If Hollywood were Camelot, Dennis Muren, ASC would surely be a natural for the role of Merlin. His peers in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences have nominated this modern master of illusion and visual slight-of-hand for 13 Oscars and Special Achievement Awards. Muren received top honors for The Abyss, Innerspace, E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, Jurassic Park, Terminator2: Judgement Day, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Other Oscar nominations include Dragonslayer, Willow, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and Young Sherlock Holmes. The pair of Special Achievement awards came about for the two Star Wars sequels: The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. He also holds four British Academy Awards and a fifth nomination from BAFTA.

Though Muren’s career remains a work-in-progress, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce has seen enough of his wizardry to make its assessment. Last May, Muren became the first visual effects artist with a star on Hollywood Boulevard. With rare exceptions, this tribute is a milestone reserved for seasoned movie celebrities who spend their lives in the limelight.

Except for brief forays on international TV when Oscars are handed out, Muren has spent his career in relative obscurity.

The public sees great performances by actors, talented directors are lionized, but the mark of a great visual effects artist is to not leave a fingerprints on film. Their purpose is to expand the visual story-telling palette by enabling the director to do the impractical or impossible with live-action camerawork.

Muren is the sixth Guild member whose achievements have been recognized with a star on Hollywood’s Walk-of-Fame, and only the second in contemporary times. His colleagues include Haskell Wexler, ASC, Leon Shamroy, ASC, J. Peverell Marley, ASC, Hal Mohr, and Ray Hunnahan.

Muren was born and raised on the outskirts of Los Angeles in La Canada, California. As a pre-teenager, he has vivid memories of watching The War of the Worlds, King Kong and other fantasy films. From early on, he recalls being mesmerized by the magical effects wrought by Ray Harryhausen. His parents gave him a still camera and encouraged their young son to explore the boundaries of his imagination. Muren photographed drawings of spaceships and dinosaurs, and tried to figure out a means of animating them. "When I was 10, I got a Keystone 8mm camera, and began shooting the same things in motion," he recalls. "I didn’t have a projector, only an editing viewer. That didn’t matter. I was fascinated by the process of making films. My parents gave me a 16mm camera when I was 14, and I began experimenting with split-screen, stop-motion and other effects techniques I saw in Ray Harryhausen’s films."

Muren’s interests were encouraged by Phil Kellison, a neighbor who worked for a visual effects company. When Kellison brought Muren for a studio visit, the young man witnessed the creation of illusions for Jack the Giant Killer, courtesy of the Howard A. Anderson Co, with Kellison supervising process photography.

Muren enrolled at Pasadena City College, where he took business classes to satisfy his parents’ concerns about the slim career possibilities in filmmaking. During his freshman year, Muren produced and photographed Equinox, a sci-fi film whose characters included an ape-like monster and various winged beings. He received help from people he met through Kellison, including stop-motion guru Jim Danforth (When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth).

Most of the $8,000 it cost to produce Equinox came from Muren’s savings, though some friends also invested in his dream. Muren sold Equinox to an independent distributor who added 40 minutes of content, and made a 35mm blowup, which premiered at a cinema on Hollywood Blvd. Equinox was subsequently distributed around the country.

Muren continued his education at Cal State Los Angeles. After graduation, he brought his resume and high hopes to the effects departments at various studios, believing that his success with Equinox would open doors. In reality, it was probably easier to break out of jail than into a Hollywood studio in those days. Muren kept his dream alive by freelancing as a visual effects supervisor on industrial films and commercials. During the early Seventies, he worked at Cascade, a TV commercial production house in Hollywood.

"We didn’t have money for experimentation or specialized equipment," says Muren. "We created low-tech effects with stop-motion techniques like Ray Harryhausen used in Mighty Joe Young. We made models out of hot glue and clay, and designed shots with light, camera angles, the choice of lenses and movement. It was a great experience. Phil Kellison was managing the department, and there were six to eight of us whom he would allow to stay long after hours and experiment on our own.

