WTF with Marc Maron Podcast - Episode 1337 - Phil Tippett

Episode Date: June 6, 2022

Oscar and Emmy-winning visual effects artist Phil Tippett is responsible for some of the most memorable effects in movies history, like the alien chess match in Star Wars, the giant robot walkers in The Empire Strikes Back, the ED-209 in RoboCop and more. And because his work is almost always rooted in stop-motion animation, Phil tends to be meticulous. It's why, as he tells Marc, he started his first film 30 years ago and it's only complete now. They talk about the creation of this movie, Mad God, and how it drove Phil to the brink. Sign up here for WTF+ to get the full show archives and weekly bonus material! https://plus.acast.com/s/wtf-with-marc-maron-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly, host of Under the Influence. Recently, we created an episode on cannabis marketing. With cannabis legalization, it's a brand new challenging marketing category. And I want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I talk to an actual cannabis producer. I wanted to know how a producer becomes licensed, how a cannabis company competes with big corporations, how a cannabis company markets its products in such a highly regulated

category, and what the term dignified consumption actually means. I think you'll find the answers interesting and surprising. Hear it now on Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly. This bonus episode is brought to you by the Ontario Cannabis Store and ACAS Creative. Be honest. When was the last time you thought about your current business insurance policy? If your existing business insurance policy is renewing on autopilot each year without checking out Zensurance, you're probably spending more than you need. That's why you need to switch to low-cost coverage from Zensurance before your policy renews this year. Zensurance does all the heavy lifting to find a policy, covering only what you need, and policies start at only $19 per month.

So if your policy is renewing soon, go to Zensurance and fill out a quote. Zensurance. Mind your business. Lock the gates! is renewing soon, go to Zensurance and fill out a quote. Zensurance, mind your business. All right, let's do this. How are you? What the fuckers? What the fuck buddies? What the fuck Knicks? What's happening? I'm Mark Maron. this is my podcast wtf welcome to it are you new here are you here for phil have you come for phil because this guest that i have today is not the usual guest i have this is sort of like uh something uh brendan and i talked about and uh he he is essential in the history of cinema, and what he represents is essential. I'll explain it.

Let me explain it. Who I'm talking about is Phil Tippett, and I'll get to that in a second. So let's talk about, you know, I've been doing comedy a long time, and it's much longer than I anticipated, even being alive to some degree. And I came up with something.

It's funny because it's rare that you, like, out of nowhere delivered something. I don't even know how to explain it, but I was like, oh, my God. Someone has to have found this before. It's hard sometimes to talk about issues or sort of controversial things in a way that's not either, you know, dickish or self-righteous, sometimes both, depending on what side you're coming at them from. And it's just rare that you're given a gift of something

from the comedy news where you're like, oh my God, this is right. This is the pocket. This is like this is an angle that I haven't heard on something that everyone has talked about, but not enough men actually talk about this. But I was just thinking about, you know, guns. I was thinking about abortion. I was thinking about these ideas and these issues and these terrible things that are going on in our country around, you know, rights and also, you know, murder. But I was thinking about the abortion debate and the idea of choice. And obviously, I am a proponent of choice. I believe all women should have the right to choose whatever they need to do with their bodies. It's their body and they should have the right and it should

be legal to do so. It should not be infringed upon. So right now, you know, given that we are living in what is becoming a minority rural country and that there are radicalized right-wing governments in about half the states, you know, the shit is going down. And I just was trying to figure out how to frame it. You know, how do you get a joke out of it and i just thought well look obviously all women have should have the right to make choices for their own body and i think maybe it's a branding problem in terms of dealing with the with the christian right and they're they're taking over of the dialogue it's just that you know abortion clinics sounds

very brutal very clinical and it's easy to make it sort of seem menacing. Whereas like maybe if we called them something like angel factories, there'd be a different dialogue because then it would sort of put the ball in the Christian's court that they're angel factories. Because if you think about it, like once they're born, it's a crapshoot. But these are guaranteed angels. So I think maybe if we could sort of push that out into the world, the type of Christians that would be out in front of an abortion clinic, the ones that were used to just hold signs and horrible pictures and terrify people, maybe they'd be celebrating. You could literally maybe put a counter on the building that has a bell to it. And every time an abortion is done, it's just a number pops up and a bell rings and a group of Christians out in front just start clapping. You know, when the bell rings, an angel gets its wings. Goodbye. Fly away. So the idea of

Angel Factory came to me and I'm like, oh, fuck. I got to text Dave Cross. And I texted Laurie Kilmartin. I texted Pat. pat and i'm like anything any anyone here of this angel factory business because i i came up with this and i've tried it a couple times and i think it's a keeper and i think it's a it's a it's a great little poetic thing anybody and no one had heard it and people were you know they they were happy for me but patents like you better ask a tell and ask stanhope like it was funny to me that there was like only a handful of people that would come up with it. But then somebody on Instagram said that there was a that I think when abortion was illegal in Germany or maybe it didn't. I didn't get the context, but abortion doctors were called angle markers with angel makers.

So that does. But that's fine. That's a good source. I think it was in, you know, in the thirties or I know nothing about it. Anyway, just letting you in on the process. And I'm pretty excited about Angel Factories. So let me, let me tell you about Phil Tippett. Okay. Phil Tippett, if you don't know, and I didn't know much of this and I had to research him. He's an Oscar and Emmy winning visual effects artist. He's responsible for some of the most memorable effects in movies like Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Robocop. And his work is almost always rooted in stop motion animation.

This is what he is. He's a stop motion animation guy. Like, you know, the big elephant looking walkers from Empire Strikes Back. Those are Phil's designs. He's worked for ILM and DreamWorks, but he also has his own studio that's been doing visual effects for like on all sorts of shit since the 80s. But here's the deal. For the past 30 years, 30 years, he's been working on this personal project. It's a feature film. it's his first feature film it's called mad

god and and now it's finally complete and it's insane it's a full-length feature film of this apocalyptic journey or maybe a couple of journeys through this like apocalyptic landscape with all these dark dark jokes and all these figures there's all kinds of stop motion you know buildings and figures and industrial stuff and gooey stuff and hairy stuff and gloppy stuff and you know there's there's blood and guts and and metal and weird sounds it's future it's past it's like it's it's almost there's a prophecy in it it's it's everything this guy has ever had in his head you know dumped into this movie and it's so elaborate and so meticulously composed and and layered it's insane and it sent him to the fucking hospital finishing this thing but now you can watch it and it

reminded me of those kind of animation things you used to see in the 70s where it was almost like it's obviously trippy but it's like you know it's it's like it's harryhausen on acid and more you know it there's just like there there's so many layers to it and it's so fascinating to watch and to know that it is the life's work a labor of of love and uh it's done and i and, and when I talked to Phil, it was all I wanted to talk about because I said, like, I'm not a sci-fi freak and, you know, I know what he's done and I'm impressed with it, but this movie was where I wanted to go with him. We got into it, but you can watch it. You can watch Mad God on the streaming service Shudder, which you can subscribe to on its own or as part of AMC+. It starts streaming on June 16th,

and it's also going to have a theatrical release starting this week, Friday, June 10th. There are screenings all over the country, so you can go to madgodmovie.com to find one near you. That's madgodmovie.com to find a screening. And you got to see it.

