The Filmumentaries Podcast

A long one, this, and a rambling one. We go off down a lot of side roads. But stick with it, because very few conversations I’ve recorded cover this much ground in visual effects history from someone who was in the room for it.|

Chris Casady was in the first intake at CalArts, through the doors the year they opened, admitted on his portfolio rather than his grades — which is exactly how Walt Disney had written the charter. He’d been making animated films since he was ten, ordering punched paper and cels by mail order from a shop in Culver City.

A few years later he was in a two-storey warehouse in Van Nuys that didn’t have a second floor until they built one, upstairs in the animation department, on a low-budget genre film nobody there expected much from. All they ever saw was spaceships, some McQuarrie paintings on Dykstra’s wall and a single black and white photo of Darth Vader.

He’s very good on what that place was actually like. A bunch of art school kids with egos, performing for each other, inventing the equipment as they went. Dykstra setting a culture from the top that Chris still credits fifty years on. And Adam Beckett, who ran the department and died at twenty-seven.The laser bolts were made with black paper, India ink, cels and tape. A slit revealed over four or five frames. Green for the Empire, red for the Rebels. He still has the paper and the cels in his garage.

After that it’s Empire — the snow battle lasers and a good many of the lightsabers — then Dragonslayer, Tron, Buckaroo Banzai, Galaxina and The Running Man. Then a swerve into commercials and music videos, including a day on a blue-screen stage with Michael Jackson and Eddie Murphy that he wasn’t senior enough to be introduced to anyone at. And a career spent finding whatever the computers couldn’t do yet.

With Celebration heading to Los Angeles in 2027 for the fiftieth, there’s going to be a lot of this history told over the next year. This is one of the good ones.

Galaxina (1980) | RETRO SCI-FI MOVIE | Stephen Macht - Avery Schreiber - J.D. Hinton
The Day Time Ended (1979) | Full Movie | Jim Davis | Bentley Mitchum | Dorothy Malone
5757

This podcast is completely independent and made possible by listener support. If you’d like to help me keep making these episodes, you can join my Patreon community here: https://patreon.com/jamiebenning

Watch more on YouTube:
Check out the Filmumentaries YouTube channel for behind-the-scenes clips and extra content: https://youtube.com/filmumentaries

All my links

John Maclean is the writer and director of Slow West and Tornado. Two films that I saw on release and enjoyed both. I've seen John talk on stage a few times about his films.

I also ended up having a chat with him at the BFI before an event and then again afterwards in the green room. So when the opportunity to interview him came along, it said "yes!". John was born just four years before me so we share a love for a lot of the movie we grew up watching.John grew up in a small Scottish village with two artists for parents, in a working-class factory town where his family were the odd ones out. He wasn’t academic. He scraped through every exam that wasn’t art, and by sixth year he and the one other like-minded kid in the school had quietly dropped everything else and were just building portfolios.His film education came from the local video shop, which stocked Terminator, Robocop, Predator and Die Hard, and from working Edinburgh cinemas while he was at art school. The turning point was Tarantino coming to the Cameo with Reservoir Dogs and standing there talking about B movies and John Carpenter. His line is that these were the films he’d been ashamed to love. After that it was Scorsese, then whoever Scorsese liked, then whoever Kurosawa liked, and on it went.

Then came the band (The Beta Band), more or less by accident. A sampler, a four track and a record collection in a Shepherd’s Bush flat turned into a demo and then a deal. He walked into the first record company meeting and said he wanted to do the sleeves and the videos. Rather than one video for forty grand, he’d make ten for four grand each. The band wouldn’t act and wouldn’t take direction, so he had to storyboard everything, and that discipline never left him.We get into storyboards as the final stage of writing rather than the first stage of shooting. Shooting a short on a phone with Michael Fassbender because he knew nobody and didn’t want a crew. Getting rejected by every festival going before London took it. Slow West nearly coming apart in the edit before it won Sundance. Populating the American West with Germans, Scandinavians, Irish and Scots. Casting faces rather than bodies. Two perf 35mm on Tornado, twenty-five days, forty to fifty setups a day. And why he thinks television has ruined our tolerance for not knowing everything about a character.