"I heard John Dykstra [ASC] was organizing a visual effects team for a space film with a new director," he continues. "I had met John briefly when a friend arranged for me to visit EEG [Entertainment Effects Group], Doug Trumbull’s company. I called and asked if I could show him my reel. That’s how I came to work on Star Wars."

That was in July, 1975, and no seasoned Hollywood veterans such as ASC members Linwood Dunn or Bill Abbott existed on the team of Industrial Light & Magic. Its original visual effects crew consisted of around 50 relative neophytes: modelmakers; matte painters; creature-makers; optical and rotoscope specialists; animators; camera operators; people with machine shop skills; and a few computer whiz kids. The shell of an abandoned warehouse in Van Nuys, California became homebase for ILM. A handful of vivid drawings by illustrator Ralph McQuarrie were the artist’s main visual reference. Dykstra hired Muren and Richard Edlund, ASC, as the camera operators for motion-control shots; Muren worked at night and Edlund handled the day shift.

Shooting effects for Star Wars was a brave new world for Muren. The VistaVision camera was controlled by a computerized stepper motor which allowed for repeatable moves. In one scene, four X-Wing fighters flying above the Death Star soar towards camera, and peel away at the last moment. By programming subtle differences in movements, Muren lent each pilot a unique personality. The distinct elements were seamlessly composited with an optical printer.

In the final assault, a single X-Wing fighter races through a trench along the Death Star’s perimeter, avoiding flashes of laser beams attempting to obliterate it. Muren used the motion-control device to create the visual tension associated with handheld shots.

After completing his work on Star Wars, Muren got an opportunity to work with Trumbull, who was completing effects for Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

"I had admired Doug’s work since I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey. He put me to work in the backroom on the Mothership sequence; it lasted about five months" Muren says. "Doug is a genius. We’d have a problem. He’d look around for 30 seconds, and tell us how to turn it into a great shot. Steven [Spielberg] often came to talk about what we were doing. It was a terrific experience, working on those films during a one-and-a-half-year period."

By then, Dykstra had organized Apogee at the old ILM facility, and he was producing effects for the TV series Battlestar: Galactica. Muren worked with Dykstra on three episodes. Then, Lucas invited him to join the ILM team being assembled in San Rafael, California, to create effects for The Empire Strikes Back.

Those first steps taken some 20 years ago marked the beginning of a journey that subsequently put Muren in the front ranks of the digital revolution. He soon progressed from motion-control cameraman to visual effects supervisor to his current title of senior effects supervisor. Countless memorable highlights have marked his career, including the pseudopod in The Abyss, the synthetic characters in Casper and Jurassic Park, the morphing in Willow and Terminator 2, and virtual environments, digital compositing and image enhancement in those and other landmark films.

ICG: In retrospect, how important were the years you spent at Cascade?

MUREN: Incredibly important, because I learned about lighting and film aesthetics. It also kept my spirits up because I was working with and meeting other people who had similar hopes. I felt I wasn’t chasing some obscure dream.

Were you really confident that you had a career in this business?

MUREN: No. I thought I could get commercial work, but there weren’t a lot of effects films and there was no way to get on a studio film if you weren’t in the Guild. I had applications at different studios. One day, I called Art Cruikshank, at Disney, to see if anything was happening. He was very honest about the lack of work and the closed shop. He also told me that in all the years he was doing this work, no one had ever asked to be his apprentice. That was depressing. It made me wonder if there was a future in visual effects.

How did you learn about Star Wars?

MUREN: I heard that George [Lucas] was talking about making a space film, but a couple of veteran effects people who met with him said he was just going to shoot some models, shake the camera and do the rest in editing. They were very skeptical, so I figured it was just talk. Cascade was selling some equipment, and I sold a camera to Robby Blalack. I found out later it was for Star Wars. I heard that most of the effects people being hired came from the Robert Abel [& Associates] commercial shop, and some had worked on 2001. They all had motion-control experience. I called John [Dykstra] and asked if I could show him my reel. I had some stop-motion photography on it, and he thought that was applicable to the motion-control shots they were planning. He said, all you had to do was understand movement in a non-real time. He was right.