If you're a little bit of a sci-fi person, man, it's not a horror movie. This is like it's a stop motion masterpiece. Seriously. So I'm going to get into it here with Phil Tippett. And I think we got into a groove, man. There's a couple of beautiful moments and he's a real artist, this guy. And it was an honor to talk to him.

Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly, host of Under the Influence. Recently, we created an episode on cannabis marketing. With cannabis legalization, it's a brand new challenging marketing category. And I want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I talk to an actual cannabis producer. I wanted to know how a producer becomes licensed,

how a cannabis company competes with big corporations, how a cannabis company markets its products in such a highly regulated category, and what the term dignified consumption actually means. I think you'll find the answers interesting and surprising. Hear it now on Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly. This bonus episode is brought to you by the Ontario Cannabis Store and ACAS Creative. Are you self-employed? Don't think you need business insurance? Think again. Business insurance from Zensurance is a no-brainer for every business owner because it provides peace of mind. A lot can go wrong. A fire, cyber attack, stolen equipment, or an unhappy customer suing you. That's why you need insurance. Don't let the, I'm too small for this mindset, hold you back from protecting yourself. To them. to him.

I'm glad you're here and I'll be up front with you in that I'm not a huge sci-fi guy. It's not sci-fi. I know. I've watched the whole thing and I'm not a huge animation guy even. But I watched the movie and it's like this possessed masterpiece that I can see. I know it took you a long time to make, but it reminded me.

I had a lot of emotions around it as a piece of art in a way. around it as a piece of art in a way and i don't think that i i really made the connection of how pure that type of animation is in relation to the medium of film like there doesn't seem to like it reveals the organic nature of what film is unlike anything else yeah i think so yeah and uh and i don't know that i've had that experience before in making that connection and i think it's only relative to you know seeing movies now or knowing what the technologies that exist now are that I could really – there's almost an organic – you can feel the humanity of it, of that medium. Yeah. Well, you can see that in the films of Carl Zeman and Jans Fankmeyer and others, Jerry Trinka. But nobody watches that stuff anymore.

But they're really, Carl Zeman's just, he was a huge influence on me. And where's he from? Czechoslovakian. And is he still around? Nope. Nope. No, I kick myself because I'm a huge fan of his. I highly recommend that you watch his movies.

Not many in the States, but, you know, the fabulous world of Jules Verne. Oh, yeah. And Baron Munchausen. He would use any kind of technique that he possibly could and just carry it through with continuity. Yeah. There'd be a lot of miss and match, but it didn't matter. Yeah. Right.

continuity yeah there'd be a lot of Mitch and Matt miss and match but it didn't matter yeah right but there was also this sensibility that not because because I don't really exist in that world of animation but you know I do exist in the world nostalgically or or just in terms of who uh I was uh moved by as a younger person of of kind of um the hallucinogenic sensibility the the kind of beatnik sensibility like there's was some burrows in the whole thing to me in terms of the way he depicted things. Yeah, come to mention, I hadn't thought of that, but yeah. Everything goes into the hopper, you know. Sure, and like who's the guy that did the work with Zappa,

Bruce Bickford? Yeah. Like there was a world of art that was sort of mind-blowing, and that was the intent of it, but didn't have to abide by any rules. Right. Like even the animation, like when I was a kid, like Wizards, like Ralph Bakshi, that you could enter an experience that could go on for an hour and a half and not have to be defined. Yeah, yeah. No, it was a huge, of course, I was, as a kid, influenced by Ray Harryhausen, Willis O'Brien. How old were you when you saw that stuff?

I saw King Kong when I was six, 1955, and when I was seven, 1958, Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. Right. So, like, because I remember seeing thoseventh Voyage of Sinbad. Right. So, like, because I remember seeing those, but they weren't new. They were already, you know, on the whatever channel it was, you know, dialing for dollars or something. But I imagine at that time, they were new, right? No one had ever seen that before. To me. Yeah.

Yeah, definitely. They were like magic. Yeah. And there were a couple of consequences that fell off of that that i didn't realize until a lot later yeah but you didn't have access to the media that you have today so it might not be another 10 years before you see that thing on a black and white tv yeah and uh that really helped all of us you know we we all kind of, you know, orbit around this understanding that because we didn't have the access that is available today, we just made shit up on our minds. Right. So you saw it all.

It was all in color on screen. Yeah. Yeah. And you made shit up in your minds in terms of. Well, just remembering what it was. I mean, you know, we would only see it once. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so the you know, we would only see it once. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so the rest was left to our imaginations and reconstruct.

No idea how to do it. Yeah. At all. And it wasn't until many years later that Forrest J. Ackerman, who was the editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland, who's here in L.A., he had his Acker mansion. Yeah. And he was friends with Ray la he had he had his acker mansion yeah and it was he was friends with ray bradbury ray harryhausen and uh had tons of the the memorabilia from you know king kong and ray's stuff yeah and so we were like in pig heaven yeah yeah yeah yeah so we would go over

there and um well that's where a lot of us met you know who's who's us uh dennis murin yeah you know uh who went on to you know win and you know more almost as many academy awards as either head and uh you know my other buddies john berg tom sanamon ken ralston you know a lot of us that you know went on to to make um the star wars on to make the Star Wars movies. To make the world. Yeah. But where'd you grow up? I was born in Berkeley.

So you were like Berkeley your whole life? No, my parents captured me and made me go to San Diego. Oh, man. Yeah, I was not a big fan of San Diego. Oh, geez. How old were you when that happened? I was right after Sinbad, eight, nine. You fan of San Diego. Oh, geez. How old were you when that happened? I was right after Sinbad, eight, nine. You're in San Diego.

Yeah. But the good news was, I mean, I liked the beaches, and now I get skin cancer. Yeah. But it put me into proximity to L.A. Yeah. When I could drive. And so that just plopped me down in doing commercial work in Hollywood. But when you were a kid,

were you trying out to, when did you start working with the stop motion stuff? Because that's something, one of those, it seems that even with kids who have access to like a Super 8 projector,

a film camera that they start, it seems like some of the first stuff that people do when they try to make movies. Oh, absolutely. I mowed lawn and hacked up Ice plant to get a single frame camera. Yeah.

And probably around 12 started goofing around with stop motion animation. And, you know, I just, I did a lot of tricks, you know. Yeah. That, you know, I did jerry rig things so I could look at things one frame at a time, which you couldn't do on a projector. So you're a little possessed. I was possessed, yeah. And my parents were worried about me.

Really? Well, my mom was. Yeah. Yeah, as moms are. And she wanted to go to a therapist, take me to a therapist. Yeah. And my dad was against that because he was an artist.

Uh-huh. And he had a library of books, and he knew that I was interested in monsters. What kind of artist was he? He was a weekend abstract expressionist. Okay, yeah. You know, tried to get into the game, taught me a valuable lesson because he couldn't stand rejection. Uh-huh.