Timestamps
00:00 Two artists for parents, in a factory town
02:18 Not academic, and the one creative kid in the school
05:01 Dropping every subject except art
06:35 The video shop: Terminator, Robocop, Predator, Die Hard
07:57 Art school, the Film House and the Cameo
08:58 Tarantino at the Cameo, and the films he was ashamed to love
09:27 Scorsese to Kurosawa to Mizoguchi
12:04 Moviedrome, Assault on Precinct 13, and the BFI with Alex Cox
13:03 Watching films again as a director, then as a writer
14:41 Why Hollywood films didn’t seem makeable
15:35 An MA in painting, the Gate Cinema, and a sampler
16:31 Walking into the record company asking to make the videos
17:03 Ten videos for four grand each
17:32 Realising he preferred the videos to the music
19:12 Storyboarding because the band wouldn’t act
20:48 Storyboards as the last stage of the script
21:46 Pitch Black Heist, Slow West and shooting the boards
23:10 Tornado: redrawing the boards as the budget shrank
24:49 A direct line from concept to screen
25:28 Robbie Ryan, and the rules: deep focus, don’t move the camera
26:17 How little gets said on set
27:29 Studying the short form, and not rushing to a feature
29:02 Knowing nobody, and a coffee with Fassbender’s agent
30:56 Man on a Motorcycle, shot on a phone
31:26 Rejected everywhere, then London
32:30 Film4, Pitch Black Heist, and Fassbender’s offer
33:30 Slow West: New Zealand, and years of prep
34:50 A decent budget, and a much tougher time on Tornado
35:52 The edit going wrong, and nearly losing the film
39:03 John Gregory, rhythm, and being thrown out of the room
41:01 Why a Western, and why nobody was making them
42:33 The real West: Germans, Scandinavians, Irish and Scots
43:19 Reading Hawthorne, Twain and Bierce instead of the mythology
43:57 Avoiding pastiche, and knowing a genre to subvert it
46:59 Casting: no gym bodies, and Leone’s faces
48:17 The actor who played Weasel with a blank stare
49:37 Tornado: no juicy role for an A-lister
50:34 Refusing to inflate the Tim Roth part
51:39 Casting Kōki off a single Zoom
54:12 Takehiro Hira, and research as the reason he said yes
55:35 Stripping out backstory and exposition
56:41 Thin characters, Boba Fett and The Penguin
58:05 James Bond, and knowing too much
58:44 Slow West on digital, Tornado on two perf 35mm
60:25 Shooting as if it’s film, even when it isn’t
61:18 Film as value for money in the edit
64:41 Jed Kurzel, and giving a composer rules
66:10 Editing without music, and a test screening that went wrong
67:30 Writing the next one, and not chasing quantity
69:06 Second features in Britain
70:21 Every film takes someone years

This podcast is completely independent and made possible by listener support. If you’d like to help me keep making these episodes, you can join my Patreon community here: https://patreon.com/jamiebenning

Watch more on YouTube:
Check out the Filmumentaries YouTube channel for behind-the-scenes clips and extra content: https://youtube.com/filmumentaries

All my links

John Knoll is Chief Creative Officer at ILM and visual effects supervisor on The Mandalorian and Grogu, the first time Mando and Grogu have been on a cinema screen. He describes two forces pulling against each other. It had to feel like it came from the same group of people who made the series, which meant keeping the handcrafted approach — puppets, creatures in rubber masks, motion control miniatures, stop motion.

But roughly forty-five per cent of the film is IMAX, and you compose and cut differently for a hundred-foot screen. Fewer quick cuts, more headroom, room around the frame for peripheral vision. IMAX had sent ILM a document about all this years ago. John decided simulating the room beat following the notes, so they built an Apple Vision Pro app that puts you in an IMAX auditorium, seats and all, looking at the live feed off the video taps.

They used it on set to check composition, and later to check animation and action scenes before they were finished. The stop motion went to Tippett, who spent the better part of a year animating a two-minute fight between Mando and two droids. The Razor Crest is a forty-eight inch miniature, double the size of the one built for the series, and John finally got to shoot it in an LED volume — built in part from panels salvaged off a decommissioned StageCraft stage.

He’d been chasing that since season one, when he tried building a foam core enclosure and projecting onto it. It sort of worked, right up until Favreau wanted the flight path changed. We also cover Rotta the Hutt, who turned out to be the hardest thing in the film. A Hutt who moves fast reads as funny on the page and is difficult to put on screen. Does he move like a snake, an inchworm, a snail? They landed on elephant seals, and then on a barrel roll.

Plus the cameras — a Sony ILX-LR1 for daylight exteriors at the Ranch, and a Canon 5D Mark IV out of ILM’s equipment cupboard for the interiors. Gaussian splats for the Razor Crest interior, shot in twenty minutes and used from any angle he wanted. Keeping a coherent look across five vendors with Doug Chiang riding the designs through post. And two shots containing an original 1976 Y-wing, on loan from the Lucas Museum for a single day, with two museum staff watching the whole time.

This podcast is completely independent and made possible by listener support. If you’d like to help me keep making these episodes, you can join my Patreon community here: https://patreon.com/jamiebenning

Watch more on YouTube:
Check out the Filmumentaries YouTube channel for behind-the-scenes clips and extra content: https://youtube.com/filmumentaries

All my links

This one's a bit different. It's shorter, and it's about a film that doesn't exist yet. Christopher Jacobsen is an actor and filmmaker, and full disclosure, the brother of one of my good friends. He's trying to get a documentary made about Daragh O'Malley, who played Sergeant Patrick Harper in Sharpe.

