Dennis Muren Quotes

I have a sneaking suspicion that if there were a way to make movies without actors, George Lucas would do it.

The 3-D effects in "Star Wars" are so realistic, you can actually see George Lucas reaching from the screen and taking the money from your wallet.

The nature of motion capture is only going to work for certain films. It's not going to put any other type of movies out of business.

For 'Star Wars' I had to develop a whole new idea about special effects to give it the kind of kinetic energy I was looking for. I did it with motion-control photography.

By the way, it was his simulations that helped out in Jurassic Park - without them, there would have been only a few dinosaurs. Based on his techniques, Industrial Light and Magic could make whole herds of dinosaurs race across the screen.

George Lucas wanted this moving camera for all of the photography in Star Wars. He was willing to take a risk with the concepts that I advanced with regard to ways for doing that.

I've seen some of James Cameron's work, and I've got to go 3D.

If you need to do a movie where you have an army of 10,000 soldiers, that's a very difficult thing to shoot for real. It's very expensive, but as computer graphics techniques make that cheaper, it'll be more possible to make pictures on an epic scale, which we haven't really seen since the '50s and '60s.

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

My friend James Cameron and I made three films together - True Lies, The Terminator and Terminator 2. Of course, that was during his early, low-budget, art-house period.

I don't comment on the physics errors of 'Star Wars,' all right. I just - you let that one go.

The learning curve is 'The Hobbit' is being shot in 3D.

The main stuff I like is from the late '60s to the early '90s. That's the stuff I love. It's the James Cameron's and the Paul Verhoven stuff. I guess when I was younger, 'Star Wars' had an influence.

I think some of the special effects in Close Encounters hold up better than the new more expensive special effects is because they were better actually.

Over 55% of all shots using animals in 'The Hobbit' are in fact computer generated; this includes horses, ponies, rabbits, hedgehogs, birds, deer, elk, mice, wild boars and wolves.

Obviously, CGI in the last ten years has gone through such leaps and bounds that today, people are looking for these kinds of movies to wow audiences with technology.

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 didn't see 'Star Wars' in theaters until George Lucas re-tweaked it.

James Cameron's films have always been distinguished by ground-breaking technical excellence.

Summer blockbusters are very expensive to make. They have things that have to be expensive, such as 600 effects shots or CG characters that have to go a certain way, or a film design that is different but expensive.

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.

Technology continues to bring us wondrous advances in filmmaking to improve how we view movies.

The nature and the DNA of IMAX has been redefined in the past years to shoot these huge blockbusters. But I think that it's not the sole purpose of IMAX to capture cars exploding in your face.

I can't wait for them to convert old movies to 3D. I am 100% confident I want them to convert 'Terminator 2' to 3D more than I want anything in the world.

I've done some effects shots. I've done some compositing. And in 'Just Like Heaven' did a lot of, like, motion control and things like that. But never done, like, computer-generated imagery in action.