You know, and as a kid I realized, well, if you can't stand rejection, you know, you better get out. Right. You did realize that. Yeah. Eventually I did. I mean, it sunk in. But he showed me books on Hieronymus Bosch. Sure.

And Peter Bruegel and his son. And, you know, it's like all these things. Things just, with me, everything takes a long time to gestate. And eventually at some point I went like, God, you know, I want to make a Peter Bruegel movie at some point. I'd love, or Hieronymus Bosch. Well, I mean, you definitely achieved that. Well, he had, Bosch had both this sense of diabolical horror and whimsy to them.

Yes, right. You know, which was, you know, I was always very attracted to. To whimsy and diabolical horror happening simultaneously. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I recently saw the Bosch paintings.

I was at the Prado i think is where they are and and you you know when you see those in a book or something it's one thing but when you stand before them it's like oh my god again because there's something about engaging with the surface too and seeing the paint and everything else it's it's it's the same effect that i was sort of talking about when i watched your film that i don't know that I ever had the visceral reaction to stop motion because in the film, I mean, this thing, it's kind of it's covered with, you know, sludge and decay and blood and goop and hair. And, you know, like there's a lot of stuff that you can just feel it, you know, when you see it. that that you can just feel it you know when you see it so in starting to do that kind of stuff i mean if that was what compelled you when you were that young what was the process to getting i mean how i mean obviously this took a long time to make but what was your experience

how did you get into the business well before i got in business, I collected mentors. And the first mentor I had was Ray Bradbury, who I carried on a correspondence wish. You just reached out to him? I was working on a guy's 16-millimeter low-budget version of Ray's short story, Sound of Thunder. The Tyrannosaurus rex time travel deal yeah and um he was speaking at a junior college and i went down there and gave him the script and showed him some pictures and he wrote back and said you know if you make any money off of this i'm gonna sue you yeah but that that started a long conversation of uh of letters

you know we wrote back and forth for years. And I lost them all. You did. You know, in subsequent moves. Yeah. Yeah, idiot. But in the 60s, you know, Ray's rant was love, love, love. You know, do what you love.

Because if you fail at that, you'll be in a better place than if you um did not even try or fail at something you didn't want to do anyways yeah yeah and didn't know you know you didn't even know what you could you could reach to and that you know coincided with my at the same time my dad you know not being able to you know oh I don't know you know I get rejected all the time all right right right so he your dad was afraid yeah and and because of that he did well and you know I can you know a lot of rope for that because he was a victim of the 50s yeah and and you're you're you know kind of forced into a court or a being you know and so you know

it's it is so difficult for many people that want to you know raise a family to um yeah sure do that well yeah well that was the ideal right so you're working i mean that was the norm or the expectation that had to be broken in the 60s by the next generation. That was the pushback on that. Yeah, absolutely. Around those expectations. Yeah, that was me. You know, and that was, you know, it was like, you know, Bosch and King Kong and whatnot.

But then in the, you know, 60s, you know, I was, you know, 15 or so. And Bob Dylan, you know, had switched from. Folk to electric. Folk, you know, switched from um folk to electric folk you know to the more surrealistic you know kind of collage stuff and that was like holy shit you know i didn't think about at the time but it was like you know eventually when i started thinking about mad god you know i wanted to do something that was a lot more collage, poetic-like. Yeah, sure. And do you think that looking back, do you believe that your father had talent? No, not particularly. So even if he had the courage to face rejection, he was probably smarter to stay in his fear. He was rejected for a reason.

Although you never know how anything goes. You throw shit at the wall. Yeah. So when you're communicating with Ray Bradbury, how old are you? for, you know, a reason. Although you never know how anything goes. You throw shit at the wall and, you know. So when you're communicating with Ray Bradbury, how old are you? Is that when you were in your teens? Yeah, probably around 16 or so. And, you know, his thing was love, love, love.

And so in our correspondence, you know, as the nomenclature changed over the years, you know, it would go from love, love, love to follow your bliss to this and that and the other thing. And then it turned out being follow your passion. So I looked up the word in passion and it comes from the Latin patai, which of course means to suffer. Does it?

Yeah. You know, like Jesus on the cross. Sure. Oh, the passion of Christ. Yes. And that is all the creative people that i know that is their world you know they follow their passion they suffer for it yeah why do we do that we don't know no but it is you're you're you're consumed you know right right you have your mind, you have no choice. Well, it's like, I mean, the paths that I took was very similar to Carl Jung.

Yeah. Wrote this book over 16 years without anybody being aware of it. Yeah. Called The Red Book. Oh. And Tashin had put it out, and it's really worth getting. Yeah? It's really fantastic.

Huh. It's got all these beautiful, you know, paintings with gold and everything. Mandela paintings kind of stuff? Hmm? Mandela paintings? No, no, no. It's more very religious.

Oh, okay. But there are Mandela things in it. And beautiful calligraphy in, you know, Gothic German and everything. And so he wrote this for the better part of 16 years. Yeah. And it was essentially, when I read this, I was halfway through Mad God and I realized, yeah, oh, this happens to a lot of people, you know, and it was the classic Campbell hero's journey. You know, as a creative person, you don't know what you're going to do. Sure.

But you want to find a what and you go down this path and that leads to another path, leads to another path, needs to another path, and you get lost. Sure. And Young got lost. Young got lost, yeah. And his family had to pull him out of it. No kidding. And he worked on this thing for 16 years.

I like to believe they sent him to a psychiatrist. That would be great. Not a Jungian therapist. No. So what's interesting to me also is that, you know, you obviously alongside of, of, you know, gestating and then kind of manifesting mad God that went on to take, you know, years and years, you, you were, you were kind of doing your job in another way, but engaging the same creative passion, right? Yeah, that was living the dreams of a child out, you know?

So when does that start happening? What's the next search for mentors? Like, who do you go to from a brand? Oh, God, you know, San Diego put me in proximity to Hollywood. You know, I went to the only place that did stop motion work, a special effects company called Cascade Pictures of, you know, Hollywood. Where was that at?

Seward and Romaine. Oh, yeah? Yeah. And you just show up as a kid, or what did you do? Well, I got in there as a 16-year-old. Okay. You know, I mean, I met the guys, and they could see that I had talent. So once I, you know, I started doing some stuff when I was 16, and I went to UC Irvine. What were they working on there?

Pillsbury Doughboy, Charlie Green Giant, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ford, Chrysler commercials, all that stuff. You were there for that? Yeah, yeah. Mrs. Butterworth. Really? Yeah.

So like when she pokes the Pillsbury Doughboy and he goes, hee hee. You saw that happen? I saw it. I was not a proficient animator at that time, so I mostly made models and did sculptures and things like that. Jelly Green Giant, because he was like, he was half human, wasn't he? No, he was all human. He was a guy in a green outfit until it turns into a cartoon.

Hee hee hee. It's so funny, because those are the commercials from my kids from when i was a kid it was a great school because the turnover was really fast you know it was my graduate school you could do this you could do that you could try and we had a great mentor phil kellison ran the place and you know he he let the lunatics loose a lot and we could stay there stay there after hours on the weekend to work on our own projects. So this is when you were in your teens? Probably mostly after I graduated from UC Irvine because I had to deal with the draft. So you went back to that place.

