Over the years, i've travelled through time, breathed life back into dinosaurs and blown up entire planets. Today, i work at Industrial light&magic, but my interest in special effects goes back to my childhood. I remember seeing the alien in The War Of The Worlds zap some soldiers with a ray gun and i thought to myself, "i want to do that". My father had a home movie camera and i filmed my brother pretending to be a soldier. Then i filmed some firework exploding. My mum went crazy when she saw it, but my dad thought it was really funny and that was all the encouragement i needed. I finally got into the film business in the 70s. Stanley Kubrick had amazed everybody with his beautiful film 2001:A space Odyssey and i found myself working on a similar film for a young guy called George Lucas. He kept talking about robots or swords made out of light, and superfast spaceships, and i kept saying "sure, George, but how are we going to make it?" Well, in the end we found a way and star wars a massive blockbuster. We made two more star wars films, and i had a great time working on the Indiana Jones movies, but them along came Jurassic park in1993 and that changed everything.
Computer animation had been around for a long time, but now we could make any kind of creature we wanted. Suddenly, it seemed like every film had to have computer generated imaging and i think some people forgot that films still need imagination. I enjoy films like the lord of the rings trilogy because they've got drama and emotion as well as great special effects, bug my kids like computer animated films like Shrek. Sometimes i try to imagine what kind of films they'll be watching when they're older, but then i look back at how far we've already come. Who could have dreamed any of this would really happen?