MUREN: You had to be a specialist in Hollywood. I liked making models, but I wasn’t good at it. I also liked lighting, and decided that the cameraman was the last person who had a say in a shot. I liked that.

MUREN: I learned that you have to understand that the greatest effects shot in the world is no good if it doesn’t fit into the scheme of the whole film. I am always preaching that to crews. We are part of a team.

MUREN: No. When George [Lucas] invited me to come up north, it wasn’t an easy decision. I had to leave my friends and family behind, and it took me out of the loop in Los Angeles, where there was steady work on Galactica and Buck Rogers. The Empire Strikes Back was a two-year project, and I didn’t know what would follow it. But, George said that we were going to do things that hadn’t been done before, and I wanted to help.

Do you think Harryhausen got the recognition he deserved?

MUREN: He is beginning to get recognition, but I don’t think he did back then. His concepts were great, but the public could see strobing and other artifacts, and that distracted them. I learned that the hard way. We had a lot of stop-motion in The Empire Strikes Back. When we saw the preview cards there were a few sequences that the audience didn’t like. One was a shot George wanted of a Taun-Taun [the beast that Luke Skywalker rides while on the ice planet Hoth] running off into the distance. A helicopter flies over him and looks straight down. Originally, Phil Tippett and I both thought it was a great shot. But, we finally realized we were playing to much larger audiences [than Harryhausen films] with higher expectations. The problem was that we were marrying different moving elements. We invented something that we called a Go-Motion Figure Mover which solved one problem and won a Technical Academy Award.

How did you feel about the changes made during the restoration of the original Star Wars trilogy?

MUREN: It didn’t bother me, because we fixed some things that we would have done better if we had more time when we made the original films. We have also learned a lot about motion-control software since we made the original Star Wars films. We made aesthetic and technical improvements, but we didn’t change camera angles or maneuver the spaceships in ways that weren’t consistent with the rest of the film. Besides, the original versions weren’t destroyed. They still exist and are accessible to film historians.

After The Abyss, you took a sabbatical. What was that about?

MUREN: It was an incredibly important decision for me. We had just completed The Abyss, and I needed to get deeper into the soul of what we were doing with computers. There was a new book called Principles of Computer Graphics. Every day, I’d go to the same coffee house in Marin County and read it until I finally realized that CG is just a different way of solving problems. I needed to really get comfortable with looking at a computer monitor and visualizing what the film was going to look like. I got a Macintosh at home, and an early version of PhotoShop from John Knoll [an ILM visual effects supervisor, and co-developer of PhotoShop] before it was available to the public.

Did something specific motivate your interest in computers?

MUREN: When I spoke to people who were savvy about computers, their eyes would glaze over, and they would give me simplistic answers, because they thought I could never understand what they were saying. They’d say, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll take care of it.’ I had to learn on my own. I realized that CG is like molding images out of clay. You don’t have to work in linear fashion or sequentially. You can grab any part of an image and move it around. You can do image processing, and you can do 3-D digital work to create characters who don’t have to follow the laws of physics.

How does this affect cinematographers and crews?

MUREN: You can be more artful in postproduction, and if you know what you’re doing, you can speed up production realizing that there are things you can fix later on. The danger is that you don’t want to get sloppy and figure you can fix everything in post. It is important for cinematographers to understand the tools and the options available to them and to use them wisely.

What are the differences between 2-D and 3-D digital effects?

MUREN: CG [computer graphics] or 3-D is like working with digital clay. You design a model for a character with numbers and a graphic pen. You can build shapes, look at them from different angles and perspectives, and manipulate them without limitations except those imposed by the script. It can be an interactive process with the director and art director looking at what you are doing on a computer monitor.

How about 2-D effects?

MUREN: That covers making digital composites, color grading, wire removal and replacement, and image processing to alter all or parts of shots and scenes. Say you shot an exterior scene on a hazy day, so the sky in that shot is a pale blue. You can change the color of the sky without altering any other blues in the same shot. It can be a terrific tool for the director and cinematographer.

Is it essential for cinematographers to understand digital technology?