You started there when you were in high school? Right after high school, and you know right after high school i got a few like little kind of gigs but i worked for this guy gene warren uh who was really cheap and he paid me um minimum wage because i was 16 yeah i got like a dollar and 10 cents an hour wow what was he working on Oh, Gene did all kinds of things. They did Projects Unlimited, did the H.G. Wells thing, the time machine, just tons and tons of stuff. Oh, interesting. And then you went to UC Irvine? Went to Irvine to escape the draft. The best thing that ever happened to me, or happened to me there, which was when I arrived,

it coincided with essentially the birth of conceptual art. Okay. And I was just totally taken by it. It was like, you mean you don't have to paint or sculpt, you know, or you can do anything. Installations, performance art.

Anything. Right. Anything. Right. Yeah. And that was a really huge thing. And in relation to the 60s, how much were you engaging with the cultural momentum of that time? Were you going to love-ins or hallucinogenics or any of that stuff? No.

There was nobody that shared my worldview so i just stayed you know in my room what was your worldview monsters it's very specific yeah yeah oh that's interesting but you did but that but i imagine you found like-minded people when he started executing the art, right, in working within the world. Yeah, oh, definitely. I mean, there were only a half a dozen of us that were doing this stuff. Yeah, yeah. Really.

And so it was really easy to pick up gigs and stuff because, you know. So after graduate school, you went to Kellison and that's where you did the Pillsbury Doughboy and stuff? Yeah. And then what happens? Where did you go after that? And what happens? Where'd you go after that? Well, at that point, Dennis Murin and I were working at Cascade and Ken Ralston.

They got hired to do Star Wars. Okay. So that's in the 70s. Now we're in the 70s. The first Star Wars. Yeah. Yeah. And then George wasn't happy with the material he had shot for the cantina scene in England and hired our buddy Rick Baker to pull together a group.

I've interviewed Rick Baker. Yeah. Yeah, he's great. Yeah, I've known him since I was 15 years old. Wow. Yeah. So he hired him for the- Well, he hired Rick and Rick put together a bunch of stop motion animators, out of work

stop motion animators together. Uh-huh. And we built all the costumes and we went to a little um you know insert stage on labrea avenue yeah george directed and carol ballard shot it yeah and uh while we were working there um george would come by every every week uh to check on our progress and he saw that i uh a stop motion puppet that i had made yeah when i was um 20 oh yeah and that gave him the idea to do the chess set in in star wars right he was like well you got two weeks can you make a dozen you know space aliens in two weeks and shoot it and it was

like yeah we did it and spent three nights doing it and staying up all night just shooting the chess board yeah oh man the night crew and that was and that changed it that that was i mean they And spent three nights doing it. Staying up all night just shooting the chessboard? Yeah. Oh, man. The night crew. And that changed it. I mean, they must have felt that the integration of what you do of stop motion into these big pictures again. Did it feel like there was a period there where it seemed like stop motion wasn't happening? Absolutely. Yeah.

I mean, it had kind of petered out. Right. You know, in a way. I mean, and that was just a result of cycles, you know. Sure. Yeah, I've been doing a lot of stop motion work up until then, you know, mostly, you know, props or setting up, you know, different kinds of scenes in different commercial houses. You know, that was, yeah, we were in pig heaven doing that, but we had no idea, you know, that Star Wars was going to become Star Wars until we went to the premiere. Well, what did you think you were working on?

Just some sci-fi movie that- Well, we're always fans of, you know, George Lucas's, you know, from THX and American Graffiti. Yeah. And it was like, you know, well, you know, here's this guy that we, you know, he's not that much older than us. Yeah. And, you know, we have the same, you know, film education as each other. So we can do that, you know, Vulcan mind mill thing. We know exactly what we're talking about.

And, yeah, he was just a really terrific guy. But you had no idea what was going to happen. Well, he had shown us the cantina scene and the chess set. And it was like, wow, this is a movie you always want to work on. Yeah. But not until we got to the premiere. I mean, or it was the cast and crew screening. Uh-huh.

And you were like, what? And the guys at ILM that were smarter than me bought stock in Fox, you know. And I have no idea about that. Me neither. But I have to assume, so you had no idea what the scope of the movie was? Nobody did. You just were working on your thing? Nobody did.

So when you saw it all put together. Only George did. And it was a Herculean task. Nobody understood what the hell he was doing so was your experience watching the completed star wars similar to when you were five seeing a harryhausen thing yeah yeah yeah that but different uh-huh you know uh yeah you saw the future for i guess for a minute you know my mind was spinning i didn't see anything really yeah except you know i wanted to see it again yeah yeah and then what

happens next do you go you go on you make the another movie with him right or do you do stuff in between yeah and then uh you know i went on and did Piranha with Joe Dante and John Davison. What was the job on Piranha? What did you have to do? Make those fish? We made a bunch of rubber fish. And John and, you know, so we shot in the L.A. Swim Stadium and came up with these rigs where we pulled these things underwater and went to San Marcos, Texas and shot there in the giant pond that was the source of the San Marcos River, which was really fucking scary. Yeah.

Because there were huge alligator gar that were like 10 feet long that were there. Wow. And they got those teeth, right? They have huge teeth. Yeah. Yeah. And there were crawdads that were the size of lobster. It was like the Lost

World. It was really fantastic. And water moccasins and all kinds of fun stuff. Those are the scariest things to me, things in the water. And that's where you did the piranha? We did some stuff there, but most of it was in the LA Swim Center. Oh, I remember that. The ones jumping out of the water

and biting off chunks of face. That was probably piranha two or three d yeah all of ours were really cheap they were just all under the water oh it's just flurries of blood yeah bubbles yeah the aqualung bubbles being the bubbling stuff but joe and and john were big fans of stop motion. Uh-huh. So they had me put in like a little character for half a dozen shots or something, you know, and just Dr. Hook's laboratory, Hoke's laboratory. Uh-huh. Evan McCarthy played Dr. Hoke. So how does things change from Star Wars to Empire? Well, during that period, you know, I was working with the associate producer, Jim Bloom, who was down here in L.A.

And I was living in Silver Lake. And, you know, we got into like kind of negotiating and whatnot. And I just said, I don't want to negotiate. Just give me whatever you got and I'll do it. So George hired me to do, there's this character at the opening of Empire, this two-legged kind of dinosaur camel-like thing called Tauntaun. And he asked me to come up with some ideas for it. And so I spent a day just, yeah, it could be this, it could be that, it could be this, it could be that. Picked one and said, can you make a three-dimensional maquette?

And I did. He said, okay, that's it. That's it. Yeah. And that's the way he worked. I found him much more like, he wasn't one of these, he wasn't a micromanager at all. Yeah. He hired people that knew more than he did.