Daragh and Sean Bean were the only two actors in every episode, from 1993 to 2008. Chris grew up a huge Sharpe fan. In 2021 he and his filmmaking partner Marco sent Daragh a short film script. Daragh said yes, and a friendship followed, along with a lot of two-hour phone calls.

The spine of the documentary is Daragh's friendship with Marlon Brando. In 1995 the two were cast in Divine Rapture, alongside Johnny Depp, Debra Winger and John Hurt. Two weeks into the shoot the money fell apart and production shut down for good. Daragh and Brando stayed friends. Daragh took him for his first pint of Guinness in a rural Irish pub, kept his voicemails, and still has thirty or forty minutes of largely unseen Divine Rapture footage. There's plenty more.

Six months in a cabin with Hugh Grant and Bill Nighy on Grant's first job. Swapping Brando stories with Ron Perlman, who'd survived The Island of Dr. Moreau. Pete Postlethwaite brushing his teeth with lager on the Sharpe shoot. A family connection to Richard Harris. And the angry Irishman in the pub in Withnail and I. Chris is raising £7,000 for the first shoot.

That's a week in Ireland with Daragh, visiting places tied to Divine Rapture and his early life, and a week in London interviewing the people who knew him. The kit is already covered. The money pays for flights, fuel, a car and an extra crew member.

I've been on the other side of this. The Joe Alves documentary got to Martha's Vineyard and LA because people listening to this podcast chipped in. If you can spare the price of a coffee or a pint, send it Chris's way. Support the documentary Daragh and Brando on

GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/f/how-to-make-the-documentary-daragh-and-brando If you've got a question you'd like Chris to put to Daragh, about Sharpe, Brando, Withnail or anything else, get in touch and I'll pass it on.

Timestamps

00:34 How Chris and I know each other, and what the project is
01:00 A short film script, and how Daragh O'Malley came on board
01:58 Daragh's friendship with Marlon Brando
02:29 Divine Rapture: the cast, the collapse, the two weeks of footage
04:10 The Guinness, the voicemails and the unseen footage
05:02 Neil Sedaka, Shoreham Towers and a parrot called Vincent
06:17 Getting the stories on tape
07:15 How relationships form in this industry
08:15 Sharpe: fifteen years, and every episode
08:43 Jason Salkey, Brian Cox, Daniel Craig, and Pete Postlethwaite's lager
10:04 Richard Harris
11:05 Six months in a cabin with Hugh Grant and Bill Nighy
11:32 Ron Perlman, The Magnificent Seven, and swapping Brando stories
12:48 Theatre, sets and the bonds that last
13:37 The wish list: Barry Navidi, Debra Winger, Johnny Depp, Brian Cox
14:25 The Sharpe fan community and an archive producer from Facebook
17:26 The GoFundMe: £7,000, a week in Ireland, a week in London
19:48 Why these projects need backing
21:07 Withnail and I, and sending in your questions

This podcast is completely independent and made possible by listener support. If you’d like to help me keep making these episodes, you can join my Patreon community here: https://patreon.com/jamiebenning

Watch more on YouTube:
Check out the Filmumentaries YouTube channel for behind-the-scenes clips and extra content: https://youtube.com/filmumentaries

All my links

Sean England has been at Skywalker Sound since 1993. He didn't arrive as a foley artist. He came in on the technical side, in the machine room and the transfer department, back when everything went to analog tape and film was spliced on a Kem. He calls those years his film school. He watched sound get made from one end of a picture to the other, then became a foley recordist, then a mixer, then went through the glass and became the artist.

The show where he cut his teeth was The Clone Wars. There was one foley stage at the Ranch in those days, so he and Ronni Brown took the night shift and cranked the episodes out, learning to work fast and picking up the Star Wars tricks handed down from Dennie Thorpe and Jana Vance.He's very good on what the job actually is. An egg crack might be an ice cream cone. The sizzle in the pan might be a candle held under tinfoil. He's got a recording of a cattle gate on his phone that he still hasn't cracked, and then somebody gave him a metal contraption built for hanging blueprints and it turned out to be exactly the sound.

He picks up leather purses in thrift shops and holds them to his ear to check for creak. He puts shoes on and looks for a hard surface to walk on.He's a drummer too, and he came up in the eighties being told drum machines would replace him, so he has a settled view on whether sound libraries and new tech are coming for his job.We cover the anatomy of a foley stage, why the mixer isn't watching his hands, the weight difference between Marvel and Star Wars and Pixar, Lincoln split between a day crew and a night crew who had to match each other, grasshopper footsteps for documentaries, mic placement as performance, and the off-mic tricks he doesn't always mention to the mixer.

Thanks so much for your continued support!

This podcast is completely independent and made possible by listener support. If you’d like to help me keep making these episodes, you can join my Patreon community here: https://patreon.com/jamiebenning

Watch more on YouTube:
Check out the Filmumentaries YouTube channel for behind-the-scenes clips and extra content: https://youtube.com/filmumentaries

All my links