Ren Ng Quotes

We're in a time now where technology is such that we can create anything, and that's what's new about television and film these days.

When I played Gollum in 'Lord of the Rings,' if I was climbing up the side of a mountain, which I physically did, you know, I was on every single occasion swimming through streams, all of that, that wasn't captured. That was filmed on 35 millimeter, and for certain of those shots, it was rotoscoped and painted over.

I mean I've seen 3D films so far and I think it's a long way to go before they replace actors. It's a funny thing with 3D, I haven't quite got it yet. Yet.

It's quite amazing what 3D is doing to movies. Just simple things like a paper plane flying at you or flower petals fluttering about are wonderful.

That's the trouble with anything which essentially has a lot of bits that are physically impossible: You're left, stuck, in the studio. And that's a shame. You're making a movie. You don't want it to stay put, you want it to be a movie - to move.

I think filmmakers in general are, as the tools become more and more advanced, you're able to tell stories in a way that I think is more realistic. The technology just wasn't there up until pretty recently, and it takes a bit of time for the normal artistic way of approaching something to become a mainstream thing.

'King Kong,' especially the first two acts of it, is a really good example of the use of miniatures mixed with digital characters and how convincing it was.

Special effects are becoming more and more affordable and looking more and more like the real thing.

In 'The Greatest Showman,' I'm back doing VFX myself, allowing me to craft exactly how something looks, one frame at a time.

When I filmed 'Power Rangers,' almost everything was being assisted by a green screen, but it wasn't the same with 'Stranger Things.'

Technology is a very important part of cinema.

When you look back over 100 years when stop-motion was really at the dawn of cinema, a lot of the ways it developed was you had stage magicians who were looking to bring their illusions to life, and one of the ways they did that, at the time, was through cinema and stop-motion. They developed these processes.

Every 'Star Wars' film was about pushing what was possible in terms of effects, puppets, matte paintings, stop motion and, now, digitally.

I mean, I certainly wouldn't want to paint myself as, you know, the evangelist for practical effects or some sort of anti CG guy because it's really a tool. Like filmmaking is this toolbox and you use what's appropriate in relation to the story.

I don't have anything against CGI.

You can make amazing sci-fi films if you want to with very, very little money and very advanced technology that can run on your desktop.

Whether you make an action blockbuster or a comedy or a drama, you've got the right camera and all the right technology to do it. In games, it's not the same yet, and I would like to see technologies dealing with cameras the way we do - dealing with bouquet, dealing with performance capture, with lighting - with all this stuff the way we do.

'Phantom Menace' was a huge project. It was the biggest visual effects production ever done at that point, and it was a little scary how big it was and how many unknown technologies had to be developed to do that work.

With the advanced editing technologies, it's not difficult to play double roles these days. It can be done easily.

In the James Cameron blockbuster 'Avatar,' 3-D cinematography is the real star. The bugs and crawling creatures seem to slither into the theater seats. The floating mountains of the planet Pandora hover gloriously overhead. And the Na'Vi, Pandora's 10-foot-tall, blue-skinned natives, come convincingly to life.

I think a lot of times, in a lot of modern-day movies, a lot of things are CGI, but so much of the stuff in 'Star Wars' is built and created by these artists.

I loved 'The Matrix,' so when they asked me to do some animation relating to it, I was thrilled.

Most of music videos were short films - they had dialogue, action sequences. I shot with cranes and helicopters. I wanted to created cinema-like moments.

Lucasfilm has always had an openness to technology.

I wrote a big animation scene for 'Iron Fists,' but we couldn't afford all that.