He'd go like, well, no, you're a monster, guys. Make the monster. Yeah. Yeah. And he responded very well to uh three-dimensional things which is what i do so i would make maquettes but instead of having something on paper that he had to interpret or could i see it from another angle you know should we put this you know fin on that leg which like a lot of productions do yeah um he would be able to hold you know like admiral akbar

up and and turn it around and it's like he could see the movie in his head you know right there and then i guess you could as well i mean you picture things three-dimensionally yeah well i have this um apparently it's like a indication of possible autism, where I can, as I'm talking to you, I can't look at you, but I can see, I can imagine a symmetrical box that has no scale to it. And I can turn it red, I can turn it blue, I can turn it white, like that. Oh, I see. And what is a maquette built from? white like that. Oh, I see. And what is a maquette built from? I use this material called Sculpey.

That's a crafts thing that you can get in any art store that, you know, it's a thing that kids can make little sculptures out of and you cook it. It's like clay. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you can cook it and it hardens. So did you, like ever was there ever a point in your life where you thought you know you would be a sculptor i was a sculptor you know i just it was all self-taught you know all this stuff you know right right but you didn't want to do big conceptual art pieces you were you were sculpting as as a collaborator i only did you know conceptual art stuff when I was in college. And I certainly had a great viewport into the art scene. My teachers that became my mentors, my friends Michael Asher and Bastian Otter

and V.S. Ellman were right at the cusp of the conceptual art movement. And they're like, you know, some of the gods of conceptual art. So I got to hang around them. What were they working on? Their own projects. Yeah. You know, and I was-

Because I don't know their work. Like, was it large pieces or was it performative? Mike worked with spaces. Okay. And did different kinds of things ephemeral things things that you wouldn't even know you were there until you spent a little bit of time okay or until somebody told you hey did you feel that there was air going through that place you just passed through oh yeah so he was working right on the edge of perception, perceptual psychology type of stuff.

Boss worked with emotions a lot. How's that? Like how? There's one piece called I'm Too Sad to Tell You. Yeah. And it's a, I don't know if he did a video of it, but there was a still of just him crying. Yeah. And he had written I'm Too Sad to Tell You. Huh.

And there was something going on in his mind. Yeah. You know, that we'll never know. I mean, his dad was a Calvinist preacher that saved a lot of people from the Nazis. Wow. Heavy. And Boss, I think, always kind of felt

that he was never as good as his dad or something like that. He'd done a great thing. And Boss ended up disappearing. Really? You know, in one of his last, a lot of his stuff was about danger. And he would put himself in dangerous situations like riding a bicycle across, atop of a house and falling onto the ground. Right, yeah. Or across, you know, falling into a river or whatnot.

So there was always a self-destructive side to him. And he ended up disappearing. He, in a 14-foot boat, tried to make it across the Atlantic. And they found the boat just floating off the coast of Spain. And a, you know a gas thing blew up and they never found him again. Oh, my God. And so what was your conceptual work like at that time?

It was like I did this thing with video that was just like a pull-up bar that was like seven, eight feet off the ground. And that's all you saw on this black and white video screen was just this horizontal line that cut it. And then I hired, I mean hired, I provoked a bunch of the students at UC Irvine for a contest. Whoever can hang on this bar the longest gets a six-pack of beer.

And it got a long line. And so in the picture, a long line. And so in the picture, the pull-up bar bisects the frame about one-third from the top. And all you see is a hand coming up and it's swinging just like this. And then it drops. And some of the fat people would just be a flash course, the guys, the sports guys won the beer. Sure. And so that was one. And then I did another one that was at UC Irvine. Their spaces were, painting studios were just terrible because they had awful echoes.

They were huge. They were square. Yeah. High ceilings. And so I got, I had a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Yeah. And I got my friends, fellow students, 20-minute tape to say the vowels. Yeah.

A, A, A, A, A for 20 minutes. Yeah. And then go through all the vowels. I did hard and soft. I could have different voices. Uh-huh. But breath would establish the rhythm. And so then I got all of the reel-to-reel tape recorders that I could find at Irvine and got sculpting pedestals and put them in this square space four feet off the wall.

Yeah. And turned them on. Yeah. Depending upon the proximity of where you were to the tape recorder, you know, A would be stronger or U would be stronger, depending upon where you were. And they were all put out in the configuration of a pentagram. But because, and I didn't plan any of this stuff like everything else I do, is like I, in the center of the space space because of the acoustics of the space everything mixed Yeah, and it sounded like some kind of a weird alien or proto human language, you know, yeah, and it was like That was really cool. It's almost like Alchemy

Yeah, like like you you you manifested something through the ritual. Didn't know. Right? Yeah, like a demon. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's wild. And so, you know, everybody thought I had a really great career in art, but just the art scene was not for me, you know. It was just too political.

I'd hang out with Mike Asher and John Baldessari and, you know, those guys. And, you know, they just talked about the art racket. And I saw. It's weird. I dated an artist. It's horrendous. It's like, look, show business is show business, but there's something fundamentally disingenuous about the art world.

Yeah. And then you're alone, you know, and I always like working with people, you know, the team, you know, because I am by default a loner and spend a lot of time alone, which I prefer. But then working with other people makes me civilized. Well, yeah. Yeah. And it's nice to be able to be a collaborator and be part of something bigger than yourself. You don't strike me as a religious man.

No, not overtly. Yeah. But Mad God kind of skewed that way where the other mad god did well yeah in in in regard to it being that hero's journey kind of thing you can't talk think think about it in any other way as like having some kind of you know profound meaning for you i mean it put me in the psych ward for a few days i mean it fucking broke me you know what year was that it was like just about the year that i finished it you know recently oh no this must have been three four years ago when i finished it when you finished mad god yeah

it was right at the right at the tail end. And I still had there, I got other ideas. So I went on, but it, um, yeah, it, um, it really popped my cork. And I was like at this place where, um, totally unbeknownst to me, my friends told me later I was disintegrating. You know, I look like a homeless person, you know, and my- Really? Yeah, my hair was long, I had a huge beard, you know, my clothes were torn and covered with paint. Yeah.

And my hands were all banged up from, you know, working with tools and whatnot. Yeah. And, you know, it was like hunched over and, you know, there were really supplies to, you know, when I heard to you know when i i heard you know they heard me say i hate this i fucking hate working on this you know it's just like getting behind the mule and and you know doing penance and um you know so it was what happened in the psych ward well the food was terrible you, and I stayed away from everybody. Yeah.

But it took me the better part of six weeks to recover. You know, for the first 72 hours, I just sat in front of the TV. And my adrenaline was just going so fast, you know. I just couldn't do anything. And eventually, you know, I'd get up and walk around the room and go out and walk down the block and go around the block. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, I built myself back up. But so this was, but did you experience any of this?

I mean, when did you start working on Mad God? What year was that? It was right after RoboCop 2 in the late 80s. So you were still, like, that was the heyday of what, before I get into this, can you tell me the difference between stop motion and go motion? Stop motion is taking a three-dimensional object and infinitesimally moving it one frame at a time. Right. But when you take that picture, it's a very clear, like a still photograph. Yeah.

