven's original film, or try to create something entirely different?
Tippett: It wasn't so much an issue of wanting to do something different. It was like, well, we were going to do something different because we have no alternative. The best strategy, it seemed very early on, between Jon Davison, the producer, Ed Neumeier, the writer, and I, was that, well, we should make a horror film and keep every thing dark, keep it all more centered on more of a psychological horror about the characters, because we don't have the money to create the spectacle that Paul Verhoeven did in [Starship Troopers]. And we also, even on that show, we were kind of running out of things to do. We couldn't come up with a bunch of new bugs with effects we couldn't afford. So the horror gulag really kind of afforded us a framework for beginning to understand how we could make something for the price. ... If Starship Troopers was Aliens, then ours is more like Alien.
The first film was adapted from the Robert Heinlein novel, but you didn't have any such inspiration for this, did you?
Tippett: No, we didn't. But there's a huge advantage to having the entire world already understood and not having to invent that. So we had all the costumes, and we knew the military structure, and we knew the foibles of the federation that sometimes hides the truth. I mean, our main take in this one was just to say, if Starship Troopers was kind of a play off of World War II from Leni Riefenstahl's perspective, the idea was to do kind of to make this an antique in a way. We kind of got the idea [that] it would be fun to make a John Ford horror movie. John Ford never made horror movies, so what if we could make a John Ford kind of a movie, and skew it to a horror side. And we would say that the world of Starship Troopers has kind of rolled from World War II straight into the Korean War, then maybe into Vietnam. And the soldiers have just been fighting continually this entire time and have gotten kind of long in the tooth and have realized that their leaders are lying to them. So that's the milieu of our story.
How much of the creatures did you create practically and how much of it was digital?
Tippett: These days it's mostly CGI. You really don't have the time on the set. I mean, we made a few very limited props, like some legs and some beaks for a few shots. But you have to move so quickly, and it was very hard to get that stuff choreographed and moving. You have to do multiple takes, and then you go in and break down, and you just sit there waiting for somebody to come in with a screwdriver. It's a lot easier to do it with the visual effects and then roll that into the post-production schedule.
Was it always intended to be direct-to-DVD?
Tippett: Yeah. The first picture didn't do that well at the box office, but Columbia/TriStar wanted to keep the franchise alive. And they just had this engine that works, if you can make them cheap enough. I mean, that was really the attraction for Jon and Ed and I, who'd worked on a number of these big-budgeted Hollywood movies. They're really not that fun to work on, because everybody's so worried because they cost so much money.
There's a lot of pressure on films like that.
Tippett: It's too much pressure, really. And we all came from kind of the Corman school of filmmaking and grew up with that and really loved it. The bad news was we didn't have any money, but the good news is you don't have any money. So you do your best with what you've got. You've got a great deal of autonomy. And my philosophy with a lot of this stuff is that if somehow you can get the energy going, get everybody on the same team, everybody's liking what they're doing and the script's good enough, then that kind of leaks through to the end, and that kind of solves a lot of problems.
I've heard directors say that a smaller budget sometimes leads to more creativity than if you had all the money in the world. Do you think that's true?
Tippett: I absolutely, completely, 150 percent agree with that. I mean, it's very frustrating at times, and there's certainly thing you want to do and you [wish], "If I only had 50 cents more." But you're right. Time and time again I do see that with the big budgets, many times the solution is "Let's throw another million dollars at it" or "We don't know what to do, let's shoot two endings for the movie."
Why do you think that is? Lack of vision?
Tippett: Well, yeah. Lack of vision and real worry that there's not going to be a return on this investment. So everybody has to second-guess and micromanage. It's just this horrible corporate culture that we live in now. And the studios are run by these giant things. So it's very antithetical to the creative process. The bigger you get, the bigger moving target you are. So the smaller you are, you can move around a lot quicker.
So you'd rather work on a smaller movie like this?
Tippett: I really had a good time working on this picture. My greatest personal achievement on this thing was when we had our wrap party at the end of the thing and everybody was still talking to each other.
Are you anxious to continue directing after this?
Tippett: Yeah. I'm continuing to work with my partners, Ed and Jon, and we like the same kind of material and share a very similar sense of humor and worldviews. So it's very important to me to work with my friends. And I'm not really looking at Starship Troopers as a debut so I can go out and direct whatever, Spider-Man XII or The Hulk II. I'm not too interested in that kind of stuff. But if we can continue to develop and work on projects that we like, that would be a great job.
What are your ambitions now as a director?
Tippett: We worked with such a limited budget, what I'd like to do is have a little bit more money [laughs]. Just to take a baby step upwards and to do something that could get us a theatrical release. And shoot on film. We shot this all digitally. And I'd personally prefer film. So I would just like to do that. Shoot the next one on film. See if I can get a theatrical release.
What's your take on all the technological advances that have been made recently? Do you think they're good or bad for the industry?
Tippett: Like with many things, when there are huge technological breakthroughs, like with sound or color or anything like that, there's a tendency for the technologists or the rocket scientists to be the tail that's wagging the dog. We got into a certain amount of that because one of the things we've learned over the years is, what you want to do is build something that's going to support the story. And if you're working with a current piece of equipment that someone is trying to make perfect, well, if you're telling a war horror movie you don't want it to be perfect. You want it to be messed up. So you go in and mess up the camera and the technical people go, "You can't do that." Yes, you can.
When you started out in this business, you were using techniques like stop-motion animation, models and puppets to create special effects. Do you ever miss the old days?
Tippett: You know, I miss the knowledge that the people that did that stuff had, or have. And certainly, the more educated they are in art history and film history, and the more experience they've had making things with their hands, the more I can directly communicate with people. And it's getting a little bit better now. It was kind of terrible for a while, because it was completely within the realm, at least in the visual-effects world, the digital realm was a very different mindset than the filmmaking world. And it's beginning to get a little bit better now. Certainly what the whole swing towards the digital thing has done for me is it's [dragged] me kicking and screaming upstairs and allowed me to do what I'm doing now. So that's worked for me.
It's been a thrill talking with you. Is there anything else you wanted to say about Starship Troopers 2 before we wrap it up?
Tippett: Buy one for you and one for your mom [laughs].
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Also in this issue:
The cast and crew of The Day After Tomorrow