MUREN: You can make movies without digital effects. We have been doing that for 100 years, and that style of filmmaking is not going to go away. But, if you are working on a movie where the director wants to do a wire-removal shot or replace an overcast sky, it is an advantage to have a working knowledge of digital technology. Hopefully, that knowledge gives the cameraman more control over the final look.

One of the landmarks that is frequently cited in the evolution of this technology is the pseudopod in The Abyss. That was still very early in Jim Cameron’s career, and he said at the time that you gave him exactly what he envisioned.

MUREN: He described a snake-like projection with a surface that constantly undulated with a random, rippling effect. He wanted it to have the texture of water. Our animators designed a snake-lit tube with a rounded head. The pod had an imaginary spine which was a line through the center that we used to connect pivot points. By manipulating the points, we were able to create the movements he envisioned. We built the pseudopod in 3-D computer space, and composited it with 2-D images of background plates shot on film. We created 3-D dimensional models of the background plates, and that helped us match the angles, movement and focal length of the images recorded on film with the camera. The most challenging part was creating the rippling effects that made the water snake seem real. That took a combination of software, animation and timing, and an understanding of how to mix refraction and reflection of light on a moving object. Aesthetic sensibilities were as important as the use of digital technology.

Has the digital age evolved faster than you expected?

MUREN: When we completed Terminator 2, I felt that the tools were there, and I expected that more directors would see the advantages of CG and digital compositing without matte lines. But, it didn’t really catch on until after Jurassic Park. Now, film schools offer visual effects classes, and we are getting a generation of young people coming into the job market who understand how to use the tools.

Do they also have a film aesthetic and does it matter?

MUREN: Some do. Some don’t. It helps to have that aesthetic. Even if you are only working on a four-second shot, you have to understand why it needs to be lit a certain way. You also need to understand camera movement. It took me a while to realize this is different than live-action, where they typically don’t use most of what you shoot. We don’t have that luxury, so we need to think deeply and understand each shot in the context of the scene. Every frame has to be perfect, and it has to look seamless.

As it becomes easier to change images in postproduction, what happens to the vision of the cinematographer, art director and costume designer?

MUREN: I hope it becomes more collaborative, but the danger is that the studio or producer is not going to want to pay the art director or cameraman to be there in post. It depends on the production company. It helps if you are a Vittorio Storaro, ASC, and you have a reputation as an artist with impeccable taste.

Do you think that comes from innate talent or experience?

MUREN: There are many things you can learn from experience and by simply watching the people who are working around you and your peers. But, you also need to discover your own style, so it comes naturally without too much thought. The great cinematographers instinctively know what to do and how to do it. They aren’t afraid to be daring and take chances, but they also don’t forget this is the director’s medium.

How do you define the role of a visual effects supervisor at ILM?

MUREN: The way I see it, it is my responsibility to represent the director’s interests. That means I have to get inside his mind and understand his vision ù it’s a cerebral function. You work with the director to design the shots û if they want you to. You also work with the art department and the special effects team to solve practical problems. You have to make certain the photography done by the cinematographer and visual effects shots are a perfect match. You are responsible for how the effects shots are done, how long it takes, and what it costs. You are also responsible for creating effects that no one has seen before. It has to be better than the last film, because that’s what the audience expects. It is a conceptual and a problem-solving job. You need technical knowledge and a willingness to trust your instincts and make decisions at a gut level.

How do you get inside a director’s mind?

MUREN: It was tough for me getting into George’s mind during the original Star Wars. I remember trying to figure out how fast he wanted the spaceship to move. It isn’t easy describing how to get inside someone’s mind. It is different with every director. If you don’t have good communication, it’s much more of a struggle.

Do you think synthetic characters will replace actors?

MUREN: I think we’ll see more CG characters which can emulate the emotions of real actors, though the idea that you can replace actors with CG characters is totally goofy. You create synthetic characters which do things actors can’t do, and you can give them unique personalities, but you can’t replace what comes from inside an actor.

Do you think that someday you will be scanning film of actors into a computer and recreating them as digital thespians?