But, you know, when you shoot a horse or a human, whatever, that are moving through the frame, you get this characteristic motion blur on it. And so animators have been trying to, you know, affect that for a number of years. But, you know, it was too cumbersome and it wasn't very successful. Yeah. you know it was too cumbersome and this the it wasn't very successful yeah but when we were when the first time i went into ilm dennis and ken were working on the night crew yeah um i saw the motion control you know equipment that john dykstra had developed and it was like you know if you could combine a stop motion puppet with this stuff you you could possibly do it. And so when we moved up to Marin, San Rafael, Ken Ralston and I pulled out,

the only puppet I had at that time was the one that I did from Piranha. Yeah. And we hooked that up afternoon, we shot a test and it worked. So you get a different kind of flow, different kind of continuity. You get motion blur with the thing.

It was very was very very you know just on one axis and um but that went on to a much more elaborate thing for the movie dragon slayer where we essentially made a computerized you know boon roku kind of a puppet thing huh it's so the engineering of this stuff is so much part of it. Technology changes everything. Yeah. And so John Dykstra, what was the machine he had created? It was motion control, primarily for cameras, where you could repeat moves, multiple moves. Oh, I get it.

Okay. But every time the technology changes, the brain has to change. Was the GoMotion, that's what was used basically for Jurassic Park? No, no, no. That was all computer graphics. Oh, my God. That was the first big. ILM had done Young Sherlock and the Terminator movies,

but this was the first time they were able to put you know actual skin on something that looked like a thing okay but so robocop was go motion uh i wasn't working at ilm and they had all the uh the i had my own studio by that time so yeah i didn't have access to that kind of equipment but i i was able to fake it for some shots by stupid ways like you know uh driving like driving a wedge underneath some 2x4s and wiggling the table and stuff like that for certain kinds of things. So because I'm just looking at when you start Mad God, that's like you said 1990?

Around then, yeah. Because that seems to sync up with the with the technology changing yeah right around that time yeah and in in the sense that like because the it seems the big difference between stop motion and go motion and whatever evolved into cgi was that that you you lose the human seams that that that kind of come through like you know there's something still organic and and filmic and that depends on who you are okay doing it yeah you know uh and um i mean for dragon slayer yeah you know because we were working with these 16 axes you know motors yeah uh you know we're driving this. Instead of like sculpting in time and light with stop motion, I had to build up things because they were all in all these axial movers,

axes by axes by axes. Okay. You know, so you had to just completely visualize it in your mind, the performance, and go through and, I mean, it wasn't programming like typing, but they had like these controls that would move the motors around and whatnot. So you're almost one step removed from setting the things up. Not in my mind, but yeah. But in actual tactile engagement.

Yeah. So do you think that for the beginning of Mad God, So do you think that for the beginning of Mad God, did you have a series of visions or imagination around, you know, these almost vignettes, these pieces of this, you know, apocalyptic story? Do you think that some of it was a reaction to almost to that type of creation being left behind? You know, like it seemed like the end of stop, like CGI comes, so stop action, it's sort of like done. Yeah, well, on Jurassic Park, I was over-emotional about it, you know, and the younger computer graphic guys that were coming in

were kind of like the young gunslingers. Sure, sure. And so there was that whole kind of weird vibe going on. And, yeah, I just got, you know, over-emotional. And I got pneumonia. I had to go to bed for a couple of weeks. And so it was up to, you know, my wife, Jules, who ran the company, and Dennis Murin and Craig Hayes,

who designed the ED-209 robots and the Starship Troopers, which just came up with this input device. It was essentially a stop motion animator and an armature that fed into the computer. And so stop motion animators could do that because the computer graphics guys were not up to that level yet. In terms of movement. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, they had done, there was only one place that taught computer graphics, really, in North America, and that was Sheridan in Canada. And so all of those guys were schooled in Disney, you know,

classic animation, squash and stretch and flying logos and all that stuff. But it's a different thing you know there are too many moving parts with putting a creature into a shot uh-huh so by like so do you think that some of it was driven by fuck you no like you know like i'm going to i i will destroy you yeah i have complete control this is my world no where did where'd the uh kernel of it come from well i mean again like

i just have relied and sought out mentors all my life and uh one just happened to cross my path and that you know my wife was in the editorial department of amadeus uh-huh and so we'd go hang out have dinner with uh mealish foreman oh yeah as a young filmmaker i'd ask him if he would give me any advice. He gave me the best advice I ever got, which is what allowed me. I mean, once I kind of got it and started thinking about Mad God, was if you want to take a good shit, you have to eat well. And it was like, you know, I mean, that told me.

That's a Milos Forman quote? Yeah. It's like you take your time with stuff. You let it cook. Yeah. You don't do it on a Hollywood production schedule. Yeah, yeah. You know? You take as many years as you like.

Sure. And unbeknownst to me, I mean, that God took me 30 years to. 30. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. me 30 years to 30 yeah yeah yeah i i shot in the you know late 80s um about three minutes and then realized that the scope and scale was too big and i lost my robocop crew to henry salek that was doing nightmare before christmas and and so i put it to bed yeah but that didn't

stop me thinking about it and what was. And what was it you were trying to, like, in your mind, what is the story? Let me put it this way. Pablo Picasso was asked once in an interview what he was looking for in his paintings. Yeah. He said, I do not seek, I find. Right. And that's what artists do. You know, ask an artist, what are you doing?

It was like, how did I know what was going to happen with those tape projects? Sure. Right. But I guess what I'm asking is is were you thinking in vignettes primarily in terms of like because there's a lot going on it's it's it's quite a hellscape and you know there and there it suggests a lot of things you know none of them necessarily about a bright future or or you know wherever that that put that place is that the film takes place in or number of places.

There's just a lot of machines. There's figures that get smashed, that get burned, that get thrown in holes. Then there's a couple of heroes, these goggled beings. So I guess what I'm asking is, do you think in sort of like, well, I'm going to have these giant metal pylons crushing guys, and I'm going to have a hole, and that's the thought. And then you integrate it after? You know, it's like a combination of a whole bunch of things, depending upon what comes to me at the moment.

You know, initially, starting with those first three minutes, then the next 20 years where I just didn't let it go. I have no idea why I didn't, but between gigs and on the weekends and whatnot, I do storyboards, design characters. Uh-huh. And we just start building the,

up this idea. And, um, I was able to get based on the first three, you know, um, minutes. Yeah.

Uh, you know, I, I produced a, I got did a kickstarter and produced another um uh but you know 15 minutes or so did you ever try to get you know on the you know showbiz financing no no i've been through that plenty of times before and i'd always gotten with things that i tried to make conventional, the 1,000-yard stare after like five seconds from the studio. It'd be hard to pitch this one.

Well, all of my stuff, John Davison and Neumeier informed me that all my stuff was art damaged. What does that mean? Art movies don't make money. Yeah, right. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Art movies don't make money. Yeah, right.

Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So because like, as I said before, there is something about, like it really is an art movie. And it really is a masterpiece of what you do, I think, in that form. And what's amazing is that you have all of these things. What's amazing is that you have all of these things, and when you try to focus on what they're made of or what the construction is, they all bring out human feelings, which is, I guess, the effect that you want. That through all of it. I guess. Even all the figures.

When you see a figure that is barely human get thrown in a burning hole, you have a human response to it. That's funny. Yeah. It is funny. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just the ongoing, the never endingness of it.

Yeah. Yeah. But when you began that first three minute one, did you see, we've talked about Joseph Campbell and about Jung here and about the hero's journey. What was the journey? Were you able to identify or were you just sort of flying blind and just reacting to your vision? Again, go back to other artists. When you look at the equivalent of reviews with Bach, Beethoven, or Mozart. Yes. You know, when they're asked how they do their thing, they say, I just transcribe it, you know?

Yeah. And it comes from God, you know? And it was like that. It was, yeah, okay. Yeah. It was just like there was a tuning fork that, like, you know, kind of tuned me in. You know, I was just following. Did it stay constant or come in and out over 30 years?

It was so slow you know i couldn't you know because the process of making it is slow right by default right so did you have the full vision and then you have to spend time absolutely not no but with any piece of it did you have to because it seems to me that like you'll have these these pieces of it and then you got to spend what six months making it well it depended because I did have these three minutes of material that were kind of parts of it that were spread out before I actually had a narrative. It doesn't really have a story per se, but... It's movement. Well, it's got a through line

to it, but not a conventional narrative. Right. And so I took some of these first images that I did, you know, years ago and I was archiving them. And some of the guys at my studio, they were inspired by watching the making of Star Wars and RoboCop and stuff, wanted to do that kind of stuff and light miniatures and stuff with real lights and you know that era had long gone and yeah computer graphics artists and they saw me you know um laboring away well no you know archiving this three minutes yeah and they go what the hell is that you know and they thought it was some long lost, you know, something or other. Oh, yeah, right. And so they got really excited and they offered to do a shot.

And so I rebuilt one of the crumbling puppets, the main character that we call the assassin. Uh-huh. And I showed them to, you know, here's how I build a set. Yeah, yeah. Here's how I light it and, you know, go for how I build a set. Yeah, yeah. Here's how I light it. And, you know, go for it. And they did a really good shot. And it just went on from there. Can we do another one?

Sure. So they're having a good time. Oh, they're in pig heaven. Yeah. Yeah. And I would give talks at, like, local Pacific Film Archive. And students, you know, college and high school students would volunteer

and I would get as many as 15 people on Saturdays, you know. To work. Yeah. And so I would spend Sundays figuring out all the processes because a lot of these people never used an X-Acto blade

before in their lives and they found out really quick. Yeah, yeah. And so I'd figure out the process do this first do the second do the third and um yeah we just did it like that so i imagine there's a lot of people like a whole generation of people that had this experience with you you know working on this you know this this epic vision you had that would never have gotten the opportunity to do that kind of work before. It probably changed their entire perception.

Well, yeah, I mean, but it starts like this. It starts with, you know, 15 people. Sure. And of course, you know, it's just like, it shrinks down to, you know, between 10 and a half a dozen. And there was one set, you know, where the assassin is driving his car.

It's like a German command car through these mountains of dead army guys. Yeah. And that was like thousands and thousands of little 36 scale army men. Yeah. That I showed these guys, we do this, you do that, you build this and you build that and you melt these army guys and you put it on it. That set took three years to make. Oh, my God. Yeah.

So you bought army guys and melted them? Tons of them. Bags and bags of army men. Which I always loved doing as a kid. Yeah. Melting army men? Yeah. So at what point do you, like, go into the final,

you know, the last stages of mad god i mean like because like if it took 30 years and obviously you're telling me that some of these sets take a year to build or more right so and it was stop and go right so like what made you kind of like i gotta fucking finish this. Passion. Yeah. In the worst sense. I was suffering. And when you finished it, did you were you did you get any relief or just go right to the hospital? No, I mean, there was, you know, the man, go right to the hospital? No. I mean, there was, you know, the mad God was never done, you know.

Sure. It seemed it could go on forever. Well, you know, it's like, you know, any artist is a great story of, you know, I don't want to go off track, but you're just never done, you know. Sure. And you work right up to the wire and I had to get kicked off of it done you know sure and uh you work right up the wire and i had to get kicked off of it i'd you know by who producers you know mad god well producers on mad god where i was the producer of it yeah and i didn't that meant i didn't have to listen to anybody about money sure you know and, but producers came in

when it came to marketing and all of that stuff and making sure that it would get to Shudder at the right time so that this would happen. And, and so, yeah, up until like, you know, what was it, the cutoff date, the sound designers, I was so lucky to get um dan wool who i'd met through alex cox and and richard begs is that guy still around alex cox he was in mad god he was the only human character in it it was kind of a flashback in the middle of the thing yeah where there's this castle being

attacked by zombies oh yeah and he's the guy in the castle. Oh, okay, okay. Wow. Okay. So we've been friends for years and tried to develop stuff. And he'd work with a composer, Dan Wohl, who mostly did kind of Sergio Leone-type things for him because he liked to make, Alex liked to make like these Western kind of things.

Sure. I discovered that Dan was a lot more kind of experimental like I am. Yeah. And more ambient and was willing to take these huge risks. And I had the bass player, Klaus Floride, that was the bass player for the Dead Kennedys trying to do some stuff. And it was just too much on the nose.

And, but Dan works with, you know, a lot of like counterpoint and is much more artistic. And then I was just like, you know, again, through Alex, was able to rope in Richard Beggs, you know, the sound designer who goes back to Apocalypse Nowadays Academy academy awards and it was like they just saw this unique thing that was like you know if you guys do it i won't bug you at all you know i don't know what you do i you know i don't micromanage people at all sure and if we're

spotting something i go like yeah it'd be kind of you know i'd like this and like that like that you know but do your version of it. And that was about it. And it all came together. Yeah. So after it's done, after you wrap it, and it's gone off to Shudder, is that a horror network primarily?

Yes. And this is not a horror film. No. But this is where it's going to go. It ain't going to go on Netflix. Right. But are you doing any theatrical screenings? Yeah.

I just saw the list today and there's a shitload of them. Because I think that would be amazing to see it like that. I just loved it. I loved the budget. Where did you see it? Is it a screener? Yeah, screener. Oh, you got to see it big.

I know. It was built for the big screen. Yeah. Yeah, I got to do that. So like after everything's done, what's the window of time before you got to go to the hospital? I wasn't done, you know? So I just had to get better and then I could start kind of fresh again, you know? Yeah.

And go like, oh, no, I need to do this. This will make, if I do this, this will make a lot more sense. Did they tell you anything you didn't know about yourself at the hospital? Was there a diagnosis? Was there? No. No, just like cracked up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So now with, did you have any? Oh, well, no. There is a side to that. And I actually, after I had cracked up, I was working on some other stuff that I wanted to do. And it was like, it was the scene where these two children, blonde haired children, come in as terrorists and they set a bomb, and they blow up this wall. Yeah. And so, you know, I was like, oh, I need to motivate the city blowing up, so I've got to do this. And I built this big wall and, you know, started, oh, I'm going to, you know, do a Jasper Johns on this wall.

Sure. No. You know, the next day I come in, I'm going to do a Jasper Johns on this wall. Sure. No. The next day I come in, I'm going to do Robert Rausch. No. Next day, it's going to be Ed Kienholz. No. And then I would just keep building this stuff out. And I was like, okay, it's enough today.