MUREN: I’m really more interested in creating new characters. There has got to be a reason that serves the story if you’re going to bring a dead actor back to life. You can do it, but it won’t be easy or cheap getting a digital character to act and look like a familiar actor with expressions and body language we recognize. Then, you have to ask if there is a reason why it wouldn’t make more sense for Rick Baker to do it with makeup and a real actor. This topic is just not a compelling challenge for me.

What about virtual environments? Do you believe entire movies will be shot with actors performing in front of blue or greenscreens?

MUREN: Technically it can be done, and there are films which can be made in virtual environments, but I don’t think it will become routine. There is something unique about the emotions that come from actors in real environments responding to light.

The sale of big screen home theaters is booming, and more and more films are now accessible to consumers at home. Given that trend, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of the cinema?

MUREN: I believe that as long as we give them great films, the cinema will be a social experience which will attract audiences. We need a boost like the ones the industry got with the inventions of sound and color. Maybe it will be 3-D, if we can somehow get rid of those glasses. The IMAX 3-D films I’ve seen really make a strong impression. It was like seeing King Kong when I was a kid. They are building a couple of new screens in the Bay Area, and I’m looking forward to that.

Will the technology ILM used on The Phantom Menace become accessible and affordable for independent producers working on low budget films?

MUREN: Yes, but I believe the real goal is the need to be constantly moving forward and finding new ways to tell better stories with more and fresher aesthetic values.

Is the cost of technology, computers and memory coming down, and how will that affect the future of filmmaking?

MUREN: Those things are already happening û in fact, you could say they’ve happened. But, we still need more speed, cheaper memory and software that are easier for more people to use. You don’t need a knowledge of Unix to write software for effects shots today and that allows you to tap a bigger talent pool.

Do you envision digital capture replacing film?

MUREN: I recently saw a digital still camera with phenomenal resolution, color space and highlight and shadow details, and it only cost $500, so there is steady progress being made. I love film, and I think it will be there at least the next 10, 20 or 30 years, but who can really predict what will happen that far out into the future? In some ways, I’m surprised there aren’t more Betacam and Hi-8 movies in cinemas now, but years ago, when Eclair came out with a portable 16mm camera, people said that was the future. It is human nature in our society to think new technology has the answer to every problem. But, when you come right down to it, people want to make big movies on big sets and at real locations with real actors, because that is how they see their stories being told.

How will all of this affect the careers of younger people in the Guild who are still in the early stages of their careers?

MUREN: Back in the days of silent films, before there were motors on cameras, the ability to turn the crank at the right speed was an important part of the job. It didn’t diminish the role of the cinematographer when that aspect of the job went away. You need to always be aware of new developments in technology, so you can use those tools. Your technical knowledge will always be valuable, but what you really bring to the picture is an aesthetic that helps the director tell his story.

Do you have a lot of young people asking you for advice about the future, or who want to apprentice with you?

MUREN: Oh yeah, all the time. I try to give them as much help as I can. There are always people I’m working with at ILM. I tell young people who contact me to keep taking film classes, to shoot and learn as much as they can, and study computers, so people can’t tell them, ‘You won’t understand this,’ and study art, because what will help them the most is their aesthetic ability.

Do you still have unrealized dreams? Do you secretly want to become a director, or are there effects movies you want to make?

MUREN: If somebody came to me with a really interesting project, and asked if I wanted to direct it, I don’t know what I would say. It would depend on the project, and what I thought I could bring to it. But, that’s not something I’m really pursuing. I’ve been blessed by the opportunity to work with really terrific directors, and I’ve always felt that it is my responsibility to figure out how I can help them tell better stories. I really enjoy doing this work, and how many people can say that about their jobs?

If you could pick your next project, what would it be?

MUREN: It is the story and the point of view of the director which makes a project interesting to me. If someone came in here and told me they wanted to make a film about the phone book from a point of view that no one has seen before, I might find that interesting. Do you know what I mean? It isn’t a particular genre that makes a film interesting. It’s the story and the director’s point-of-view.