I'm going to go home. And it was like, open the door, the stage. And it was like, oh, I forgot my it's like oh i forgot my you know wallet and you go back in and you walk past this thing and you go like oh you know what and then like two hours later you're still there working on it over and over and over and you know i i realized you know what this is not normal you know yeah for a human being but I existed this way all of my life. And so I went home and looked up, went online and looked up bipolar and it was like every tick mark.

Oh, no shit. Yeah. Yeah. And they call up a psychiatrist and I am diagnosed as unipolar. I don't get depressed unless there's a really fucking good reason to get depressed. But I'm manic. And that's what blew my gasket. Sure.

Really. Yeah. Yeah. It was I just could not stop. Yeah. You know? Yeah. And the only way I could stop myself was by self-medicating with alcohol.

Yeah. Which did not help, you not help my brain popping. Yeah. But I just had to, at the end of the day, put brakes on. But now there's medication that deals with that really successfully. Nice. Leveled you off a bit. Yeah.

Yeah. And I can actually control it. I can kind of play it. That's great. In that I can feel it coming on in the morning. You take it. OK. And the afternoon I can feel it.

And I've kind of moved into a new deal. I one of the things that happened at the end of Mad God was bang. I lost all interest in making things with my hands. Well, and I and I prolifically dream. What? And I prolifically dreamed. I was a prolific dreamer, and I used the dreams to help me figure out the Mad God narrative, because there was a narrative to a bunch of my dreams. Yeah.

Although oblique, but it really did inform me about, you know, cinematically, how to construct the thing. Yeah. And that, you know, my intention or design such as it was, was to make these shots that were so detailed that there was no way you could really encompass the whole of it. Yeah. In the, you know, three or four seconds that it was on before the next shot that had so much shit in it was, it cancel that out right the best way i could think of affecting a dream yeah it's like just to stay in this moment like everywhere you look is a whole other possible world yeah or you're just like drug along right right right right so uh yeah that was that was intentional yeah yeah so like it's interesting

when you look back on that method of working, that sort of, you know, compulsive, like, you know, not landing on things but putting everything in. You know, that's sort of a kind of testament to the manic imagination. Yeah, yeah. Definitely. It is. I had no idea. I've been that way all my life. That's exciting.

Have you seen the movie Tim's Vermeer? Yeah, I did see that, yeah. You know, remember the scene he gets to this point where he just like throws down his whatever he's doing. Yeah.

And he goes, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. I hate this. This is worse than being in a bad marriage. Yeah, I mean, that's where I was at with this thing.

Yeah. Oh, man, I'm glad it's out of you. It's like an exorcism. Yeah, I would never do it again. Well, you might's out of you. It's like an exorcism. Yeah. I would never do it again. Well, you might not have 30 years. I don't want to be negative.

Well, exactly. Yeah. No, but I've got a, I've got, well, I wouldn't call it a sequel. Oh, yeah. Well, no. I mean, it can't be. Yeah. It's like.

Is this the happy ending? Yeah. Well, hopefully. I mean, one of my mentors was Tex Avery. Oh, great. Yeah. And so I worked with him on commercials and stuff. Oh, did you?

And he would show me how to work dummy sheets and stuff like that. So I went this next thing in the 60s. A college buddy of mine and I were smoking dope. And I don't even remember what it was, a story or whatnot, a character. They were smoking dope. And I don't even remember what it was, a story or whatnot, a character. But we came up with this word, this whatever it was, term, Pequins Pendequin, P-E-N-D-I-Q-U-I-N-S, apostrophe S, P-E-N-D-I-Q-U-I-N. And I have no idea what it was. But it just stuck with me, you know, since college.

And so Pequin is a character, and I want it to be more like a 1940s, you know, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones kind of... Cartoon? No, stop motion thing, you know, like Mad God. Oh, yeah. But, you know, they say the canary sings one song. And so, you know, I'll try and I'll be good. I'll make a version of it.

If anybody lets me, that will have gore and stuff in it. But I'll design it in such a way that that can be cut out. So it can be presented. Because I've got to look for money. These things cost a lot of money. So yeah, we'll see. money sure these things cost a lot of money so um yeah we'll see and do you since you've sort of gotten a handle on the the mental thing do you uh or do you um what how's your your like because it feels that mad god as funny and and dark and and uh uh i just like all that there's all this like you know decay and

goop and things but it's bleak you know it's the zeitgeist sure of today yeah you know you can't avoid the void right right so this sequel in your head is it

oh it's much more playful you know it's very hopefully a little bit no it's pretty boilerplate you know it's it's really a hero's journey oh good yeah well i mean i i tell you i just i as a guy who doesn't uh you know i'm not a sci-fi nerd or an animation guy i really enjoyed it and i and i and it felt like a deep rich, you know, it felt like a life's work kind of thing. Yeah. And it resonated with me. I couldn't take my eyes off it.

Thanks. Oh, I appreciate that. I mean, I was a nervous wreck when it was premiered in Switzerland at Locarno. and the composer Dan Wool and I would, our hobby was to sit at the back of theaters and watch how many people would walk out. Yeah. And we had just no idea. I was like really nervous,

and we sat at the back, and there was a mom and dad and a seven-year-old and a five-year-old and a little blonde boy, and I told the mom, you know, I wouldn the mom, you know, I wouldn't bring my kids to see this. Yeah.

And then, like, it wasn't more than, like, you know, 30 seconds in, you know, they got up to leave and she said, you were right. And we're like, yeah, it gets worse. How did it go over, though, in general? Oh, God, it just took off. Really? Great.

Yeah, it was just exponential, you know, and it just took off really great yeah it was just um exponential you know and it just hasn't stopped i mean it's it's found its audience i have no idea if there's a bigger audience except i do have some faith that you know because of the state of things and the so-called content which is just hot air. Yeah. It means nothing. Sure. That if you make something unique, you know, if you build a better mousetrap, the world will, you know, beat a path to your door. Sure.

And we'll see. Yeah. I have no idea. Yeah. And we'll get, I'll get those, the theatrical release dates and stuff. And yeah, it was great talking to you. It really was. Yeah, it was fun. I appreciate you. I yeah, it was great talking to you. It really was. Yeah, it was fun.

I appreciate you coming. I, you know, time just flew by. Cool, man. And I knew all the answers. Yeah, it's all you. Thanks, Phil. Okay. That was me and Phil Tippett.

Again, the film, Mad God, is streaming on Shudder, which you can subscribe to on its own or as part of AMC+. It starts streaming June 16th, but there's going to be a theatrical release starting this week, Friday, June 10th. Screenings all over the country. Go to madgodmovie.com. Here's some guitar.

I keep doing it Thank you. guitar solo Thank you. Boomer lives. Monkey. Lafonda. Cat angels everywhere, man. Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly, host of Under the Influence. Recently, we created an episode on cannabis marketing. With cannabis legalization, it's a brand new challenging marketing category. And I want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I talk to an actual cannabis producer. I wanted to know how a producer becomes licensed, how a cannabis company competes with big corporations, how a cannabis company markets its products in such a highly regulated category,

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